Compete with yourself

As much as competition is part of life’s success journey, I encourage you to make it personal; you will need to learn how to compete with yourself, by this I mean competing with your past, present and future. Past successes and failures can become distraction or motivation to your present plan for the future, always look forward to out-do your past and have plans in place for the future because your dream for the future can serve as motivating factor to your success today.

Two things we look at here; you can be motivated by the success and failure in your past and you can also be motivated by your dream for the future. This is what I mean by competing with yourself, it helps to measure your level of success as you progress in life and it reduces a lot of pressure on you because you do not need to compare yourself to anyone else. Personally, this is one principle I live by and it has always worked for me, I usually have long and short term plans, my long term plan is usually five years while my short term is yearly and I try as much as possible to measure my short term plan monthly. This keeps me on track and guides me, if for any reason you derail from your plans, this will help serve as check and balance so you can get back on track as you work towards achieving your goals and plans. I encourage you to adopt this today, get a note pad; a good one you can treasure for keeps and write down your plans. You do not need to have all that is required to start planning; that’s the reason it is called planning. So write down your plan for the next five years; you’re here today, where do you want to be in five years? List the things you want to achieve within the period of time, when you are done, flip a new page and try to break down your plans into yearly. For example, if you want to achieve something in five years, how much of this can you achieve in one year? And further break-down your plan on monthly input in order to achieve your overall objective.

As a student in the university, in the year 2007, I’d a long term plan to be married by 2012, as at then, I never knew how it’s going to happen but I wrote it down and it happened according to plan. Whatever it is you want to achieve, write it down, you do not have to know how it’s going to happen, trust God and motivate yourself as I earlier admonish.

As a student in the university preparing for graduation, I wrote certain things down in my planning book; such as, “If after I graduate from the university and still depend on my parent for financial income, then am not wise”. Each time I flip through my book and see these write ups, it encourages me to do more, work hard and today I'm grateful. I've learnt to take care of me, my family and a lot of others around me. So the best way to compete is with your past, present and future. This helps you to remain focused and the issue of jealousy will not come to play, forget about the next person to you, who seems to have all that you so desire in your life, that’s his time, your time will come and it’s closer than you think. So keep doing the right thing, it’s only a matter of time, you will be there and remember your success is possible.

Image credit (Pixabay)