Not Just The Best
A lot of people have stagnated and limited themselves simply because they are aiming to be just the best. The idea of success is not just to be the best but to keep trying and attempting to be better. If you become the best today and you did not get better tomorrow, then you are neither making advancements nor improvement. Success is not what you arrive at (like a destination) and then stop going, it is actually a continuous and never-ending journey. The day you stop getting better might just be the start of your decline. In fact, if you stop progressing and getting better, what you thought was a success sometimes ago may begin to go into obsoletion. Aim not just to be the best but to keep getting better.
Do not allow the success that you have experienced in one aspect of your life or in a phase of your career to make to think that you have arrived at your destination. While growing up, when I newly entered junior secondary school, there was this student who I admired her academic prowess. She was a class ahead of me at that time, so I used her performance to motivate myself to work harder in order to achieve the same result. This was to show you the level of brilliance she had. When she got to Jss3, she wrote the Junior WAEC exam, and as everyone expected, she aced all her subjects and was even the best in the school that year.
When she entered senior secondary, it was as if she thought she had arrived, well maybe because of her excellent performance in the Junior WAEC. What she did not realise was that success is not a call for relaxation but a call for more work. No wonder it has always been said that "success is easier to achieve than it is to be maintained." She did not understand this part of success, so she thought that as she was the best in the junior secondary school, that it will continue that way. By the end of the SS1 first term, she dropped from 1st to 2nd. The whole school was shocked. It was obvious that she did not continue to work on her best.
The decline was also experienced in her 2nd term of SS1, up till when she wrote her O'Level. Sadly, the student who was the best in Junior WAEC, barely passed the Senior WAEC O'Level. She struggled to make the required 5 credits - someone who got all A's before. We, her friends, had to call her and gave her some very crucial advice. We told her that she should look beyond whatever she achieved in the past and look forward to what she can achieve at the moment and the future, because she constantly reminded everyone about her Junior WAEC success. It was at this point that she got herself together and admitted that living in past glory will not help her, that she needed to get back into the game and work on herself. She finally picked herself up.
It is true that you need to celebrate your wins, but you should not dwell too much on it that it will prevent you from looking forward, rather it should motivate you to strive towards achieving more. One of the things that you need to understand is that for success to be sustained, then you need to keep working to improve on your best. Even if you beat everyone else but you have not beat your highscores, then you have not really improved. Whatever you achieve today, always know that there are more to be achieved and that it is not the end. Success in one phase will open up actions in another phase. This is why success should be continuous and not a destination.
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You cannot access the future when you keep holding on to the past. Even though your past was good, you future can still be better, so keep looking towards what lies ahead. Just to let you know, the thing that sustains success is to keep working to improve on it. If you refuse to improve, then you risk losing value. In the same way, if you do not work to improve on your best, it may start to lose relevance with time.
Thanks for reading
