The Slow Forward Match to Greatness

We all have goals that we’d like to reach. And, if we had the choice, we would prefer to reach them sooner rather than later. We want to get results now. We want to make plans, pursue them and achieve immediate results.

My experience teaching younger children has taught me some life lessons. First, the power of patience. Second, the power of repetition. Third, the power of learning by portion.

Esther is a little girl I teach. She's active and ready to learn but easily distracted. She was yet to master the use of letters to form words. Words that rhyme. My goal for her was to make her master two-lettered words in one week, three-lettered words in the second week, four-lettered words in the third week. All in three weeks. By the fourth week, she would begin to read texts written from two letters to four letters.

I set these goals in high spirits. I thought within myself:  If I can achieve this - I'll count myself an effective teacher, besides her parents would be impressed their bright little girl is doing so well.

So I set off to work. I took away things I believed would distract her, I employed tactics that would keep her focused and make her concentrate. I got basic word rich books and began to stamp them into her brain. Guess what? It worked! She forgot the words as soon as they were stamped.

Then I realized the problem. The goals were alright and I was impatient enough to achieve them.

The Power of Patience

I have discovered most of the time, our constant quest is to achieve faster results.

This happens to most of us ( I'm still yet to master the way-out.) We want to master the subject all in one night, we want to build a business that will immediately yield returns, we want our first write up to become popular, We want to master the programming software in one month, we want to learn how to play a musical instrument in three weeks, in summary, we want overnight success.

Yet, the quickest way to get to our goals is to take slow forward steps towards our goals.

This means:

- To become a powerful writer, you need to allow yourself write on few basic ideas before you  hit a ground breaking idea.

- To understand a difficult course you need to be patient enough to understand the basics before you go to more difficult concepts.

- To become ready for college, you need to go from kindergarten to senior secondary school three, a total of 14 years + some tutorials along the way.

- and so on

Esther is preparing for college. She still has a long way to go so why the hurry?

If you're yet to ground yourself on the basics of the goals you set, why the impatience?

The Power of Repetitions

Here is the other part of the story...

After realizing my impatience, I devised a new method to achieve my goals.

I outlined the two lettered words in the textbook.  On the first week, we focused on the two lettered words. She would read it, write it and recite it. on the second week, We did the same on the same words. We followed the same pattern on the third week. As she began to get familiar with the two lettered words, we moved on to the three lettered words. she would read them, write them and recite them. We repeated this for  few more weeks. After familiarity and exhaustion of the three lettered words, we moved on to the four lettered words. It's more than thirteen weeks now and we're still making progress.

This applies to other areas of life.
- The only way to become a better writer is to repeat the process of writing.

- The only way to become better at any course is to repeatedly study the course.

- The only way to become skillful on any musical instrument is to keep showing up at practice

- The only way to be more creative is to repeat the process of creating.

The Power of Small Portions

An average man eats thrice a day. Maybe for you, twice. Whichever way. It is recorded that a man in his life time eats a meal six times the weight of an elephant. Amazing! (You can Google this.)

Eating a meal six times the weight of an elephant is a big big goal. Yet the only way to achieve this goal is to take the meal in portions and on schedules - breakfast, lunch, dinner.

If you could approach your big goals in this manner you'd soon discover it only takes small progressive steps towards greatness to become great in life.