The biggest killer of sustainable advancement is vanity. It comes in different forms, from demanding respect from others, keeping up appearances, or giving in to feelings of peer pressure. One thing certain about vanity: it is a thief, stealing focus from your plans and journey, and letting you live your life through the eyes of others. Using social media speak, vanity lets others live rent-free in your mind. In such a situation, your life, plans and attainment of success will, sadly, be the ultimate casualty. By Nimroth Gwetsa, 31 January 2024.
Run your race! Wear blinkers if need be. Stop living your life through the eyes of others. Your success is more important than anything else and its attainment requires your dedicated focus. Live as though the attainment of your good plans is the only reason for your existence. But those plans must not be based on what they will help you attain in the eyes of people or detractors or even those healing praises on you.
The purpose of the plans and success sought after should be to help you make a difference in this life, contributing to the advancement of humanity and where possible, adding to the body of knowledge. That purpose should be nothing about getting respect, or showing off, or proving a point to someone else.
I have never seen anyone sustainably attaining success and contentment from pursuing life for the sole reason of causing others to praise them. That would be idolatry, setting yourself up as a god worthy of worship from and by others. That’s preposterous and a sure way of guaranteeing your spectacular fall from grace. Aside from colonial subjugation of others enabling corrupt ways of wealth accumulation and success attainment, ordinary people cannot attain sustainable success at the expense of others.
If you are not a prodigy of colonialists, such ruthless subjugation lifestyle and success at all costs is not for you, and you were not mentally prepared to sustain such a life. You will only cause yourself much pain. That pain will result in the deterioration of your mental health due to lacking contentment. It can also lead to murder of self that social media millennials refer to as unaliving yourself, otherwise commonly known as committing suicide.
Run your race. Dust yourself and rise again by taking those considered steps. If you must move locations as part of your blinkers to avoid neighbours talking about you and/or your failures, do so. However, whomever you will be, only focus on yourself and plans to help you make a difference, and not try to settle scores with your detractors. Property and land use are expensive nowadays. Never permit anyone to live rent-free in the valuable and vastness of your mind. That mansion is for you and your specially chosen ones to occupy.
This advice is more apt especially to entrepreneurs because you can easily ruin your business through vanity if not careful enough. Good money that could be used on expanding the business steadily could be wasted on worthless vanity projects. The fall from grace is not an easy outcome to experience. It brings with it, high doses of humiliation and destruction. Not many can live through such stressful setback, much less recover from it. Such humiliation and destruction can be avoided.
Life is filled with many challenges already hindering our ability to attain success. Let us not pile on more problems on ourselves by adding the burden of living our lives through the eyes of others. I understand that we do not live in isolation of others and free from the glare of naysayers, detractors and prying eyes. There will always be scrutiny, and such scrutiny can increase the pressure unnecessarily causing us to make the wrong decisions.
We must try harder to resist such. We often complain that “when days are dark, friends are few”. Maybe life is protecting us when that happens and such feelings emerge. Life isolates us to shield us by removing leeches from our lives so we do not experience their taunts and bad advices. What was meant for evil is now being turned into good for our development. This explains reasons we are told to become grateful in everything always. We often fail to see the goodness in all our experiences, good or bad.
We only want to see what we desire to see. But we did not create ourselves, and as such cannot dictate all our experiences and how we should overcome all the bad ones and keep only the good ones. We are destined to go through a medley of experiences enriching our lives. In fact, we emerge stronger when we come from a weak than a vantage point.
I refuse to believe that people who toiled to achieve their success would easily splash it on frivolities, entertainment and other vain projects. As the saying goes, “easy come, easy go”. Protect yourself and flee from unprofitable things and choose for yourself a path leading to sustainability and generational attainment of success-after-success. Let us strive for that, and maybe, just maybe, we will finally manage to cut off and eliminate the so called “generational curses”.
Run your race so, like the apostle Paul, you can say, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith”, or, as popularly attributed to Julius Caesar, also say “Veni, vidi, vici”. Hopefully in your next stage of life, you will be congratulated and declared a “…good and faithful servant … faithful with a few things … [and deservedly so, will now be] … put in charge of many things.”
Be blessed.
