The Sunday Mail
Hunt for Greatness
Milton Kamwendo
New Year celebrations always seem to have special traditions.
Some of the traditions are powerful and affirming, while others are senseless and disempowering.
For many every new year is a season of declarations, and resolutions. Most of the New Year resolutions are made with good intentions and powered by personal or corporate will power. The pattern as you know is familiar. The New Year resolution is made, a few days and weeks into the year it is business as usual.
If something is not working change it. This time rethink the whole ritual, forget about Will-power and think about Why-Power! If you have a big enough WHY, you will be powered and inspired to follow through and do great things.
It is not what you do that is most important but your inner motivation for doing it — your WHY. External motivation always boils down into a boiled-carrot. External motivation can only go so far. Borrow reasons for doing anything always have a short shelf-life.
What changes things and moves systems is a powerful inner drive and fire. If you can start there you will be unstoppable because in you there is something that is so strong and so powerful and so unstoppable. Find your inner fire and you can burn all you like and never become ash.
Set goals and not wishes
Mr Paul J. Meyer once said: “If you are not making the progress that you would like to make and are capable of making, it is simply because your goals are not clearly defined.”
Goals are better defined when you have a clear WHY-factor. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and start setting clear goals that you drive towards. Stop thinking you are a victim and blaming everyone and everything around you. Armed with a big-enough-WHY set big goals that will demand big action.
Do not set goals that do not respond to the fire within.
Your goals must be yours — not mere show horses that you intend to parade. Your life will continue on the current trajectory until you set new, empowering and inspiring goals. Use your hindsight to review the path you have taken to date. Do not get angry with people, get angry with yourself.
Nothing changes until your personal agency changes. Use insight to look into the wisdom and fire within.
Your spirit sees more and knows more. Look at what you have oversight over and decide to lift it, improve it and change it. Set goals that you feel within you. It is not just about goals on paper, but goals on fire. Unleash your power of WHY.
With the fire and flame of purpose burning within make your goals big, inspiring, exciting and bold. Set goals that are big and inspiring. Set goals that challenge you rather than keeping you where you are doing what you have always done and complaining about the same old things. Look back in order to discover the fire within you.
You are equipped for greatness and powerfully endowed to be whatever you dream to be. Make no excuses and do not look at your conditions as your limitations. Look at the goals that you had ten years back and knowing what you now know, would you not have stretched those goals and made them bigger?
Ten years ago would have been the best time to have set powerful, destiny-shaping goals that you would have pursued with all you had and all you are.
The next best time to set goals with meaning you can feel is now, today, this hour, this year. You do not have the luxury to lose another decade or waste another year. So do it now!
Say it to yourself and repeat it all the time. Keep affirming: “I act plan now! I act now on the plans! I act now!” Set and commitment to massive sustained action. Spare no moment in hesitation, heed the passion within. Without a clear WHY and goals you will just stumble into the new year, hoping for luck to strike.
Hope without an action plan is not a strategy. Gambling with your life is a sorry and sad joke. Just do not do it.
You have equipment
You are equipped for greatness. Believe in the God who believes in you. Believe that you can and take massive action and do what you have to do. Mr Edgar A. Guest (August 20, 1881 — August 5, 1959) was known as the People’s Poet. He wrote poems that people could easily relate to. He spoke to heart, to minds, to motivations and write with clarity. One is his poems is entitled: “Equipment”.
In the poem he throws a challenge — forget about thinking other people are better and get busy doing what you must do. Take this as a person challenge to to unleash your WHY and do great this.
Mr Guest’s poem: “Equipment” reads:
“Figure it out for yourself, my lad,
You’ve all that the greatest of men have had,
Two arms, two hands, two legs, two eyes,
And a brain to use if you would be wise.
With this equipment they all began,
So start for the top and say “I can”.
Look them over, the wise and great,
They take their food from a common plate
And similar knives and forks they use,
With similar laces they tie their shoes,
The world considers them brave and smart.
But you’ve all they had when they made their start.
You can triumph and come to skill,
You can be great if only you will,
You’re well equipped for what fight you choose,
You have legs and arms and a brain to use,
And the man who has risen, great deeds to do
Began his life with no more than you.
You are the handicap you must face,
You are the one who must choose your place,
You must say where you want to go.
How much you will study the truth to know,
God has equipped you for life, But He
Lets you decide what you want to be.
Courage must come from the soul within,
The man must furnish the will to win,
So figure it out for yourself, my lad,
You were born with all that the great have had,
With your equipment they all began.
Get hold of yourself, and say ‘I can’.”
You are blessed
You are blessed to be seeing this year and cross into a zone of new possibilities. The Year 2022 will be a year of accelerated changes and major transformations. Count yourself blessed and count your blessings. It is a brand new year for your brand new passion, hope and dreams.
This is an opportunity for you to begin again more intelligently, building the experiences of the past years. It is a new season; an opportunity to do great things and manifest the greatness in you. It is your season to scale up, rise up and brace up to be what you have never been and do what you have never done. Welcome to the new year!
It is easy for life to become an empty bland of grinding routines. Break the cycle of mediocrity and limited thinking. Your choice determines your destiny. Your “WHY” determines what you do and how you do it.
Choose to break the cycle of recreational complaining, career-boredom, listlessness and lack of imagination. Set empowering, challenging and exciting goals that get your mind racing, and your energy pumping. If your goals do not move you they will never be able to move others. Boredom is a symptom of fuzzy, weak, impotent goals.
A goal-less life is a wasted existence. An unfocused life will likely result in empty abusive passions and misdirected activity. Activity without purpose rarely yields measurable exploits. You were designed for exploits, engineered for greatness and fashioned to manifest purpose.
Every new year is an opportunity to begin again, more intelligently, more thoughtfully and more passionately. The earth circles the sun in the span of a year. Each step in the solar turn of the earth gives rise to a pattern of days, weeks, months and seasons. Life is governed by seasons and your experience of each season is determined by your attitude. Each new year, is another opportunity to run another course, take another challenge and commit to the journey of life. It is not what happens to you that matters but what is happening within you. What matters is what you think about whatever you are going through. Think big thoughts in order to do things with scale.
So what are you going to be doing in the new year? If you set your mind on nothing you are positioning yourself for disappointment. Whatever you focus on will grow. Whatever you magnify will determine your experience of the year.
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. His life purpose is to inspire and promote greatness. He can be reached at: [email protected] and His website is: www.miltonkamwendo.com
