On the greatest lessons I've learnt

Me and my primary school teacher.
She taught me my greatest lessons.

In the last week, several events close to me and others we’ve been able to witness through the media have made me think a lot about my own mortality and what things we’d like to leave those close to us. Most people assume this means monetary inheritance and other ephemeral things of that nature. In my case, I was born without these things and so they are of little importance to me. I got to thinking, however, of the legacies and the truly valuable things I have acquired that I would love to leave to my offspring, my peers, and to any and all who care to know of these things that Vanessa really cherishes. So, below, I’ve written a list of the most important things taught to me, or the greatest lessons I’ve learnt.

1. Education is the one thing that truly pits people as equals.

Why is education important to me? Because it was important to my mother, and it was important to her for her children to have it. My mother has a primary school education but was smart enough to know that what would keep her children out of these perpetual cycles of poverty that have dominated my family and ancestors – and that was/is within the reach of most people – is education. My family had always been peasants and servants, hard-working people but with little possessions to their name. Our name was nothing important; we are commoners. We didn’t have the money, the social or political connections, or much else. But my mum made sure that she worked very hard to be able to provide for her children not only food and shelter, but almost at an equal importance, also education. She taught us that we had the same potential to learn and succeed academically as any other person, even those with money or connections or whatever other perceived advantage. Then this, and not the name or money we didn’t have, would open our world up to as many opportunities as we were willing to accept and work hard for.

2. The single greatest thing you can teach a person is a hunger to know more, a lust to achieve more, and a passion for your subject matter. Passionate people don’t know satiety, and they also never learn defeat.

Great teachers aren’t the people who taught Nobel Prize winners the knowledge they used to achieve their success, but rather the ones who were able to transfer to them a passion into the field of their success. Passion, a burning insatiable desire, is the only antidote to failure.

3. “We are poor – not because of God”. No more effort is required to aim high in life, to demand prosperity and abundance, than is required to accept misery and poverty.

Two Napoleon Hill quotes. Why are they important to me? Well, the first I’ve discussed previously so I won’t go into it again, but the second took me a while to get my head around. It’s hard to be poor or to not attain your dreams, right? But it’s really really hard work to get what you want too. If you work hard, and I mean passionately and relentlessly hard, you probably can become a famous movie actor, a celebrated artist, a professional in a field with strict entry criteria and few spots for newcomers. It’s going to take a lot of very very hard work! But what’s the alternative? The alternative is actually equally hard. This is what blew my mind. It takes a lot out of you feeling crushed every day because you’re not working the job you’re really keen for. If you’re poor, it is really really hard to do physical labour to get just the bare minimum to feed yourself and go to bed hungry and know that you have to wake up tomorrow to do the same thing again so you can go to bed with a half-empty stomach the following night. It’s really very hard to be poor. So if both roads are hard, and I am suggesting here that they are equally hard, why not risk your pride and show some faith, and follow the path of your dreams? I mean, the alternative is just as hard.

4. You don’t fail until you give up. Failure is experienced only by those who when they experience defeat, stop trying. The only thing that separates success and failure is the number of attempts.

5. Improbable does not mean impossible.

6. You miss every shot you don’t take.

7. Be willing to risk failure in order to succeed.

8. Every soldier dies a hero.

I believe the thing that holds human beings back more than fear is pride. I will consider the last five points together as I believe they are intrinsically linked. Often people list a dim statistic for success as an excuse for not trying or for not going for the thing they really want. I always ask these people, “So? Someone has to get it, so why can’t that someone be you?” Oh yes, they tried that one time and they failed. Or they would try, but it’s just going to be a waste of time and effort as they will most likely not succeed. You know, because somehow these people believe they are fortune tellers too! The one 100% fool-proof method to guarantee failure is not to try. I mean, you can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket, right? So, as small and as uncontrollable the probability of attaining your goal on the next attempt is, it’s still greater than zero if you at least attempt it. So what if you don’t succeed? You’re only one attempt closer if you’re courageous enough to keep trying and don’t let that stupid pride convince you that lack of success in an attempt means failure forever.

That last statement came to me rather unexpectedly one day when I happened to be listening to the radio in my car to some news about a soldier’s death. Some days you have to contemplate that you will die, and you may die soon without warning. What if you died and you still had not achieved that one goal you had dedicated your life to? Does that mean you’re a failure? Does that mean you’re a loser? Well, think about soldiers. They literally risk their lives in order to achieve an outcome: to defend from the enemy and to destroy an attacking enemy. But sometimes soldiers die in battle, and when they die in this way you could say they have failed in their goal. Now, do we consider these soldiers who died in the line of fire as failures? No! We call them brave and courageous and war heroes. Yes, they didn’t succeed in what they were trying to achieve, but they weren’t failures because they died trying to achieve that outcome. I believe that similarly, in civilian life, we don’t die as failures if we died trying to achieve that one thing we really wanted.

9. Anger and hatred are the most successful ways to waste energy and to keep our enemies in power. People may hurt you in the present by some wrong action, but the anger and hatred we pay them well into the future is how we continue to hurt ourselves on their behalf.

This is one I learnt from experience when I was about 20 years old. I was getting so run down, so upset all the time, feeling so much anger and (I’m ashamed to admit it now) hatred towards one person. Now, this person had stopped tormenting me years ago and yet I kept feeling all these negative things towards them; they had probably forgotten I existed, and yet I kept hating them. It really takes so much energy to remain angry and sad! One day I realised this, that I must have been barely a speck of this person’s world and that was so long ago, and I still kept dedicating so much of my life to them, feeling for them, even if was hatred and anger. And I came to realise that I had given them enough of my life. I closed my eyes one day and said a prayer. I told them in my prayer that I forgive them, that I forgive myself, and that I wanted to forget the whole experience and become me again without traces or stains of their existence in my life. You know what? It was the best thing I could have done for ME to make my life about myself and not the people that have hurt me.

10. Money is the world’s most renewable resource. There’s no glory in being the richest man in the graveyard.

Mark Bouris once said that in business you don’t want to hire a man who has always produced a positive result, who has always managed to make his company profit. You want to hire the man who has had nothing, possibly being bankrupt due to his own mistakes – but that has managed to build himself back up. Money has a way of always renewing itself, so it’s not worth all the effort and value we place on losing it. Personally, I think we risk far too many valuable things like relationships, health, and true happiness to attain or maintain money. Eventually we will all die, and our deathbed it will probably be more comforting to have your loved ones by your side rather than the knowledge that in a bank somewhere there sits a big dollar figure associated with your name.

11. Do unto others as you would like have done unto you.

Every religion and most human philosophies will rephrase this in different words and attribute this concept to one of millions of God-like figures. That’s irrelevant, but the concept is more about the preservation of humankind, of our humanity, and of our own self-esteem. It actually comes naturally to most human beings from a very young age, but later it becomes a conscious choice of our own integrity. Mark de Moss defines integrity as, “Integrity is not what we do when it serves us. It is who we are in the dark and how we treat people when it makes no difference to us”. That’s one thing that would benefit anyone (and everyone) to learn, I think.

12. To be a man is to be responsible; to be ashamed of miseries you did not cause; to be proud of your comrade’s victories; to be aware, when setting one stone, that you are building a world.

Somewhere in the past century we all got so caught up in the various human rights movements that a corrupted self-entitled attitude came to develop from it and a lot of us came to forget about responsibility.

13. You have to tolerate the caterpillars if you want to see the butterflies.

Another Antoine de Saint-Exupery quote. Life isn’t always easy and it’s unreasonable to expect it to always be. Sometimes you just have to stay focused on what’s coming or what you want to come next.

14. Let every occasion be a great occasion.

Yes, a lot of the things I’m sharing above are of course not mine but things I’ve learnt from others. Some things I’ve learnt from experience; most are out of a book called ‘Success through a Positive Mental Attitude’, co-written by Napoleon Hill; some from my theological study; and some are probably from Oprah or the Dr. Phil show! There’s no shame in how you came to learn a thing, only that it is valuable to your own life somehow.