It’s January 3, and Mr. Akinola was whistling happily. He had made a New Year resolution to join a weight loss programme to reduce his bulging tummy and sagging chest. After searching for, and locating one along Allen Avenue, he went there on a Saturday. While trying to get into the gym, he found it hard to find a parking space….the place was jam packed. Mr. Fiyad, the in-house physiotherapist told him not to worry,” this is where we make our own money, they come in plenty every January, just relax, and be consistent, by March- April, most of them would have gone”. This is the case for many New Year resolution addicts. This syndrome has effectively put many of us into the category of the victims of New Year resolutions. How many of them have you made this year? How many have you forgotten?
I have come to understand that there are basically five factors that will determine your positioning in life, and like I told an audience recently, it is the same factors that is responsible making two friends, who attended the same schools, live in the same area become two different personalities – one, a governor; the other a thief. If you want to elevate your life or destroy it, alter these factors. These same five factors are the factors we can change if we cannot change anything else. If you are poor and disadvantaged, change these five it’s a matter of time for your life to transform. If you inherited or won a large amount of money alter these five, you will become poor faster than you made the money. If you want your life to maintain the same upward altitude in which it is moving, keep tabs on these five. Though I have some design and proposals to produce, I make ensure these posts come one after the other and believe it will provide insights for us all.
I call these factors, the five forces of altitude. They are;
I will move on to pick the first of my principles.
1. The thoughts of your mind.
The mind of man which represents the factory of thoughts is an awesome creation of wonder. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he has become a fundamental truth for every people. The Living Bible translation quotes it as “Be careful how you think, because your life is shapened by your thoughts”- this cannot be stated better. All the multifaceted customs, habits, manners of mankind are from the smallest to the greatest, products of consistent or uncultured thoughts. When we say ideas rule the world, we are actually paying homage to the commitment to mental development of the mind of some men. The faculties of thought have been known and agreed to by philosophers and theologians alike, to develop or atrophy like the muscles depending on use or disuse. This is one factor that can turn every man into a monster and an ordinary man into a hero.
Long before professional hair cutting became fashionable, the barbers in Florida gathered in protest to people’s perception about their profession as if it were a semi-skilled labour. They decided to embark on a project that will showcase to Americans what the average American barber can do to an average man. So, they went to the slums of New York to look for a raggedly looking man and they found one- and men, he was ragged. After taking pictures of this hungry-looking, dirty and hopeless young man, and flashing the pictures on a TV reality programme ” See what American barbers can do!”, they set to work. After rounds of washing, shampooing, shaving and fine tuning, the American media could not believe the clean guy dressed in grey suit, with silk tie and shirt to match was the bum, shown earlier. The American barbers have proved a point – they could perform wonders.
Four months after that, a business journalist got interested in finding out what was up with this made-over bum after a gift of $100,000 was given to him. He combed the best hotels hoping to find him lavishing the money; he combed the restaurants and bars hoping to find him eating the choicest of foods, but he was nowhere to be found. Finally, he decided to go back to the bum area where this overnight success was first brought from. There he found him; the raggedy tattered bum, looking worse than he was first seen. He had all the money spent, clothes sold and was back where he started- the slum. Then he thought about it, he had seen what the American barbers could not do. They could take the barber out of the bums, but they couldn’t take the bum out of him. You can never rise above the level of your thoughts, it doesn’t matter when. If you want to elevate your life, then you must then control your mind like the reins of the horse, direct it, develop it, cultivate and use it.
Most people were created into mediocre lives by the words spoken into their minds by others. Parents who have structured their children’s life by making them think they are stupid, dumb, idiots and fools and their lives have never really risen above those levels. Only few will actually go through the tough path of consciously fighting those thoughts with good and progressive ones. The mind of man is like a typical farmland, if not consciously cultivated, can become a mighty field of wild growth and hopelessness.
It is imperative we enlist in the business of thought and mind development. If you go into the business of building your mind daily, by meditation, exercising what your mind says to yourself. Calling and digging into your mind to fish out remarkable ideas and thoughts. Make this a regular exercise like physical gymnasts do. Consciously going along the hard path of controlling the quality of thinking that goes on in your head- not just about problems but about progressive solutions; not about despair, but in challenges your thoughts. You will find the transformation in your personality, amazing.
The thoughts of your mind yields knowledge in your heart, my factor number two…wait for it.
1 comment. Leave new
Comment * so simplified but very motivating n understand, wish I can get d oda four attitude forces, tanks