By Aniekeme Finbarr
One of the biggest obstacles to a successful life are the people who know your yesterday. They are the folks who make you think you don’t deserve a better life. They really think they know you and what you are capable of achieving.
People may know about your humble beginnings, your human sides, your strength, capabilities and weaknesses, your crazy past, your likes and dislikes.
The truth is that they don’t know you. Nobody knows you better than you. You are too complex for anyone to understand, you are too unique and too loaded for anyone to comprehend, what God has deposited in you is too much for anyone to claim to have an idea.
The people who think they know us are our greatest enemies. They are the ones who dig up our miserable past, they are the ones who belittle our victories and success stories, they are the ones who gossip and provide enemy forces with weapons to knock us down, they are the ones who doubt our current results, they are the ones who talk us down.
They hide under the guise of former relationships to spread fake news and manufacture lies to comfort their miserable status. “Oh Mr A is now a Federal minister” “We use to live in the same compound, he had a smelly mouth”. What is the co-relation with being a federal minister and having a smelly mouth?
The people who knew Jesus did it to Jesus. When Jesus went to His hometown and began teaching them in their synagogue, the people were astonished, and said, “Where did this man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers?
They thought they knew him because they saw him grow. They began to ask questions, Is this not the carpenter’s son? Is not His mother called Mary? And His brothers James, Joses, Simon, and Judas?” Math 13:54-55.
That is what people do the moment your success story begins to manifest, they begin to trace all past relationships they had with you to belittle your strides. We use to live in the same street, we attended the same school, I was more brilliant than him or her. And so what?
But there is good news, you don’t need anybody’s approval to succeed. Not even your siblings, your classmates, your friends, your colleagues, your teachers, your mentors, your parents, people more qualified than you. Nobody.
You must know what you carry and you must never allow your past to hold you down. The trigger to succeed is in you. It doesn’t matter how filthy your situation looks today, you have the power to recover all lost grounds, you have the power to re-write your entire story and give it a fresh plot.
As long as you have the right conviction, the right knowledge, make the right decisions, take the right actions, you will certainly get the right results.
You need to dare to take a step, you need to tell yourself, I am fed up with this situation and I don’t care what people will say, you need to act and the time to do it is now, right now, right where you are.
• Finbarr is a professional speaker and author of DARE IT, DO IT!