I have always been a fan of great stories and learnt from this specific one that changed my perception towards choices. So I learnt once from one of my teachers in Junior School through a story he told us.
My teacher told us of his exploit through school and how he was always the first to raise his hands, he won all the “winnable” prizes then in school and just recently, he met one of the back-benchers in his class then with a SUV car that is one of the newly released in town and he is even a chairman of a very good company. According to my teacher, this old friend does not qualify for the life he is living because he was a dullard in school. My teacher concluded by telling us mildly “That is life for you, you cannot all be successful no matter what you do, life places someone first, we are created for different roles”, he concluded “all of us cannot be successful”.
I was really young then and my thoughts contested his ideas, my teacher was terribly wrong. Wrong because he based life success on intellect, wrong because he left life to chances and forgot the place of perseverance and due diligence; the beauty in labor and the reward of persistent innovation.
He equated finance to intellect and could not even see the uniqueness in every one of us. He also saw wealth as the big cars and the houses, he was wrong not to see wealth in its most basic form; servant-hood, the reward that comes from living a life that others benefit from, the reward of willpower irrespective of intellectual power. He did not remember that life is not controlled by your knowledge, but the application of your knowledge.
I learnt from him that we all are where we are today based on our own choices; life did not choose for us, life did not place the limit, we all decided to at certain points.
I am a step further today, because today has taught me to live with those decisions and make the best of it. I know now that when I see a roadblock to my achievements, I should strategize to create a new dimension. It is foolishness to live in the same old processes that were tried in the past and failed and now expect a different result.
Albert Einstein classified intelligence as the “ability to change”. It is expedient to mention that your grades in school do not earn you a place in life. It sure open doors but you have to act enough to make a world difference. The big cars are not your hallmark, your track records are; achievements in life. It is not enough to know, it is enough to know that what you know is not enough.
Let me challenge us with some certain questions in conclusion, if Bill Gates truly never finished school, if truly we do not know really care what grades the world changers today makes and they are this influential, what then happened to the really remarkable students that graduated with top charts grades from Harvard and Yale? What would the world have looked like if these brilliant minds also rise up like the Steve Jobs and challenge the conventional process of doing things? What would have happened if they did not allow to be caged in their grades and offered a fun job with fat salaries that only has to do with paperwork, but instead rose to create dimensions to our long awaited search for the business “messiah”?
Ponder till we meet next week as we solve the mysteries together. If we need to talk, contact me at tolulope.aina@uniquegifts.com.ng