Caged with a lion

11 Sep, 2016 - 00:09 0 Views

The Sunday Mail

 

Opportunity is a mystery that is not solved by hesitant action, comfortable inaction, thoughtless complaining or incessant mourning.

You are caged with a lion.

This is your opportunity to show your prowess and challenge your own fears.

You are able to do more than you think or imagine. Your potential defies description.

Opportunity has a diverse and wide wardrobe.

Never let what it wears intimidate you. Sometimes opportunity is dressed as adversity, misfortune, closed doors or nagging problems.

The opportunities of the future are more than those of the past. The situation that you are in right now presents opportunities that are beyond your wildest dreams.

Keep anchored. See beyond the thorns and realise that there are opportunities in this moment that will not be there again.

Stop postponing your life until it is no more. Instead of being problem-minded, be opportunity-minded.

When others are obsessed with the past, study vision. Instead of looking for every reason known to men to be miserable, look for every excuse to take action and make a difference. Your future depends on your thoughts and actions.

Do not run away to presumed safety just yet, you may be running away from opportunities that are begging for you to come and dance.

See possibilities where others see impossibilities. Where others see nothing, build your dreams there.

Be crazy, dream

These are not ordinary times, with ordinary solutions and answers in the big.

The challenges are extraordinary, calling for fresh thinking and new paths of action.

Be crazy and start dreaming.

While dreaming, scale your dreams and make them big, bold and exciting.

The best time to dream is when you are on your back-foot.

Waiting for everything to be perfect is thoughtless delay.

It is when you are in a hole that you must nurse a great vision.

Waiting for good times in order to think clearly is self deception.

If you cannot think and plan in this environment, you have no chance when racing with sharks.

Waiting to perform without interruptions or problems is to be in limbo for a lifetime.

Phantom circumstances are a fanciful fantasy.

This is the day that the Lord has made. Rejoice and do great things in it.

Perfect moments are a myth.

When you no longer have problems, you are likely dead or avoiding life.

A life without challenges is boring. Start the dream machine and dream big and bold. See beyond the problems of today.

Quit the “tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow mindset.”

In Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28), Shakespeare gives us these sobering and warning lines:

“She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools;

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player;

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage;

And then is heard no more. It is a tale;

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury;

Signifying nothing.”

Someone will call you crazy.

Everyone who changes the world cannot fit into old moulds.

When you do what is expected you should never expect to be celebrated for doing the basic normal.

You are too special to be ordinary and too important to park in mediocrity.

Dare to be different and to dream beyond the edges that have been set for you. If you are not willing to look foolish, you are foolish.

Dreams do not have parameters, except the ones that you set.

Do not crop your dreams to fit someone else’s picture.

Do not make your world so small because you are trying to fit into other people’s mediocrity and maintain comfort levels.

No dreamer is ever too crazy and no crazy dream is ever a mere dream.

In the 1990s, Apple ran a series of adverts that featured a number of “crazy” people that brought change and impacted the world.

The caption to the adverts read: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels.

The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.

Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, they are the ones who do.”

That last line is worth repeating.

Those who think they are crazy enough to bring change, do bring it.

Get tired of normal people encouraging you to live a normal life that is boring, mediocre and banal.

If your life was made into a movie, would it be worth watching? Be crazy and dream so big and bold that people will suspect that you are insane.

If your dreams do not scare you and get you labelled crazy, you are dreaming too small.

Get out of the box and stop living a life of trying to win acceptance and approval.

Quit playing to the gallery and play the game that matters.

Laugh at yourself

Take other people seriously and take God even more seriously. Just do not take yourself too seriously and begin to think that you are invincible, indispensable and irreplaceable.

Learn to laugh at your mistakes and at life’s event.

Simplify your life and accept that life is not a story of the rise, rise and further rise of an individual.

Laugh your way through the obstacles and temporary setbacks you face.

Life is challenging enough without a smile. When you laugh at yourself, the world laughs with you.

Embrace neotency

Neotency is the quality of extended childhood, the key to greatness. It is the tendency to maintain youthfulness even as you grow older.

You are truly old when you now replace your vision with regrets.

So long as you are receptive, imaginative and excited about life, you cannot grow old and irrelevant.

Youth is characterised by an openness to learn things, exploration and adventure.

Neotency is the quality where, like a child, you retain childlike receptivity and cognitive flexibility.

Whatever score you tip on the age scale, retain the wonder, curiosity and the “can-do” spirit of childhood.

Do not surrender your dreams to the despondency and rigidity of age.

You are not as old as your birth certificate, but as your doubts and fears.

Do not let age terrorise you and blunt your creative urge.

Think like a child, but behave like an adult.

Unless you think like a child, the world may pass you by, as you increasingly lose your relevance.

The tragedy in life is not death, but what you allow to die while you are living.

Commit to freshness of mind, agility of thought and vibrancy of spirit.

Divergent thinking

Stop crowding with the crowds, at least in your thinking.

No one who follows the crowd will have a crowd that reciprocates this gesture.

Be divergent. Be different. Be bold. Do your own thinking and realise that normality is overrated.

Challenge your assumptions, blaze new paths.

Divergent thinking means challenging the process to stimulate innovation.

Challenging the process does not mean being an unruly and wild renegade.

It does not mean challenging the values or standards of your organisation, just because uncompromising integrity and alignment are too hard to live by.

Challenging the process does not mean attacking other people when they do not share your views, that’s barbarism.

It does not mean becoming a rebel without a cause either. It is not seeking to dismantle what is working well, or attempting to eliminate something that is simply a personal inconvenience for you.

Challenging the process is about finding and implementing new and better ways of doing things in order to constantly improve to grow.

It is about always seeking for a better way and asking what is not yet perfect?

What would you do if you were caged with a lion?

Do not give up, fight until you win.

You have more strength than you think. You are stronger than you imagine. Go for greatness.

Milton Kamwendo is an international transformational and inspirational speaker, author and coach. He is a strategy, innovation, team-building and leadership facilitator. He can be reached at: [email protected] and Twitter: @MiltonKamwendo or WhatsApp at: 0772422634

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