Just like you and me, Cinderella had her own cold nights that made her cry.
Tears are not always an expression of weakness, most times they are an expression of passion.
They show how strongly you want what you love and how deeply you hate what you hate.
In fact, if you spend a year without crying for something, then beware you could be living too comfortably.
This is how life changes…. You must have a desire that you refuse to see denied; a hope that keeps you restless.
Deep inside we all should hope for a tomorrow that outshines our today.
However, hope alone is never enough. To make hope a reality, there are two things that Cinderella knew that you need to know too…
1. Cinderella Knew What She Didn’t Want
She didn’t cry because she was weak, she cried because she was treated badly and she hated it so badly.
She cried because she kept telling herself, “This is an ugly way to do life.”
When I see how the poor hate talking about money, how the most unlearned hate to read and how the overweight hate exercise – I get tempted to believe that the poor actually want to be poor, the unlearned want to stay behind in life and the overweight surely want to die young!
I know I sound cocky… but do you know that I have coached depressed people who actually don’t want to be happy?
They go from psychologist to psychologist – and they come out boasting that theirs is the most complicated problem in the world!
Do you really want a better life? If you want it then why are you being comfortable with being at the bottom?
When you heard that it’s a lonely place at the top, you probably stopped feeling like being up there.
The words “there is a lonely place at the top” made me realize there are vacant seats up there. Meaning if I picked myself and started going up, I would definitely find a room for myself!
Life has a high table. Those sitting at the high table are eating the cake of life while those lying under the table are eating the crumbs that are falling from it.
The real problem with cake crumbs is not that they are few, but that they taste just as sweet as the cake.
They make you comfortable – thinking you are having the real thing. But those still comfortable with the crumbs will never eat at the high table of life.
This is why not all people you try to help are willing to be helped. Try pulling some people up to the high table and they will tell you, “My life is fine the way it is!”
They call it contentment yet in the actual sense it’s complacency.
Contentment is being grateful for what you have; but complacency is gratefulness to the point of forgetting that life has given you more than what you already have.
The moment you believe that all you have is all you should have, then you have started down a life path that ends you with nothing.
Crumbs are crumbs even if they taste like cake.
Your complaint is your vision. You dislike what you dislike most probably because you were born to help solve it in some way.
What irritates you the most can be a clue to what you were born to solve. Yet most times we ignore our complaints because we think this world can’t satisfy them.
Anyway, why should the world satisfy your complaints?
The world owes us nothing; it is us who owe it everything.
Without humans, the world is a meaningless jungle. It is the systems we create and the order we establish that gives this world meaning.
The world has been built by complainers who chose to self-responsibly find solutions for their complaints.
Which song tracks are you tired of playing?
Which chairs are you tired of seeing in your room?
Which trend has repeated itself so many times in your life that it makes you sick?
Is it a bankruptcy trend?
A heartbreak trend?
Or is it the very fact that your life has no trend at all?
The journey to success begins when you look at your life and admit the things that make you sick. You are not yet ready to be free till you can see that you are bound.
Know clearly what you don’t want and refuse to tolerate it.
You cannot change what you can tolerate.
The first step to knowing who you want to be is knowing who you don’t want to be.
Remember: it is not the problems you correct that make your life miserable, it is the problems you live uncorrected.
Look into your life and admit there are people and situations that you can’t stand anymore.
It is an act of courage to look at the things that once seemed “fine” and admit to yourself “I don’t want this in my life, not for another day and not anymore!!!”
Trapped in the dungeon of life, in dusty cinders and ashes, Cinderella bitterly wept.
Her tears were not to make the Cinderella story a pitiful story. She wept because she admitted life was treating her badly.
She didn’t know how to get out of that dungeon but, most importantly, she knew she had to get out.
When you decide you deserve better than what you are getting from life, you give your mind freedom to start creating a way that leads to what is better.
Writing a Cinder List
There is an exercise I frequently do year by year, and it has boosted the speed at which I improve my life. I write what I call the Cinder List.
I grab my notebook and I scribble down every complaint I have about my life. I also write everything I have but no longer want.
It can be one of my products that are selling poorly, a suit that doesn’t suit me well, an asset that is outdated, or a friend who is pulling me down or a habit I need to break.
I just write everything down as fast as I can.
Sweeping the Ashes
The next thing I ask myself is how I can start to get rid of each of those things. I call that “Sweeping the Ashes.”
Just as a dusty home can make you sick, so can a poorly swept life.
Some things will take longer than others to sweep away. Some will take more effort. I don’t care how much it costs to sweep it all away, I just do it.
This is the only life on earth I have, so it’s not like I’m in a hurry somewhere…
Pause: Write a Cinder List
Take a notebook, list all the cinders and ashes of your life. List all the aspects of your life you think you should get rid of.
Just randomly list any dislike that pops up in your mind. The goal is to inform your mind of those dislikes that you have treated as likes and the complaints that you have tolerated.
Remember: you cannot change what you can tolerate.
Now here is the second thing Cinderella knew that you should know too…
2. Cinderella Knew What She Wanted
Being left behind all Home Alone without her mockful sisters teasing her every minute was going to be a nice treat for poor Cinderella. But that is not what she wanted.
Cinderella wanted to be in the palace; to dance with the Prince; to win and be the Queen.
Cinderella strongly knew what she didn’t want. Yet above that, she clearly knew what she wanted. She wanted the throne.
In other words, she had both a complaint and an ambition.
Your complaints show you what you have to run away from; your ambitions show what you have to run to.
Without ambition, our complaints would be too weak to get us anywhere.
We would be no different from a cruelly battered, abused wife, who says, “I know I can’t live with him, but I have no choice, I don’t know where to go!”
She knows she is not happy, but she can’t leave because she doesn’t know where to go.
You need a complaint and you also need an ambition.
On the other hand, without a complaint, your ambitions would be too weak to get you anywhere.
It is like being that poor man who hesitates to pursue financial independence (starting a business, or investing) saying, “At least we can afford food on our table and a roof over our head. What is the point of risking so much?”
He has an ambition but can’t pursue it because he has no complaint or problem strong enough to push him forward.
In one of my coaching sessions, I once asked one lady, “What kind of mother do you want to be?”
“I don’t know…” she paused and continued, “all I know is I don’t want to be like my mother.”
She knew who she didn’t want to be. That is good. But that is not enough. She had to know who she wanted to be – who to become.
Every complaint needs an ambition so that life can start showing a direction.
Most teenagers feel like leaving home but never do. And some who do need only a few years away to be back home again.
The movement would be temporary, and at times a total waste of time or a fatal mistake. The reason being they moved off before figuring out where to go.
“Just somewhere, anywhere else that is not here,” that’s what they said.
Unfortunately, some make a flight from an abusive father only to land in a marriage just as abusive as home.
When they left they had no idea where they were going, they only knew what they were leaving. They were rich in complaints but poor in ambition.
What do you want your life to be? How precisely would you like your life to end?
What story would you want your lifetime to tell? A story of success, of failure, or merely an ordinary story of an average achiever?
Do you want your life to tell a perseverance story of someone who became a victor despite their circumstances or a feebleness story of those who succumbed to being victims of their circumstances?
Paint the future in your mind. The same mind that replays the past can pre-play the future you want to have.
You have preserved your past in pictures, video clips, letters, and audio recordings. These are good, but they only remind you of the past.
Where are the images that remind you of the future you want to have?
Photo albums are the tombstones of the past.
When we open them, the past episodes that slept deeply as corpses suddenly come to life and become troubling zombies walking upon our present.
When heartbreak episodes resurrect, we start shivering in fear of being heartbroken again – even though we now may be in the arms of someone who dearly loves us.
Because of the betrayal entombed in the images of your past, you fear trusting the good person in your present.
Sometimes when past memories come to mind, the present starts feeling like the past. Love suddenly stops feeling like love.
If we keep painful episodes of the past, they resurrect and cause yesterday’s scars to hurt today.
We remember that day when the scars were still fresh wounds. Tear streams we once dried with tissues start flowing again, and this time they unexpectedly find us having left the tissues home.
When the people who hurt us come to mind, our hearts start taking back the forgiveness that we once gave away.
On the other hand, sometimes good times are as much a hindrance to progress as bad times.
When beautiful memories resurrect in our minds, we start regretting being in the present – and wish things had remained the way they used to be.
Cinderella must have had an image of the future that is brighter than the dark cruelty she experienced an hour ago, a minute ago, or a year ago.
Her mind needs a reason to be strong, and ambition is that reason. Even hope is attracted to ambition, and “where there is no vision, people perish.”
The past is like a parasite. It lives by sucking energy and time from the present.
The past fears to die, it seeks means to propagate itself.
That is why most times history repeats itself.
We break away from fake love and break away from true love just the same.
We forgive but afterwards wish for revenge, we give but desire to take back.
If we are not aware, our lives end up being one step forward into the future God has given us, but then two steps behind into the past entrapped in our minds.
Memories do not only make us relive the past, they cause us to re-create it.
Memories have the power to cause history to repeat itself.
Every human mind is endowed with these two important gifts – the gift of memory that replays the past and the gift of imagination that pre-plays the future.
Don’t live on memories, live on imagination. Memories recreate the past, imagination pre-creates the future.
When Fairy Godmother asked Cinderella why she was crying, without wasting time Cinderella said she wanted to be at the palace and have a chance to dance with the Prince just like everyone else.
If I were to ask you what you want, would I ever find an answer?
Do you have the answer now, or the time you will be able to reply would be long after the ballroom party is over?
To break away from the past, the future you imagine must be more vivid than the past you remember.
– MOFFAT MACHINGURA
Make the image of the future you love more vivid than the present or past you have grown to hate. Keeping inspirational images of the future you desire fuels your life into motion.
It’s time to Paste your future on the wall!
Do you desire a flamboyant wealthy future? If so, then in your bedroom paste wallpapers of the wealth and success your heart dreams of.
If you desire a happy family, then saturate yourself with clean happy family movies, and stop listening to those song tracks that deceive you into cheating on your spouse.
Saturate your senses with the images of the future you desire. You become what you always think and talk about.
Even before he had acted in his first film, Arnold Schwarzenegger had already told himself he was going to be one of the most famous actors in Hollywood.
That ambition became his dominant imagination.
What you always focus on, is what you become.
Your imaginations grow your desires, and your desires are the energy that propels you into the future.
You need to know who you want to be to get there.
Dream Big
My brother Charles always said, “Dreams are for free, so why dream small ones?”
That question always got me thinking. Why do people fear to dream big?
When we are little, parents say we can have anything we want in this world. When we are grown up, they tell us we have to be “realistic.”
When we are grown old, we realize there is no such thing as reality. What we call reality is actually a summation of other people’s dreams that came true.
We dream small because we don’t understand how truly the limitations of our dreams become the limitations of our lives.
Life is a journey that begins with a dream, you can’t start living till you can start dreaming.
When you take time to imagine and compose a great song or story, people will compliment you that you are so creative.
They say you are creative because imagination is a creative tool.
Imagination is not a tool to predict the future, rather it is a tool to create it.
God has given us the gift of imagination as a device to dream and create the future.
To be imaginative leads to being creative.
Sadly, it’s clear from the boring life most people live that their lives lack imagination.
You ask them how their day was, and they say boring. You ask them what one interesting thing they had planned to slot into their day to make it interesting – only to find none.
So how did they expect their day to be interesting without making it interesting? Did they think their bosses would wake up with a happiness plan for them?
Nobody lives to make you happy. If you want your day to be interesting, use your imagination. Add something interesting to it.
Dream big. To unchain your mind is to liberate your soul.
Studies show that your mind will averagely wander away thirty percent of the time every day.
However, today I don’t want to make you “tame the monkey mind” and concentrate on one thing as I say in my book Journey to the Center.
Today I go on further to balance the success skills you need by saying – a wandering mind is also necessary for your improvement in life if used right…
History tells us of men who wandered into the jungle and stumbled upon undiscovered gold mines that they would have never found had they gone consciously searching.
Many are the sweet love stories of people who wandered down a certain path and stumbled into people who became their lifetime partners.
People wander, animals wander, even our minds wander and that is because wandering is a tool of discovery.
Concentrate on life, but also give your mind moments of free wanderings.
An over-concentrated mind is an incarcerated mind.
A wandering mind can be used like a messenger dove set loose.
Let it fly away into the fantasy world, at the right time it will fly back into your head.
This time bringing back messages and paintings of how landscapes in fantasy land can become landforms of your real world.
A wandering mind is a tool of discovery.
Give your mind wings to fly.
Dream big!
However, as I say in Journey to the Center, focus is also a crucial skill for success.
The boy who keeps on searching will never marry.
Wanderers are never builders.
A wandering heart cannot settle down.
A wandering mind cannot build a life.
You have to decide to make your mind settle down upon one idea.
Then only go about in search of methods to best express that idea as a reality of your life.
Writing a Dream List
Every time I do online shopping on Amazon.com, and I bump into something I want to have but haven’t budgeted for yet – Amazon simply suggests that I add it to my Wish List.
The next time I buy more stuff, I won’t waste my time looking for what I want – I go straight to my Wish List and click the Check-Out button!
Just as you need a Wish List on Amazon, you need a Dream List in life.
The next time opportunity comes or you find more resources, you won’t use them for things you never wanted.
You will go straight into your Dream List and use your opportunities to make your dreams come true.
One of the most pitiful moments of our lives is when opportunity finds us with no idea what to do with it…
Exercise: Write a Dream List
Sometimes we focus on what we hate so much that we lose sight of what we love.
That turns us into hateful lovers – these are people who use hate to protect what they love.
Love stops feeling like love, and what we love fails to stand us.
Build your life not merely out of fleeing from the past, but because you have also fallen in love with the future.
Take a notebook and list at least 7 important achievements you would want to see in your lifetime.
Just list them even if you doubt your capability to achieve them.
Remember: Dreams are for free, so why dream small ones?
PS: maybe you are saying,
“I have been dreaming since I was a child, and in this chapter, I have filled the Cinder list and Dream list – but where do I go from here?
How do I make my dreams come true?”
Congratulations on taking your dreams seriously! In the next chapter, we will learn how to turn those dreams into realities…
Next Chapter…
