The Sunday Mail
Bloom to the full along the cutting edges of your life. Blunt people are like a sore tooth. Never let the past blunt and overwhelm your future. Take the lessons from the past, but never dwell there. Past success is never a guarantee of future success.
The key to greatness is identifying your cutting edges and then sharpening them daily in every way possible.
There is nothing that cannot be improved. You can still do better. There is no time for complacency or space for mediocrity on the march for greatness.
Any failures along the road are just lessons and suggestions of areas to sharpen.
The world is in motion, you do not afford to stand still.
To freeze in time is to belong to the museum of the past. Never be content to be fossilised in history while you are alive. Do not be satisfied with the exploits of the past or dusty strategies.
Be relevant, fresh and exciting. Remember there are people alive today who care no less for anything special that you did in the past. Bring your flavour today, be on the cutting edge of your agenda. Find your cutting edges, sharpen your hold and keep cutting.
Your shelf-life
Whenever I walk into the supermarket, I like picking up products and looking at their dates of manufacture and expiry. Your relevance also has an expiry date. At birth, you are born into the world.
You do not choose your circumstances of birth, but you choose your destiny.
You may not have chosen where you have come from, but you can choose where you will end up.
In time after birth you find yourself on the shelf of life, playing some role or other, significant or not.
Whatever happens in your life, do not take yourself off the shelf of life before your sell-by date. Refuse to just be a place holder and statistic in life.
Never give up or expire while you still have life. If your heart still beats, you can do something great.
If you have to begin again, begin. If you have to join the back of the queue again, join.
Whatever you do, never allow adversity or the vicissitudes of life dull your edge and make you lose your confidence.
Inside every struggling person, there is greatness stirring forth. Inside every struggling organisation, there is an enterprise of significance struggling for release.
Failure is never final. When you know your calling, get cutting and sharpening your edges.
Improve daily
Never park at any level of competence or be content with the qualifications or credentials of the past.
Go back to your certificates and look at the dates when they were issued.
That should help you sober and realise that relying on past credentials without continually sharpening yourself leaves you dull, tired and boring.
Improve, grow and change daily. When you can no longer change, you cannot be helped by anyone. There is always room for improvement.
Change and improve daily. Unless you change, you cannot expect to achieve any new goals or stretch to new levels. Improvement is a call to change and grow.
Improvement begins with “I”. You have to want, desire and work for it.
Improve daily and never park at yesterday’s bay of success.
Yesterday is already history and people are looking for value and relevance today.
The challenges of the future are bigger and require better capacity.
Grow your capacity, challenge your limits and keep improving. If you are not growing you become a miserable liability.
If you are not improving you prevent many good things from happening and maximising their potential.
If you are not changing you move from being a blessing to becoming a curse.
Invest in experiences
Exposure makes a difference. It opens your eyes, challenges your vision, strengthens your resolve and intensifies your passion.
Parking within a small community of thought makes you breed self-conceit and useless pride.
It is easy to pride yourself of having gone far when you have barely departed.
Invest in experiences that challenge your perception of reality, raise your ceiling and stretch your vision.
Get a new hunger, fire up your dreams and passion to be at the cutting edge. What you are seeing today is not all there is to see.
What you are calling great today could just be a mole-hill. What you are calling excellence today is mediocrity waiting to be shredded.
Do everything that it takes to keep learning, growing and getting exposure. Grow your vision and expand your horizon.
If you have to travel, please travel. Meet new people who think bigger and challenge your the magnitude of your dreams.
Never mistake being a celebrity in your village as a global claim to fame. Invest in experiences that sharpen your edge.
Keep asking
Keep asking for and demanding more of yourself. Capacity grows when you put a demand on it. Sharpen yourself and never think that you have arrived.
When you can no longer improve you are in a dangerous space. Keep asking yourself: “What is not yet perfect?”
Never stop thinking or park at the reality that you see. Keep sharpening everything around you. Keep the edge. Ask questions that are bigger than your present grasp.
Ask questions that inspire you to search deeper and go further than most people.
You do not afford to be satisfied with swimming at the shallow baby-end of the pool of life.
Pursue goals that are big, intimidating and exciting. The luxury of boredom is reserved for those with small and useless goals.
Keep asking yourself what you would do if you knew that you could not fail. Never let fear arrest your potential.
Keep asking yourself what you fear and what fear has done to limit you. Ask big questions even if you do not have the answers.
Your questions will shape your life and sharpen your edge.
Keep asking questions about the shape of the future and how you can sharpen yourself to be relevant in the future.
Choose your response
It is not that which happens that matters but what you choose to do about it. You choose your response.
You are a go-getter and you do not afford to sit like a victim, complaining all day and waiting for something to happen by mere luck.
Choose to be a live wire, an actor and catalyst. Let your life be so full of passion, focus and energy that you become unstoppable.
Polarise everything around you with your passionate focus. Atomise your challenges and be at the cutting edge.
Be a human dynamo and generate power from within. Whatever happens outside does not have power to overwhelm the power within you, unless you allow it and let your mind be weak.
Be a ball of fire, brand of light and motivated greatness missionary. Set alight everything around you with sharp action.
You do not afford the luxury of spending a day brooding over negative thoughts and dwelling of visions of self-pity. Nothing great ever comes to any pity-party.
You are powerful beyond your own estimation. You have power within and nothing can overwhelm and tame you unless you allow it.
Arise and shine because this is your time and season. You cannot wait forever.
Choose to be at the cutting edge and make the most of your strength in the battle of life. It is not enough to dream of possibilities, you have to fight.
If you are blunt, you will need to use extra force, rather spend a little time sharpening your edge and you will see an improved cut of excellence.
Committed to your greatness
Milton Kamwendo is a cutting-edge international transformational and inspirational speaker, author and coach. His life purpose is to inspire people to be great. He can be reached at: [email protected] and on WhatsApp at: 0772422634
