Read history for greatness

GREATNESS is never a sprint; it is a marathon. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “The years teach much which the days never know.”

Hunt For Greatness

Milton Kamwendo

The immediate is imposing and intoxicating, but time gives perspective and completes the picture, solves enigmas and supplies the seemingly missing details. What you are seeing is not all that is happening.

Things are not always what they seem. Time is your friend and the great revealer. Take time to reflect. Take time to watch and eventually, you will see more clearly as you distil knowledge into wisdom.

Do not write yourself off because you feel hopeless.

Give yourself time and you will bounce back and bounce higher. Whatever happens, take time to reflect and then pick yourself up and run. Do not finish yourself off by giving up and throwing away your hope. Time is your friend as it gives you the opportunity to write a new story.

Be patient, remain grounded and focused. Stop reacting and overworking your mind into madness, when you should be focusing. In a speech at Stanford University, in 2005, the late Steve Job told the graduating students: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. Choose to be long- sighted; see further than just today and take a long view.

Read history

What is happening now is not all that ever happened, or will ever happen. Life is a long winding and grinding train journey. It has its surprising moments, interesting stops and long delays along the way. Keep your eyes focused on the destination and not what is happening now.

Read history to improve your depth of perspective, learn about humanity and have a better understanding of the current reality. Your ability to translate that learning into strategic action will give you an edge.

Mere recreational complaining is not strategic analysis. Strategic thinking is the ability to see patterns in the storm and follow a path through flooded waters.

When lessons from history are not heeded, the follies of the past are repeated with fanfare. Read not just your own history, but other people’s as well.

It is when you look at life through other people’s eyes that your own are opened. Be humble enough to greet history and listen to it carefully telling its tales.

Read history as an explorer and an imaginative thinker, realising that every lesson you come across counts when distilled into wisdom and diligently applied. Fertilise your imagination with the manure of history.

Read the present

Read the present with your strategy playbook open and think several moves ahead. Knee-jerk reactions are not necessarily strategic responses.

Merely watching and helplessly wondering what is happening is not strategy planning either. Look at the present with wider lenses. Think deeply about the long-term future and go beyond limited narrow time spans and emotional reactive tides.

Look at what you are facing with a view to fixing and pruning elements that do not fit into your strategy and future.

Some things worked in the past will regrettably no longer serve you in the future. If ever you carry anything from the past into the present, carry the best pasts of the past. Any crisis that you face is a message of change. It means something that may have worked in the past cannot longer fit into your present and future.

Reflect on the things that need to be corrected and restored. Never let the bitterness of the past bite off your energy and vision. Stop complaining and start working on your magnificent obsession. Leadership is a journey.

Continue the path of learning and self-improvement. Times of change are not times to stop learning and unlearning. Keep exploring for best practices and continual cycles of improvement.

Read strategy

It is not just enough to play; aim to play to win. Clarify what greatness means to you and do not let other people’s pedestrian comments tempt you to doubt yourself or veer off your path.

Confront the brutal realities of the present but never forget that this also shall pass but in the end, you will prevail. Keep a key eye on the future, have a bold vision and correct your course along the way. Think long term and keep seeing the big picture.

Small thinking and purposeless action will never take you anywhere worth going. The pressures you feel are not the whole journey. Keep walking even if the pace is slow.

Be encouraged as you reflect on the words of the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, in a 1903 letter to his protégé, the 19-year-old cadet and budding poet Franz Xaver Kappus. Rilke, encouraging his protege to embrace uncertainty, wrote: “I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Committed to your greatness.

Milton Kamwendo is a leading international transformational and motivational speaker, author and accomplished 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]