Posts Tagged ‘Victorious Living’

I found myself saying this statement to myself the other day, ‘I don’t want to ever forget the pain’.

Why?

I suppose, as I am currently embarking on some of the most successful ventures in my 24 years of knowing that I have been called into business, I want to make sure that I never despise my days of  small beginnings.

I actually went into business ten years before that when I found myself working for an entrepreneur called Sid who owned a company called ‘The Potch Trading Company’. I was only 18 at the time and was very naive. I remember the day he asked me to carry $9,000 cash down the road to the bank. I refused, and would only do it if he drove me to the bank, because I thought it was such a huge sum of money, and I feared that I would be robbed.

Continue Reading…

There was a particular day in my life where I found myself battling to identify the next steps I should take in regards to some projects that I was working on when I was reminded of the storyboards that are designed for feature movies. These are hand drawn pictures of each of the frames of a film that are created before it is ever filmed. These storyboards are used to guide the director as to how best set up the greatest shots that will finally appear in the film. It is the visual plan for the movie.

Then I spent a weekend reading the final volume written by Sir Winston Churchill about the  final years of the 2nd world war. The overriding impression I received as I read it was that the allies knew exactly when they were going to win the war. And although it didn’t always go according to plan the fact was that they had a plan – and would make adjustments to the plan as they went. Churchill, along with the American and Russian leaders that worked closely with him, knew when Hitler’s and the Japanese nation’s demise was going to happen. And they then continued to work towards the fulfillment of that plan. They never considered the possibility of defeat. It was a detailed and well executed plan that we can now read in the history books.

And then I was reminded of the last two years that I spent at school as a teenager. I studied science which consisted of three areas – physics, chemistry and biology. For the bulk of those two years – before my finals – I failed every single test in Physics and Chemistry. But through sheer persistence and hard work I passed with flying colors when it was really needed. The irony of it all was that I was accepted in to university to study Science. I may have lost many a battle along the way, but I won the war.

And life is very much like that. I know for a fact that throughout my lifetime there are innumerable battles that I have lost – but my concentration is not on the battles. I want to make sure that I position myself so that at the end of my life I will be able to clearly declare – and it will be proved by the legacy that I leave behind – that I have in fact won the war.

It is for that reason that I never compare myself to others who seem to be able to win battle after battle after battle. And that is where I am reminded of the following story of men who may have won the battle – but ultimately lost the war.

Continue Reading…

Take a path less travelled by others and tread your own.

Oh you may have to break open virgin territory that requires the use of a machete or a front-end loader, but that is the way of the pioneer. That is the trek of the adventurer.

They don’t want to take the beaten path. They want to push out the boundaries and break down the traditions of men. They want to ask the hard questions. They refuse to accept the statement: ‘that’s the way it has always been done around here.’

When everyone else is going right, they will be going left. When everyone is going up,they will be going down. When everyone is going under, they will be going over. When everyone is queuing up behind everyone else, they’ll go and stand at the front of a new queue that they just created, because they can.

Continue Reading…

Pain is something that we would all like to avoid. My wife often says that if God had created men to bear children, there wouldn’t be any – children that is.

She’s not wrong. I’m living proof of this fact. When our first child was being born, amidst the battlefield of muck and blood, a nurse brought a glass of water for my wife, but I drank it.

Let’s face it. Tests are sent to test us. Sorry about stating the obvious. We all have tests that we must face in life. And they’re nothing like the tests we faced at school. They can come in the form of sickness, financial challenges, marital hiccups, or even through the loss of loved ones to that insidious event called death.

But the good news is this. We can turn any test into a testimony. And the good book states that ‘there is power in the word of our testimony’.

As a writer of motivational books I often tell my friends, when I’ve gone through yet another testing moment, ‘Well there’s another story for my next book.’

Continue Reading…

Character is the inherent complex of attributes that determines a person’s moral and ethical actions and reactions. It also speaks to me of moral rectitude. And rectitude is defined as righteousness as a consequence of being honorable and honest.

I have lived long enough to observe the outworking of lives lived with or without character.

Now please do not misunderstand me. Bad things still happen to good people. But there are those whom I have, in the past, perceived as being the possessors of a flawed character, who are now either dead, destroyed, imprisoned, or are currently under-performing in respect to their full potential. I do not stand in judgment. I simply observe.

Those whom I viewed as having strong moral character, on the other hand, no matter what life has thrown at them, have gone on from strength to strength, and continue to grow stronger, in both character and influence, with each passing year.

Continue Reading…