BY HILMA DAVID
Each one of us have dreams and goals we would like to achieve. In my life of more than two decades, I have met so many different people but not a single one of them told me that ten years ahead, they would like to be jobless, homeless and begging for food on the streets. Everyone have dreams to have a good life, a career of their choice and so on.
Many people even have a bucket list of places they would like to visit and adventurous activities they would like to take part in. Every dream come true by being turned into a goal, and working with dedication to achieve that goal. You do not just cast a wish to the starts and wake up in a senior position at your dream work place the next day, you have to have the necessary year of training and experience. Although we can be determined to work hard, we find ourselves sorrounded by negativity trying to bring us down. Sometimes other people say negative staff about your ideas and tell you that you will not succeed. It can be a business idea, a career choice, or a desire to take part in a certain activity; people will have opinions.
Sometimes these opinions comes from our family member or friends who believes they are giving advice but rather they are criticising.
Advice is when you are being warned of the possible danger in your way, but when someone is telling you that you are incapable and you should quit, thats just negativity period. Negative comments make you doubt your potentials and you start looking down on yourself.
There is nothing impossible to achieve on earth. Hundreds years ago, they thought the sky was the limit; today we have people going to space and landing on the moon. The creation of a spaceship started as one person’s imagination and they worked determined to make it the reality it is today. All the amazingly designed buildings, cars, gadgets were all mere thoughts and determined individuals brought them into the physical world.
When negativity tries to kill your dreams
You find people that work so hard but they never finish a task. If they see that no results are coming after a while, they quit. You do not study for one night and become a geologist the next day, or you do not record a song today and expect to win artist of the year next week. It takes year of training and marketing yourself to become established.
Over the year I have learned a trick on how to keep my dreams alive till I achieve them. First of all, I only tell them to my close friends (not more than five) who I share with the same sentiments about success. Secondly, I trained myself to be an optimist critical analyser. To be a critical thinker, you have to be in touch with your intellectual self (a side of you that does not let feelings and emotions cloud your judgements). Being an optimist is a choice you make, no work required. I study the honest opinions I ve gotten from my friends and weigh my own opinions and I make a decision on how I can make the situation work in my favour. Negative comments are going to be there, it is then your job to make you think of something better.
If you have a dream, start working towards it today and do not stop until you have achieved it. It may take five months or fifteen years, do not give up. There is a story of a man who was digging for gold, after a long time of digging and there was no results, he gave up.
Another man came and dug the same hole, he got to the gold a few minutes later. So the lesson here is, you never know how close you are to your dreams, so keep digging. And the saying goes “Rome was not build in a day…”.