Negative 2 Positive

Happy New Year!!! This Year shall be the start of great things to come in our lives in Jesus Name!! I started this blog to share inspiring reads and songs that I come across. I discovered this really motivating writer, http://www.ofilispeaks.com/ who lives in Texas, originally from naija...His stories are truely moving. Here is one - long but worth it :-)

Rising Up From Within

A farmer owned an old donkey, one day the donkey accidentally fell into a dry well. The animal cried piteously for hours as the farmer tried to figure out what to do. The farmer threw a rope down to the donkey in an attempt to lift the donkey out of the well but this attempt failed as the well was too deep and narrow for the donkey to be pulled by the rope. The farmer made several different attempts to rescue the donkey, but all to no avail. He finally gave up on his attempts, thinking to himself, “an old donkey and dry well are not worthy to be saved”…instinctively he grabbed a shovel and began to shovel dirt into the well, in order to cover up the well and simultaneously bury the wounded donkey.

This story reflects the reality of life, we fall into a bad situation be it getting fired from work, failing intermittently at a degree, financial crisis and people give up on us. At first they attempt to lift us up out of our situation, but sometimes their attempts are futile and instead of trying and trying we are left abandoned. Sometimes we are told to just give up. I know many stories of people that made a pact to go to college and do something with their lives, but because they have bad grades in their first few semesters, people that they look up to such as Professors, Friends even Parents start doubting their ability, saying things such as “why don’t you change your major?” or “why don’t you consider something different?” inherently burying their dreams and aspirations.

Sometimes we are not told to quit, but rather are allowed by friends and ourselves either directly or indirectly to remain in our current states mediocrity. This is what I call a slow carcinogenic death, because we don’t know that it is killing us until it is too late. Zig Ziglar motivational speaker tells a story about how this phenomenon can occur. If you drop a frog into boiling water, he will sense the pain and immediately jump out. However, if you put a frog in room-temperature water, he will swim around happily, and as you gradually turn the water up to boiling, the frog will not sense the change. The frog is lured to death by gradual change.

The same happens to us, we aren’t even aware that we are slowly dying; we just trot along like everything in life is OK. I remember vividly in Nigeria, my elementary school teacher told our class they were 3 types of brains. The brain A’s were the ones that heard the information and understood it immediately, they were smart ones. The brain B’s were the ones that heard and needed to study the information to understand, the average ones, while the brain C’s were the ones that heard the information, studied it back and forward, forward and back but still did not get it, the stupid ones. For some reason, I accepted that I was a brain B, not smart enough to be a brain A, but at least not stupid enough to be a brain C. This crippling mindset followed me all through high school, until “I fought my first battle from within.” My first 3 semesters in high school, I had what you would call an acceptable results for a brain B type. However, in my fourth semester things changed! Either I got dumber or my classmates got smarter, but whatever the case my result that semester was simply woeful. Coming from a family of very high academic standards (Dad was an engineer and Mum was currently a teacher and my senior brother was the President of the organization Brain A’s smart!) I was expecting the worst, an outburst of some sort from my parents over my results. But when I delivered it to them they said nothing, you see they had (to no faults of theirs) accepted the fact that I was not academically inclined to excel like the Brain A’s, just like the Farmer had given up on the donkey. But something in me got angered on the inside, I could have accepted what they had said and slowly and surely died like the frog in a sea of mediocrity. But I heard something louder than any beating or shouting I had ever received, it was a silence so loud that it shook the very foundations of mediocrity rooted in me. I decided from that they forward that I was going to shoot for excellence and so I did, my mindset totally changed I approached college with this feverish and addictive thirst for excellence. I left high school and college with academic records that would have made any parent proud. I remember driving with my dad once, right after I had graduated high school, he told me “that he was proud of me and did not believe I would make it to this level years ago.” I was so happy with those words, but remembered how close I was to accepting what was expected of me.

So when people give up on you completely or put you down gradually, fight the battle from within and strive for excellence. Remember “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Eleanor Roosevelt.

The farmer invited all his neighbors to come over and help him. They each grabbed a shovel and began to shovel dirt into the well. Realizing what was happening, the donkey at first cried and wailed horribly. Then, a few shovel-fulls later, he quieted down completely. The farmer peered down into the well, and was astounded by what he saw. With every shovel-full of dirt that hit his back, the donkey would shake it off and take a step up on the new layer of dirt. As the farmer's neighbors continued to shovel dirt on top of the animal, he would shake it off and take a step up. Pretty soon, the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and trotted off, to the shock and astonishment of everyone.

The donkey in this story, refused to accept the faith he was given. Instead he used the negativity thrown at him to rise up. The truth is that life is not a fairy tale, it would be nice if we could all waltz through life with people telling us how amazingly talented and beautiful we are. But the truth is that life puts us down, telling us that we can’t, telling us to give up, telling us to quit, telling us to aim for lower goals. And the irony? We accept, what life throws at us. Humans are funny creatures, we tend to focus on the negatives as opposed the positives. We let the negatives bring us down and don’t allow the positives to uplift us. People would go even as far as taking a positive situation and turning it into a negative, those are the donkeys that would choke themselves with the rope the farmer handed down to them. Rhonda just had her portrait made. Her friend tells her how beautiful she looks. Rhonda instead brushes aside the compliment by saying that the photographer must have touched up the picture. She says she never looks that good in real life. Behaviors like this is all but ubiquitous, there is something that attracts us to the negative, this sickening cycle of self pity versus self upliftment. The greatest people however are the ones that are able to focus on the positives, whilst simultaneously using the negatives to motivate them.

There is a story about an African American who grew up in the fifth ward of Houston; his life was stuck in a quagmire of violence, crime and anger. One day he was caught by one of his cousins sneaking out of the house in order to dodge school, his cousin shouted out to him “go on I won’t tell anybody, nobody in this neighborhood has ever amounted to success.” Something in those words pricked him deep in his soul, he could have accepted the words and continued on a path to self destruction, but instead he took those negative words as a catalyst to propel himself away from that path. He joined the US job corps where he picked up the art of boxing, several years later he went on to win the 1968 Gold medal in boxing. Since then George Foreman has held the heavy weight championship title on several occasions and now spends his time ministering to youths. A classic story of someone, who took a single negative statement and used it to elevate himself to extraordinary heights, just like the donkey in the story, who used the dirt that was meant to bury him as a prop to get out of its precarious situation.

We are like a child chained up by negativity, but the keys of positivity are scattered around us. If we for one second concentrate on the keys of positivity we would free ourselves from the negativity that holds us down. Find the positive in every situation, replace negative phrases with I can, I will, I am beautiful, I will succeed.

Dave Ramsey best selling author says “the key to winning any battle is to identify the enemy” for many of us that enemy is us, the greatest battle we will ever face starts from within, only when we are able to win that battle, can we take our first step towards excellence.

By Okechukwu Ofili