Paradoxes to embrace to be successful

                     By Bayo Ogunmupe

     Inasmuch as I like self improvement, I always pepper my insights  with caveats. Nothing in life is straightforwardly true. Every truth is a paradox. If you want to be successful, you need to be comfortable physically and in thought as well. You need to be comfortable holding two or more contradictory thoughts in your mind simultaneously. Most people can't do this. They crave binary, black and white, either or thinking. Either you are on their team or not, agree with them or else you will be branded stupid  and evil. And you may have to toe the line or get ostracized. Thus, you have to brainwash yourself into undoing your binary societal programming. Which means reading and studying alternative media sources, watching videos or whatever you must do.

    In processing your mindset to hold contradictory  beliefs, you must implement this through test theories you learned in self improvement strategies. Thereafter, you learn to constantly question your thoughts from results delivered onto your problem solving techniques. Constantly questioning your thoughts and results ensure that you are never sure you are 100 percent right. This doesn't guarantee the correctness of your decisions but teaches you to be perspicacious and attempt to be less wrong, not right. Using this process, especially when it comes to paradoxes enables you to markedly right in decision making. On what makes people successful; the first is a superiority complex- a deep seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite-insecurity, a feeling that you or what you've done isn't good enough. The third is impulse control.

    Thus, you need a delusional level of optimism to counteract all of the negativity, limiting beliefs and social programming that permeates society. Which is why the masses aren't at fault. Indeed, the inevitable outcome of decades of brainwashing, political deception and institutional mass conditioning based on perverse incentives is the vast majority of people living well below their potential and infecting you with that energy on accident. Put another way, never be mad at society, don't look at other inherently worthy people as sheep, just understand what's going on and prepare your mental defences against it. If mediocrity is the norm as is in Nigeria today, you have to think of yourself as exceptional.

      You have to be audacious and borderline arrogant to believe that somehow. You need balls, courage, moxie, a chip on your shoulder, whatever you need to navigate that minefield of achieving your purpose. And at the same time, you should think of yourself as a worm with a ton of work to do in order to survive. We all have fantasies of being our super self; of being a superb self actualized person. If even we never did anything with our daydreams, we have them all the time and fancy ourselves better than the average person. But to be successful, you must escape Potentialville. That is to say that you must eschew the pride of Mister Know- All.

      When you try to develop a skill, you will be confronted with feedback about how much you suck at it. It takes humility to admit you don't know all that much and need to get better. It takes darn courage to take genuine criticism and use it to improve. There is a healthy form of self doubt. This form pushes you to get better for the sake of getting better instead of wallowing in egotism. Your purpose means everything. The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. Yet everybody rushes around in great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.