Imagine how Cinderella must have made her midnight flight……
Panting and out of breath, the Prince gave up chasing and helplessly watched the most beautiful woman of his life running off and being swallowed by the darkness of the night.
He knew there was no way they would meet again. In desperation, he called out, “Please! At least leave me your name!!!”
But Cinderella didn’t hear that, and even if she did, the Prince’s call was an obviously denied request. The Prince stood alone at midnight, a madman calling into the darkness.
He felt robbed.
She had stolen his heart and left him with nothing.
But when he dropped his head with dismay, he was glad to realize right at his feet, Cinderella, the mysterious Princess, had dropped something too.
He picked it up and was stunned by how beautiful it was – a slipper of turquoise blue glass. A slipper that glistened with the gleams of a million gemstones.
Cinderella was found because of the glass slipper that she left behind. Where is your glass slipper?
There are people that you meet once and remember forever.
There is something about them, maybe on their face, in their aura, or maybe it is the melody in their voice that leaves everybody wishing they could meet again.
Like Cinderella, wherever they go, they leave glass slippers behind.
They leave a part of themselves implanted in our souls – and we live life wondering how much more we could have found had we but a little more time with them.
Success in business is not when you find customers, but when your customers find you.
Instead of looking for customers, your customers start looking for you.
That only is what should give you confidence that your business is here to stay. But it only happens if your product or service leaves a glass slipper behind.
You must drop into the hearts of people a standard of excellence and perfection that only fits you.
Some people win an interview the moment they enter the door. Right there, without any time wasted, they drop the glass slipper.
When they leave, the rest of the interviewees get their turn only out of courtesy. The vacancy would have already been taken.
Secrets of People who Leave Glass Slippers Behind
i. They Insert Beauty into Everything
Studies show that…
- A driver is most likely to get a heavier sentence for hitting an attractive pedestrian than a less attractive one.
- An attractive person is more likely to be trusted (even when not trustworthy) than a less attractive counterpart.
Fact: Beauty Sells!
We might call it unfair, but that won’t be enough to change it.
Human nature is biased towards beauty such that from as early as three months of age, we award more attention to photos of pretty or handsome people than to less attractive ones.
Humans have a natural weakness for beauty. Beauty drops us to our knees.
To succeed in life either be beautiful or make beautiful things.
Those who make beautiful things make what cannot be forgotten.
It’s only a beautiful thing that can excite a longing to be seen for the second time.
Distancing yourself from something beautiful will only make your heart grow fonder of that thing.
When you find a beautiful thing; you wish to hold it in your hands, rest it on your heart and preserve it in your embrace.
Beauty has the power to trigger human jealousy.
Whether you are a speaker, farmer, teacher, singer, or inventor. Whatever you do, do it beautifully. Beauty creates demand.
Smoothen your face. Smoothen your voice when you talk or sing just as much as a carpenter or sculptor smoothens a completed piece of art or furniture.
Life has enough rough patches, your work doesn’t need to be a reminder of any.
Add beauty to all that you do. Beauty gives hope that life can be beautiful after all.
ii. They Make a Difference in Everything
For whatever you see, ask yourself; “How can it be different and better?” And in whatever you do, ask yourself, “How can it be done differently and faster?”
You will be valued for the difference that you make.
Great people make a difference while ordinary people maintain a difference brought by others.
Your difference defines your purpose.
You were born to change, not everything, but something in this life that only you can change.
If you were like everyone else there wouldn’t be a reason to be born.
You will be remembered for the difference you create.
Get into the habit of leaving things and people a little better than you found them.
Every time you make a difference, you leave a glass slipper behind.
iii. They Provide a Touch of Quality
Quality is so expensive that those who find it fight to keep it.
If you are a person of quality people will fight to keep you.
How different would your words be if your name was to be cited after them the same way we cite the names of people who wrote great quotes?
How different would your work be if it were to be branded with your name the same way Mercedes Benz brands its automobiles or Apple its technological inventions?
Then go make that quality of difference because every day you are creating a brand.
You are a brand. The question is; is it more profitable to remember your brand than it is to forget it?
No one remembers the person who came in second.
In everything, aim to be the first among the best.
The day you leave, your work will remain telling a story about you.
You would have left a glass slipper behind.
iv. They exist to add value
When Cinderella went to the ballroom, she didn’t beg the prince to marry her, “I am miserable, marry me out of my ashes…” No!
People who live glass slippers behind understand that there is no profit in being pitied.
They don’t believe the world owes them anything, not even compassion.
They are not seeking donations they are seeking opportunities to deliver their abilities.
They don’t think in terms of what they should receive, they think in terms of what they should give.
They are assets among us, whilst many people are liabilities.
It is this giving attitude that makes their presence worth keeping and their absence noticeable.
What makes you worth hiring?
v. They show up
Even the best singers are merely part of the audience if they are downstage; fame and success come only to those who can dare to take the stage.
Life is not looking for the able, life is seeking the available.
If you are ever hiding, then life cannot use you.
If you show up, you will learn so much that you thought you were not ready to know, because life finds people who show up and it sharpens them to work as pencils to sketch history.
Refuse to spend your life in hiding, create a space for yourself and let the world know you exist.
Some people are like stagnant islands that waste their lifetimes in the distance waiting to be discovered.
But as little babies, we knew we could only have our milk if we screamed loud enough for it.
There is an ancient African proverb that is interpreted, “A child too lazy to cry will die of hunger clutching its mother’s back.”
That means if you want anything in life, stand up and be seen for it.
If you want a platform to do great things, stand up and make it.
You are responsible for who discovers you, for the fans you create and the customers you win.
Cinderella showed up at the party, had she stayed home then simply being a queen at heart would not have made any difference.
Cinderella Learns to Forgive
Hate and love are similar in that, the people you hate occupy your mind as much as the people you love.
To live a life worth telling – to leave behind a slipper worth picking – you have to let go of the past.
I’m not saying forget it, I’m saying commit to yourself that you were born for a better purpose than avenging the people in your past.
The worst thing about hate is that it often turns us into the very people that we hate. By learning to hate back we learn to be haters.
You cannot be better if you are bitter.
What you do in bitterness won’t be different from what was done to you by those who embittered you.
Like Cinderella, turn around and tell your stepmother (or your real mother) “I forgive you.”
I know they were too bad to deserve it, but the fact that they were bad parents doesn’t mean you should be a bad child.
Buy your father a birthday present, even if you know he was never in your life.
People make choices. They chose to be the worst parents any child could have – but the story doesn’t end there. You are also making choices.
To do to them what they did to you, you will first have to be who they are.
By choosing to avenge what they did, you are also choosing to be who they have been.
Don’t give your abusers power to turn you into who they are.
Even if you are only angry with one person, your anger will hurt many people.
Alain De Botton put it perfectly right, bitterness is that anger that you forgot where it came from.
It’s possible to be angry with your father so much that you treat your husband badly, or to be so angry at life that you actually mistreat yourself.
Despite being so cruelly mistreated, Cinderella had to turn around and tell her stepmother and stepsisters – “I forgive you.”
In real life, Joyce Meyer had to forgive her father for sexually abusing her throughout her childhood. It set her free from the past.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean you didn’t treat me bad, it means I withhold my right to treat you as badly as you treated me.
At that moment when you should hate, that’s the perfect moment when love is most needed.
The past that never dies continues to kill the present.
The past dies when we accept that it is past. Actually, the past dies twice, it first dies to itself the very second it happens, then it slowly dies to us as we learn to accept that it is already dead.
The past that we feel like we are still holding onto today is not real at all – it’s only a memory.
Your past is the source of your memories, your future is the source of your imaginations; if you follow your noblest imaginations you will create the future but if you remain bound to your memories you will continue to suffer the past.
The storm that you go through in life goes through into you.
That is why you snap so harshly at your partner that he/she wonders if you still want you two to be together, the same could be the reason why your children secretly wonder if you are their real parent or you picked them from the streets.
Maybe this is the reason you bark at everyone including your customers, your employees, or your boss.
A storm got into you, and it’s making you storm on everyone else.
You now carry an atmosphere that even the people who love you just can’t stand.
It’s not the storm that you went through that is destroying your life, it’s the storm that went through into you as you went through that storm.
You are like a man following up after a hurricane with a heavy hammer in his hand, smashing all the windows and furniture that the hurricane spared.
You are destroying what the storm couldn’t destroy – in other words, you are strengthening the storm long after it’s gone.
Yesterday the storm took what it took, but today you could be suffering because of the storm that you took.
Do yourself a favor – stop helping the storm.
You can’t change the past but you can change what it makes you do.
Don’t go bad when things go bad.
Going through the pain of rejection should show you that rejection is too painful a thing to give away – from today onwards only live to give love and to give acceptance.
Let the pain of that heartbreak remind you that a heartbreak is too painful a thing to give away – if there was a time you understood the necessity of true commitment and faithfulness it should be through that storm.
Let your worst days of life remind you how necessary it is to create the best days in the lives of others.
If you learn this then you will grow through whatever you go through.
Start to let go and you will start to grow.
Most of the problems in this world were created by people who were trying to solve theirs.
So don’t take your past’s pain personally, it has nothing to do with you.
They treated you wrongly but there is nothing wrong with you.
Don’t define yourself by other people’s choices. Define yourself by your choices.
Sometimes we are tempted to think, they treated us wrongly because there was something wrong about us.
But the danger of taking your past personally is that you end up believing you deserve what happened in your past.
If you believe you deserve pain, then pain will always be a part of your life because you would have deprived yourself of the energy to make your past different from your future.
So as you step into the future, life is going to take you to new places and you will meet new people.
You will dance to new songs, learn a new language and no matter what challenges you met in your past – life will give you instances in which they will slip off your mind.
But sometimes your mind you will take you on a walk down memory lane. Go there for lessons only, not to resurrect the past.
I desire that you dwell in the land of your dreams more often than in the land of your memories – because your present life is always growing into the reflection of wherever you most often stay.
So never forget every place that you once lived, because a part of you still lives there, and a part of that place still lives in you.
And as you forgive the people in your past, remember to also forgive the places where you met those people.
Forgive your partner for cheating on you, but also forgive the place called marriage where it all happened.
Forgive the business friend who betrayed you, but also forgive business.
That way you will continue to believe in love even though you have lost in love, and you will remain a business person despite your business failures.
Let’s forgive people and let’s forgive places where we met those people.
If we can’t forgive places, our unforgiveness shrinks our world.
Forgive family, forgive love, and forgive home. Forgive school, forgive church. Forgive the places where you met some people.
Forgive till you can visit those places again, because some of these places still have a chance to give you better people 🙂
Next Chapter…
