Have you ever tried writing a business plan and when you were almost done your computer crashed?
Or have you ever tried to call an important contact and heard they just left the country a day before you found their number?
What came to your mind?
You almost believed all this was happening because you were attempting what was not meant to be, isn’t it? Some even believe they are cursed.
Well… you were wrong. Even if you are pursuing the right dream and the right purpose, many times you will find the odds against you.
It is tempting to interpret the odds of life as omens of failure. That is why success in life is not for superstitious people.
Superstitious people are so quick to interpret the odds of life as judgments for unknown and unconfessed sins.
Instead of dealing with the situation, they divert their energy and attention inwardly.
They worst time mutilating themselves and judging themselves unworthy of the miracle heaven has shown they deserve.
Heaven has dropped an idea into your soul because it believes you have what it takes to change the world that way.
The most life-changing revelation of your life might be in this sentence:
You will still suffer adversity chasing the right purpose as you would suffer when chasing the wrong one.
One mistake you can make is to think that if God has given you something then getting it should be easy.
But in life, many things can be yours yet you can’t use them till you fight for them. That is what it means to fight for what is yours!
Even the righteous suffer adversity.
There is a point in your life when your problems and failures have nothing to do with your sins; they are just a result of poor wisdom.
Most times our marriages, finances, families, ministries and nations are not going through sin problems – they are going through wisdom problems.
I have met many righteous people who are poor beggars, saints who are lying in sickbeds, and generals of faith defeated in battles.
It’s not their levels of sin that are causing their problems; it is their levels of wisdom!
Wisdom is the skill to turn ideas into reality.
Wisdom is what turns the hope in your heart into substance in your hands.
If where you are today is not where you really hoped to be, then it shows there is something you should know that you still don’t know.
The level of your achievement is proportionate to the level of your wisdom.
Your achievements expose your wisdom, or lack of it.
The Simplest Definition of Wisdom
Wisdom is knowing the right place to go, and the right way to get to it.
Some people know the right place they want to end up in life; but they are doing nothing to get them there.
In fact, the friends they choose, the habits they hold, the words they believe and the thoughts they let preoccupy their minds are only good enough to take them directly opposite to the life they want to have.
They are those people I mention in my book Life Capsules for Success, that they are following a cake recipe over and over again with the hope that this time it will give them pizza.
Long time back, when we were at university there was a young man called Antony who kept boasting that he couldn’t spend a week without s3x.
Our bridge of relationship was not yet strong enough to carry the weight of correction, so I couldn’t correct him on that day. I fell silent, so did everyone else.
In less than two years he had impregnated a girl from his neighborhood and was forced to drop out of university so he could take care of his accidentally found family.
For Antony, this meant shrinking back into the poor and dilapidated neighborhood that his parents hoped he would have escaped through the ladder of education.
Antony knew the decent and successful lifestyle he wanted to reach in his lifetime, but his habit was only good enough to take him in the opposite direction.
What you do is just as important as where you want to be.
Cinderella took the right path that leads to the palace, which is why she found herself there.
If you want a marriage that ends up in the right place called happiness, then cheating is not the right way to get to it.
Neither is tit-for-tat or eye-for-an-eye the way to lasting friendship; nor is the love of sleep the way to great riches.
Yes, it is the easy way, but that doesn’t make it the right way.
Those who take a wrong path because it is easy will soon discover how easy it is to end up in the wrong place, and how hard it is to live there.
Two Types of Wisdom
Maybe you are saying it is possible to have wisdom and achieve nothing. You are right, and that wisdom is called “Wisdom that Achieves Nothing.”
When you consult these people, they have all the wisdom you need to stay where you are and never get beyond.
They have many reasons not to do something than to do it.
Their level of analysis causes them paralysis.
They are afraid of risks.
They only wait for moments when action is easy.
They spend their lifetimes aiming and never shooting.
Wisdom must create safety instead of stagnancy.
There is a difference between an armour and a cocoon.
A medieval knight warrior wore armour and ran to war. It was safe, and at the same time allowing him to run and fight…
A tortoise, however, has a cocoon. It is a shell so heavy that when an enemy approaches it cannot run or fight- it can only draw in its head and hide.
The tortoise is safe; and though it can live long, unfortunately, it cannot go far.
It dies where it was born. It has a long life that is not worth telling because, as Abraham Lincoln puts it, “the most important thing is not really the years in your life but the life in your years.”
“Wisdom that Achieves Something” is different. It is like a warrior’s armour that protects you but partly leaves you vulnerable.
It gives you space to freely move, climb and fight. It believes those who might fail should not fear, it is noble to fail while daring greatly!
Beware of what kind of wisdom you find.
Some wisdom transports you forward yet some wisdom transfixes you where you are.
This is because some people have “Wisdom that Achieves Nothing” and others have “Wisdom that Achieves Something.”
It is just as important to know who you should learn from as it is to know what you should learn.
Passion vs. Wisdom
Every time Tino saw his friend drive that car, he told himself he could do it too.
One day he took the driver’s seat when his friend wasn’t watching. He started the car and with all his might, stepped on the accelerator…
The next thing he remembers is lifting his head only to realize the car had crashed through a restaurant window.
Tino was right to believe he could drive, but he was a fool to think he could do it right the first time and without training.
He so much desired driving to an extent that he thought learning was a waste of time.
He had a passion that lacked wisdom.
I know people who want to be billionaires so freaking bad.
I know of people who want a happy marriage so bad.
Some have a passion for the stage and dream of being famous.
But passion alone is not enough to give you what you want.
Your wisdom is just as important as your passion.
Your Passion decides your speed. Your Wisdom decides your direction. (Your commitment decides your endurance).
Passion without wisdom is like driving without a steering wheel. You crush.
Wisdom without passion is like steering a car without fuel – it goes nowhere.
You don’t have what you desire because you still haven’t found enough wisdom to get you there.
Live life with an eye for wisdom.
Grow Through Life
In my Life Capsules for Success, I write that,
“The most important thing is not having it all, but who you became by having it all.”
– MOFFAT MACHINGURA | Life Capsules for Success
I further emphasized that in the book Life Capsules for Your Faith saying,
“The most important thing was not being blessed, but who you became by being blessed.”
– MOFFAT MACHINGURA | Life Capsules for Your Faith
In life, we go through many things, but the most important thing is how what we go through makes us grow.
Many times we can’t choose what we go through, but all the time we can choose to grow through what we go through.
The path in which you are going is the path in which you should be growing.
On this path…
You will make your own mistakes and that will teach you the ways by which some things can’t be done.
You will win and that will teach you the right way to do things.
You will meet achievers of better things than you, and that will make you a dreamer of better dreams.
You will meet fools and wise people too, and you will find both their life stories have treasures good enough to make you a better you…
Step into every day with an enthusiasm to learn.
Whatever happens to you in life will, in some way, teach you how to make life happen.
When you understand that, you stop merely going through life and start growing through it.
Have an Eye for Wisdom
Your failures will teach you wisdom.
Your failures say nothing about what you deserve or don’t deserve. They only show you what you don’t know and need to know.
We forsake a failure by embracing the lessons we learn from it.
The value of failure lies in the lessons you choose to gain from it.
Our failures show us what doesn’t work.
Our circumstances are temporary, but what we learn from them will last forever.
Our failures mean loss when we only view them as failures, but when we embrace the lessons they give – our failures become just as important as our successes.
They show us how to preserve our success by avoiding trying what we would have learned doesn’t work.
Develop your eyes to see the wisdom that lies in your failures.
The experiences and failures of others will teach you wisdom.
You have to learn from others because life is too short to make all the mistakes on your own.
The history of humans and beasts shows that creatures that learn through their own trial and error always lose to those that learn through the trials and errors of others.
Read widely. Find a mentor. Seek an audience with the most successful in your field.
An author can take fourteen years of research, success and failure to write a book, so to read is to swallow someone’s fourteen years of experience in a few hours.
After three hours your mind would be fourteen years older in that particular topic than it had been before you opened the book.
To read is to travel. To read widely is to travel far.
To read many books is to live many lives. To read much is to live long.
To find a mentor is to make the top your beginning.
Utilize the lives of others to design the philosophy of your life.
When you merge many lives into one, you live a life worthy of many lives.
Wisdom can be Corrupted
If you want to see a poor man’s character, give him wealth.
To see a weak man’s character give him strength.
One of our greatest traps in life can be finding the very money, wealth and love that we desire.
Right at the moment of our victory, that is when we are weakest.
When the battle is won, and we cast down our weapons to lift our hands and voices in celebration, that exactly is the moment when we are most weak and unarmed.
When wisdom wins you something that you desired, beware lest you cast it down in celebration.
Many are celebrities who became millionaires but died too broke to afford a proper burial.
Those are examples of people who allowed victory to corrupt their wisdom.
Unlike you, perhaps no book had ever told them that Wisdom can be lost.
Pleasure can corrupt the wisdom that pain taught you.
You will need wisdom to create wealth, and you will need wisdom to keep it.
Wisdom can be Preserved (The Three Keys)
The wisdom that you preserve shall preserve you.
Here are three keys that will keep your ear attuned to the voice of wisdom in this journey called life.
i. Measure the journey not by the thrill of travel but by the place of arrival.
Have you ever had some old folks tell you of their childhood adventures?
They tell you of the money they spent, the people they dated and cheated on, of the clubs and parties they danced all night and the near-death street fights that they escaped by a whisker.
After telling that story, they drop their heads and sigh, “Those were the days…we were busy deceiving ourselves, we never thought one day life would turn out this way…”
They say that because they realize they spent their lives making absolute failures of themselves.
They found wisdom at sunset when they had nothing else to do with it except to sit by the fire and tell it to others as folktales and bedtime stories.
They got caught up in the thrill of the journey, such that they forgot to keep the direction.
A journey should be interesting, but above everything, it must lead you to the destination that you desire. Never lose sight of your life’s dominant desire.
And if the path you are in diverts you from your dreams, then it’s not worth taking no matter how exciting it is.
The goal is to avoid going nowhere very fast.
ii. Where you are going to matters more than what you are going through.
You don’t have enough wisdom to fight all the battles in your life. Choose your battles wisely.
Fight only those battles that lead you to your dreams.
Problems will arise around you, and some of them you can’t yet change.
Only focus on those things that you can change.
iii. Wisdom is the ability to weigh present actions in terms of their future consequences.
Every action has a consequence, whether positive or negative. And life is long enough to make the consequences of your actions catch up with you, whether good or bad.
Every act of diligence is an investment for a future highly rewarding excellence. Every act of kindness or compassion, will catch up with you one day.
So is every act of abuse or deception – those who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind…
Next Chapter…
