English mountaineer George Mallory was once asked by a New York Times reporter why he was attempting to climb Mt. Everest for the third time; he replied, “Because it’s there.” ¹ Mallory participated in the first three British Mount Everest expeditions in the 1920s. Although Mallory and his climbing partner Andrew Irvine perished on their attempt to summit Everest, they persisted and gave it their best shot. In a 1923 New York Times interview before his third attempt at reaching the summit of Everest, Mallory made the following observation about the conquest:

Whether it is summiting a mountain, running a sub-3 hours marathon, running your enterprise, or achieving your wildest dream. Achieving anything worthwhile requires taking the first step and baby steps to achieve it. As the ancient Roman Stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca once quipped, “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.” Most of the things we consider to be impossible are mainly a result of our mindset and our inability to try. It is not about the marathon run, starting the business or reaching the summit of the mountain, it is more more about what you will become in the process of your attempt.

Your path to greatness will be filled with obstacles, challenges, opportunities, near-misses, failure, mistakes, self-doubt, naysayers, yay-sayers, doubters, supporters and a roller coaster of storms and battles. The key to making the journey less turbulent is to trust your path, embrace the challenges, bet on yourself always, show up daily, go all in and trust the process. It is going to get more challenging as you climb higher. Remember why you started the journey in the first place and keep it moving.

Life is a series of storms; you are either going through a storm, leaving a storm or heading to the next storm. During the storms, people are going to show you their actual colours. Your so-called friends will become silent, your frenemies will gossip about your situation, and you will feel incredibly lonely. People come into our lives for a reason, a season and a lifetime. During the stormy seasons, few people will stick with you, most will disappear while others will come around to check if you are still stupid.

 No matter what season of life you are in, always trust your path, your greatness and your purpose. Don’t engage anyone, situation or relationship that does not value you or your greatness. Vote with your legs by not going to anywhere you are not celebrated or encouraged. You are being called crazy all the time because the people you are hanging around don’t get it yet. Change the crowd you hang around, and those supposedly crazy goals will become routine. If you hang around professional athletes, saying you are going to run a sub-3-hour marathon does not feel out of the world, but if you hang around people aiming to run their first marathon, you will probably be seen as crazy.

We teach people how to treat us, knowingly or unknowingly. We allow people to treat us unfairly because they are our childhood friends, family members or the only friends we have. It is tough setting boundaries for our closest family members and long-time friends because it is not easy but at some point, one has got to draw the line. By setting healthy boundaries, we can have a mutually beneficial relationship, but we fear and don’t want to rock the boat; hence, we enable the drama queens and the chaos kings in our lives. Life is too short to be spending it with energy vampires, even if they are family members; you’ve got to protect your sanity.

Love is a verb, an action word, a behaviour, not a role. Blood is thicker than water, but love is thicker than blood. The older I get, the more I believe less of what anyone says; I only believe your actions. You can say you are my friend, but we can’t confirm that until the chips are down and everyone needs to step up. As Maya Angelou famously said, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time”. Most of us don’t heed the advice of Maya; hence, we give people the benefit of the doubt all the time. In the end, they get the benefit, and we are stuck with the doubt

Equanimity is a state of psychological stability and composure which is undisturbed by the experience of or exposure to emotions, pain, or other phenomena that may cause others to lose the balance of their mind. ¹ Equanimity can be defined as an even-minded mental state or dispositional tendency toward all experiences or objects, regardless of their origin or their affective valence (pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral). It is a mental state or trait that is not easily achieved and typically requires some form of practice. It is an “even-mindedness in the face of every sort of experience, regardless of whether pleasure [or] pain are present or not”. ²

Equanimity is derived from French équanimité, from Latin aequanimitatem (nominative aequanimitas) “evenness of mind, calmness; good-will, kindness,”. ³  Equanimity is being at peace with whatever is in our experience. As French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once quipped. “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

In network security, a firewall ¹ is a device that monitors incoming and outgoing network traffic and decides whether to allow or block specific traffic based on a defined set of security rules. The firewall is a first line of defence that establishes a barrier between secured and controlled internal networks that can be trusted and untrusted from outside networks, such as the Internet. Just as a network requires a firewall to determine the inbound and outbound traffic it allows, we must also create mental firewalls for ourselves. We live in a high-paced world where we are constantly bombarded with a deluge of data, and it is somewhat impossible to keep up, let alone turn the data into information.