As the saying goes: “You don’t have to be great to get started, but you have to start to get great.” One of the toughest parts of achieving a goal is getting started in the first place. We don’t get started due to many factors, such as procrastination, uncertainty, inertia, fear, and believing that we have more time. One principle that can help get things done is the five-minute rule. The Five Minute Rule involves committing to a task or goal for at least five minutes. The five-minute rule aims to get you started on a task, and if you don’t find the task enjoyable after five minutes, you can take a break.
You don’t have to be great to get started, but you have to start to get great -Les Brown
Everyone has an opinion, and it is often cheap. Everyone has the right to their opinion but not the facts. An opinion could be that you would not amount to anything, but the fact is that you are a kind/queen put here to do epic things. You might not be maximizing your potential right now but you have limitless opportunities to become who you are put here on earth to become. It is never too late to be who you might become. You are not too old, young, inexperienced, or experienced to effect change.
“First people will tell you that you are wrong. Then they will tell you that you are right, but what you’re doing really isn’t important. Finally, they will admit that you are right and that what you are doing is very important; but after all, they knew it all the time.” – Jonas Salk, developer of the Salk polio vaccine
You will come across naysayers, doubters and critics on your path to achieving your goals. You have to be mindful of whose opinion, advice or criticism you pay attention to. It is okay to be misunderstood, as the more prominent your vision is, the more people will not understand what you are trying to achieve. It is not what you hear; it is what you listen to. As American essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson quipped in Self-Reliance and Other Essays: Emerson’s Essays, “To be great is to be misunderstood.”
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
I was a Manchester United Football Club fanatic and saw almost all their games live. I have supported the club since the 1998/1999 season after the team won the Premier League, FA Cup and UEFA Champions League continental treble. I paid attention to almost everything about the club: new signings, the latest news, and merchandise purchases, among others. But in 2018, all that started to change as I was re-prioritizing my values and goals in life. I realized I spent at least 4-6 hours every weekend watching the Premier League, la Liga and other sporting events. Five hours every weekend equals 250 hours per year just watching soccer events; that is 1,000 hours in four years. If I keep up at that pace, every 32 years would have involved a year of my life watching soccer events. Like most humans, I was already going to sleep 1/3rd of my life; add soccer match viewing and other entertainment activities to the mix, and time became scarce.
Obsession is a state in which someone thinks about someone or something constantly or frequently, especially in a way that is not normal. The word obsession comes from latin obsidere “to besiege”, the transferred sense of “action of anything which engrosses the mind”. Developing a healthy obsession to achieve your goal is what is required to bring your vision to life.
You must develop an obsession to go from where you are to where you want to be. One of the hallmarks of the highly successful people in the world is that they chose a craft and became laser-focused on it for a very long time. As the saying goes, “We get rewarded in public for what we deliberately practice in private.” They deliberately practiced for a long time. Overnight success usually takes ten years or 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in a particular field or endeavour.
Implementation Intentions is a plan you make beforehand about when and where to act. That is, how you intend to implement a particular habit.
Implementation Intentions is a self-regulatory strategy popularized by psychologist Peter Gollwitzer in his 1999 research paper: Implementation intentions: Strong effects of Simple Plans 1 Gollwitzer observed when that people encounter problems in translating their goals into action (e.g., failing to get started, becoming distracted, or falling into bad habits), they may strategically call on automatic processes in an attempt to secure goal attainment. This can be achieved by plans in the form of implementation intentions that link anticipated critical situations to goal-directed responses (“Whenever situation x arises, I will initiate the goal-directed response y!”). Implementation intentions delegate the control of goal-directed responses to anticipated situational cues, which (when actually encountered) elicit these responses automatically.
According to Domo’s Data Never Sleeps 10.0 infographic1, a visual representation of the amount of data we generate every waking minute. The data we are generating and consuming is becoming increasingly considerable, and there is no sign of slowing down anytime soon. Here are some of the statistics on the amount of data we generate every minute on the internet:
The Fear of Other People’s Opinions (FOPO) is the fear, worry, and anxiety that result from overthinking what others think or say about us. FOPO is one of those fears that stops many of us from moving toward our goals, dreams and aspirations. We make every move based on the perception of how others would perceive or receive it. FOPO can be crippling, and in the age of social media, the fear of being cancelled by the mob makes this fear more debilitating. The reality is that no one is thinking about you, as everyone is also trying to figure it out. As the saying goes, “In your 20s, you care what everyone thinks about you; in your 40s, you stop giving a shit what anyone thinks, and in your 60s, you realize that no one was thinking about you in the first place.”
In your 20s, you care what everyone thinks about you; in your 40s, you stop giving a shit what anyone thinks, and in your 60s, you realize that no one was thinking about you in the first place.
Keep showing up until they call you chairman. Until they call you a genius. Until they call you the greatest of all time. – Jay-Z
One of my favourite things to watch is acceptance speeches of award ceremonies. I find them very inspiring, and I often tear up listening to some of these speeches, especially in real-time. The award winners are usually overjoyed, and they mostly talk about how hard it took to get to the award moment.
One of my highlights of the 2024 Grammy Music Award was the inspiring acceptance speech of rapper Jay-Z. He was honoured with the Dr. Dre Global Impact Award, inaugurated at the 2023 award. Jay-Z is one of my favourite people in the world, as we were both born on December 4. Jay ended his speech with the following profound words:
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” – T. E. Lawrence
American politician and author Les Brown is one of my favourite motivational speakers. His speeches were among my favourite things to hear during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Les is hilarious and shares memorable stories to pass his messages across. He often talks about “possibility blindness,” which is the tendency of others to project their limited vision and fear on people with dreams. A story about a little boy and the power of self-belief exemplifies the “possibility blindness” concept:
The road to success is not straight. There is a curve called Failure, a loop called Confusion, speed bumps called Friends, red lights called Enemies, caution lights called Family. You will have flat tires called Jobs, but if you have a spare called Determination, an engine called Perserverance, a driver called Will Power, you will make it to a place called Success.
Everything worthwhile is uphill, the climb is steep, and the journey is the reward, as success is not guaranteed, but the struggle is. To make your wildest dream come true, you must be willing to sacrifice, endure, persist, persevere, commit, and relentlessly execute. Whether it is building a business, running a marathon, learning a foreign or programming language, following through on a fitness regimen, becoming financially independent or any other goal you set, it will require a lot of effort, self-discipline and dedication. Success is not guaranteed, and it is also never an accident. As author and motivational speaker Jim Rohn often said: “Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day, while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure. Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. We do not fail overnight. Failure is the inevitable result of an accumulation of poor thinking and poor choices.”
Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in. and day out. – Robert Collier.
First Things First provides you with a compass, because where you’re headed is more important than how fast you’re going.
Learning to put the first things first is a lesson that most of us learn late or never until it is too late. First things first is a phrase that signifies the need to do the most important things before doing other activities. It is synonymous with the word priority, which is something that is more important than other things and needs to be done or dealt with first. Knowing the first things is a question of your priority, value system, life philosophy and goals. Whenever someone says they don’t have time to read or go to the gym, they announce their priority. To achieve any worthwhile goal, one has to keep the first things first. Exercising should be a priority to give yourself a fighting chance to be alive for a long time. To change the direction of your life, reading, studying and getting things done should be a priority.
To get what you have never gotten, you have got to do what you have never done. It will require hard work, persistence, mistakes, roadblocks, breakthroughs, and a rollercoaster of ups and downs. The road to success in any endeavour requires going the extra mile, from consistency to intensity, and one might need to become a little bit obsessed. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates once said, “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” What got you successful in the first place might be a hindrance to scaling or getting to the next level. Hence the need to stay hungry, curious, teachable, adaptable and flexible. Getting to the top is not the hard part of the success journey, it is staying at the top for a long time that is hard.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” ― George Bernard Shaw
Although it might not look so right now, better days are ahead. The world might seem on the verge of armageddon; the funds are low, and the office politics and family drama are not decreasing. Hope is a luxury, but trust me when I say better days are ahead. I have been through my go-through, and all I can say is that the sun will shine tomorrow, you will be fine, and everything will be alright. This is not Pollyanna-speak but a belief that life is to be lived forward cos whatever will go wrong will eventually go wrong. The key to navigating the vicissitudes of life is to keep it moving no matter what.
I used to want to change people through insights, advice-giving, lessons learned, and strategies garnered. But I realized that If I wanted to change anyone, the only person I needed to change was myself. Most of us don’t like being told what to do. We want to buy but we don’t want to be sold to. As author John C. Maxwell puts it “People change when they … Hurt enough that they have to, Learn enough that they want to, and Receive enough that they are able to.” Sometimes the only way we change is when we have hit rock bottom and change is not something we wish for but we have to swim out of the hole or we sink. It is a constant battle to stop myself from giving unsolicited advice. I try to read as much as possible, and the more I know, the more I realize that I still have a lot of work to do.
People change when they hurt enough that they have to change. People change when they learn enough that they want to change. People change when they receive enough that they are able to change. – John C. Maxwell
I have been trying to learn to speak impeccable French since 2011, and I am still not there after a decade-plus of trying. It has been sometimes frustrating, and I often want to give up on the goal. I have tried almost everything to become proficient in my French communication skills. I have attended multiple classes in different formats, including residential (Nigerian French Language Village), formal classroom (daily lesson), watching French movies and documentaries, listening to a French podcast, reading French books, blogging in French, and even moving to a French-speaking city. It’s been a rollercoaster of breaks, progress and grit. The main thing that has made me stay consistent with my French Language learning goal is my WHY.
