tawandamusarurwa
Hunt for Greatness
Milton Kamwendo
IF you think you are good, you have not lived long enough because you can always get better. If you do not get better, you will increasingly get bitter and regress.
Keep raising your ceiling and challenging your limits.
Set your goals, gun for them, then raise the roof and keep moving.
Do not allow yourself to plateau quickly.
Get busy with being better.
You are responsible for your life and what it becomes. You have only one life; you might as well make it great.
You should not play the blame game if you want to be great.
Take full responsibility of your life and dump every alibi.
Stop playing mental games and thinking the world owes you a life.
There are no half-hearted champions. Pursue greatness with obsessed focus and a crusader’s zeal.
Get better all the time; never be satisfied with the cheap accolades that tempt you to stop and lose steam.
Remaining at the same place is no consolation, unless you were a stone.
Doing no harm is a great accolade for a stone but never for a man.
You are not a victim of your parentage, community, circumstances or geography.
Accept no excuse for mediocrity.
If you do not like your circumstances, then work to create the ones you want.
Think of stretching, growing and maximising your potential.
Any time you think you are a victim, you easily become one.
Think differently and your life will be distinct. Blaming someone or something brakes your faith, and breaks your momentum.
Whoever you blame, you empower them to control your life.
Whoever you attribute your misery to, you empower them to inflict pain on you.
Choose your response, attitude and actions.
Deliberately opt to be better and keep improving.
Going forward may not be an easy call. However, it is possibly the only call. The road you are treading may be uphill, keep trudging higher.
One step at a time is all your need to keep walking.
No winter lasts forever; no plague is endless.
It may all be hard; get tough at work. Harden your resolve and move forward. Keep getting better and better.
This is true greatness we are talking about. It is not the easy platter of unmerited dainties.
Aimless improvement is not really betterment.
Create a purpose-drive margin of improvement in everything you do. Keep getting better.
When you can no longer get better, you have started decaying. This is because anything that is not growing is dying, if it is not dead already.
You are not in any way part of the living dead. Are you?
Stop being obsessed with death and get busy with living.
Do not die while you are living. Keep shining the light and seasoning everything around you.
Express life through consistent improvement and positive action.
Do not fear taking small steps forward; be afraid of standing still or regressing.
One little improvement every week means more than 50 progressive steps in a year.
Target and focus your efforts. Make your improvement agenda big and meaningful.
Let every day find you better than you were the last night.
Every day is an opportunity to begin again more intelligently at a higher level of faith and deep commitment.
Better failing
Some people cannot do anything because they want everything to be perfect — never failing at anything.
Waiting for perfection is to wait for too long.
Get better at taking action and learning from it.
Get better at failing, rising up and facing the battle again.
Failure is never final. Failure is not failure, unless you refuse to learn from it. When you fail, you are never wounded; what usually gets bruised is your pride, but never you.
Never despise anyone who is trying to get better.
If you tried doing something great and failed, do not hide yourself. Stop carrying and wearing the failure badge.
Come back to the ring and keep trying.
Those who are great were willing to risk failure until they succeeded. Repeated attempts are no shame at all, but failing to attempt is.
Those who have never failed at anything are likely to have never succeeded at anything.
Get better at failing by using the results you get as feedback, and improve all the time.
Most people who love reading novels will know Stephen King.
King wanted to be a novelist. He became so frustrated with his attempt to write the novel “Carrie” that he threw away the entire early draft.
King’s wife, Tabitha, found the manuscript in a rubbish bin and took it out.
That same novel, “Carrie”, went on to become a hit and launched King’s career as a writer.
His novels have since sold over 350 million copies.
Do not let any failure stop you from pursuing your greatness.
Never park at any failure station.
Keep getting better and stop growing bitter.
Better listen
The master key to greatness is to get better at listening.
Whenever you listen, you learn. The more you listen, the better you become. True listening is transformative.
When you listen, do so with your ego muted. It is not what you can say eloquently that matters but what you can hear so distinctly.
Listen to felt needs. Hear beyond the words used and meanings implied.
Get better at listening and you will experience what you have never gone through before.
Stop defending yourself, explaining and rationalising, and just start listening.
Every day gets better at listening. I am working on it as well.
Do not become so good at hearing your own voice that you forget to listen more.
Give your ears a chance to edge you towards greatness.
Every day, work on your listening skills and they will take you further. Good leaders know how to speak and present ideas. Great leaders are epic listeners.
When you stop listening, you start growing moulds in your ears.
When you start listening, you begin growing in new ways and seeing fresh things.
Get better at listening.
It is not about waiting for your opportunity to throw in a word or two — just listen and get better at it, and watch what happens in your life.
The forgotten key to greatness is improving your listening skills daily.
Committed to your greatness.
◆ Milton Kamwendo is a leading international transformational and motivational speaker, author and a virtual, hybrid and in-person workshop facilitator. He is a cutting-edge strategy, team-building and organisation development facilitator and consultant. He can be reached at: [email protected]
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