On The Path Of Winners BY BAYO OGUNMUPE How To Fortify Your Success

On The Path Of Winners

BY BAYO OGUNMUPE

How To Fortify Your Success

STOP wishing for miracles, start getting things done through concerted action. Great thoughts influence good decisions, but actions determine results. To achieve your dreams, you must complete whatever you start. Many lives have been changed by timely action. Immediate action is one of the most important traits of successful people. They develop such a sense of urgency and bias for action that nothing dissuades them otherwise. The ability to execute your decisions instantly is a key trait you need to cultivate to harness your success.

  Greatness is a moving target. To win therefore, you must take immediate action. Also, by taking immediate action, you gain instant feedback, which enables you to self-correct. Self correction will allow you to reset your goals and make a more accurate aim. By taking every necessary action on your new goal, you are able to accomplish it. Boldness propels you into the ranks of the highly successful.

  The ways to inculcate the habit of immediate action are as follow: One, develop a compulsion for the closure of everything you start by acting now. You should know that if you sow an action, you reap a habit; if you sow a habit, you reap a character; if you sow a character, you reap a destiny. Two, always be clear and specific about what you want. Action preceded by active thinking and thorough preparation, is the very basis of success in life. A great leap forward is always preceded by adequate preparation followed by action.

  Three, embark upon every action boldly. When you set out boldly to confront a challenge, all power in the universe aligns with you to conquer the problem. Four, expect success from whatever you do. Act as if it were impossible to fail. Five, Act now, never put till tomorrow, what you can do today. Whatsoever thou resolveth to do, do it immediately, reserve not till the evening what the morning can accomplish. By carefully following the steps outlined above, you cultivate the habit of winning. This is the habit of the three per cent who control the affairs of the remaining 97 per cent of the people living on planet Earth.

  Serving others is the key to greatness and wealth for wealth is a reward for service. As a corollary to action, freedom from want is the very basis for human progress. Thus, by our actions we deserve to gain financial freedom. So, building wealth that lasts involves service to our fellowmen. Remember the law of cause and effect. What you respect, you will always attract. Give more to others if you want more out of life. You cannot be truly rich without enriching the lives of others.

  God’s command has been interpreted thus: “If any would not serve others, neither would he expect any reward.” Unknown to many, the wealth they are seeking is dressed in service clothes. Building wealth as against working to earn a living is often the result of delayed gratification. You may currently be poor, in bondage to debt, with no friends and influence. But if you begin from today to serve others with your gifts, caring with love in time, you will amass greater wealth than you can imagine. Just promise yourself that you will not give up from serving others. The reason Nigerians don't have enduring wealth and legacy is that they use their power or businesses to defraud others. The banking consolidation of the past was a ploy to defraud the people of their money and of bankers their jobs. Even fraudsters are perpetrating havoc by changing the profiles of applicants in the current YouWin Women Empowerment Programme. The reason economic principles don't work in Nigeria is negative mindset. The Nigerian is too pessimistic and superstitious to be able to command instant success.

  Blessed is the man who has found his vocation. Which is why unending success awaits the one who has discovered an endeavour that can consume him without tiring. But if you are yet to discover your vocation because your job is ill suited for your talents, I would encourage you to find out what vocation is right for you. Here are targets you can use to gauge potential opportunities in which you can serve.

  One, your vocation must be self chosen. There’s nothing more disastrous than having an opportunity and not be prepared for it. Two, you must have passion for your vocation. It must be your magnificent obsession. Three, your vocation must offer opportunity to associate with those you can rub minds with. You cannot achieve excellence alone, it always involves cooperative efforts. Your vocation must enable you form a mastermind alliance. Four, your vocation must be beneficial to others. It must be a means to leave your footprints on the sands of time.

  Five, your vocation must provide opportunities for limitless growth. Six, it must permit the use of your creative abilities. Your unique creative power enables you to rise and shine. Seven, time must be your tool not as the basis of your compensation. Trading time for money is the lowest form of reward for any vocation. Reward must go to the value created rather than the time spent. Eight, migrate to a new vocation if you found that your present profession is facing extinction. Only foolish people end up being wiped out by the winds of change.

  Our champion this week is Rosa Mc Cauley Parks, the African American civil rights activist whom the US Congress called the First Lady of Civil Rights and mother of the Freedom movement. On 1^st December 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey a bus driver’s order to give up her seat in the coloured section to a white passenger after the white section was filled. Although Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation, but the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) believed that Parks was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience.

  Parks’ act of defiance became an important symbol in the Civil Rights Movement. She became an icon of resistance to racial segregation. She collaborated with the civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr. Parks was active in NAACP then and Dr. King was a NAACP executive which organized the boycott of city buses by blacks that constituted 70 per cent of the riders. The boycott continued till December 1956 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision declaring segregation unconstitutional. Parks attended Alabama State Teachers’ College and made her living as a seamstress. She was born in 1913.

  In 1957, Parks moved with her husband and mother to Detroit, Michigan where she worked from 1965 to 1988 as Secretary to John Conyers, an African American United States congressman. She remained active in the NAACP. In 1987, she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute of self-development. Rosa Parks received national recognition including NAACP Spingarn Medal in 1979; the Presidential Medal of Freedom; the Congressional Gold Medal and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. Upon her death in 2005, at 92, she was the first woman to “lie in honour” at the Capitol Rotunda, Washington DC, USA.