I once watched a movie called “Baby Geniuses” which insinuated that children up till they reach the age of 2years are proverbial geniuses! The father of one of children in the story is obsessed with getting his daughter to tell him the secret of the universe before she turns two and becomes dumb!

But, I digress. My point is that you can learn a lot from children. I am constantly amazed just watching my daughter grow up. Over the past week, I’ve seen my daughter come from crawling around the house to walking with all the Swag of a fierce-some but drunk pirate(Jack Sparrow anyone?!) I feel so proud and blessed to see her developing so well.

Anyways, still more digressing. The point I’m trying to make is that I’ve learned some important truths about growing and succeeding in life from watching my daughter over the past few months and I’d like to share my thoughts with you.

1. Don’t be afraid of falling

My daughter falls on average a hundred times a day. For real. Whether its walking, playing on the bed or sofa, whatever it is she’s doing, you can be sure she’s going to fall a gazillion times in a day. In fact, i think she finds it extremely strange that we her parents don’t seem to fall, ever. Ha! If she only knew! The amazing thing is though, it doesn’t stop her. No matter how many times she falls, she’ll pick herself up again and again and again. And then again. I gave up trying to pick her up. Too exhausting.

Life lesson: No matter how many times you fail in life, pick yourself up and keep going. Again and again and then again. Falling is just part of growing.You can’t learn to walk without falling a few hundred times so why should succeeding at a relationship, a career, a journey be without its falls? Pick yourself up.

2. Be annoyingly persistent when you want something

On my bed side is a little cupboard where i keep whatever books, wallets, phone and other nick nacks nearby. Before my daughter could even crawl properly, she took note of this little treasure chest of mine. She determined that she needed to have whatever I keep in there. I marveled watching her learn to lean precariously over the side of the bed to pull open the drawer and reach beyond her little arms could possibly do so to pull out a book — ripping several of them in the process or worse, my wallet. What was amazing was seeing the daily persistence and how she kept adapting till she could finally open it and get whatever she wanted from the drawer. You should see the look of satisfaction on her face whenever she’d succeed. Priceless.

Life lesson: Be annoyingly persistent in going after what you want and keep adapting till you finally attain your goal. Life isn’t going to just give you what you want. There are so many obstacles to overcome but keeping trying different things till you succeed.

3. You gotta let things go!

One of the hardest things I have to do is to punish my dearest Princess from time to time. It’s incredibly hard to spank her. Sometimes I wonder if she even understands why I do it. Often I have to remove something from her grasp for her own safety or restrict her from going somewhere. Now this vexes her to no end, evidenced by her banshee screams and crocodile tears. It breaks my heart to cause her to cry. But every time I do so, every time, in a matter of minutes she’ll have forgotten and flashed me her polar cap melting smile or come to me for a hug. Sometimes immediately after I’ve spanked her she’ll come to me for comfort! You see, she’s very forgiving. She doesn’t hold a grudge and seek revenge on me and all my descendants. She doesn’t crawl into a corner and seethe and play the victim. She’s gets hurt, she cries, she moves on. Period

Life Lesson: Let things go. Forgive people. Forgive yourself. You’ll move a lot faster and higher in life when you don’t let things stick to you. They only weigh you down. And you’ll be a lot happier too.

4. Be curious about everything

Albert Einstein once said “Never lose a holy curiosity”. My daughter is the poster child for curiosity. Everything is unique, special and wonderful to her. It doesn’t matter if its the television flashing all these tiny people at her or a freshly filled diaper that could make the dead wrinkle their noses. She’s curious about everything, turning them every which way, banging them, shaking them, tasting them(its horrifying to see her try to taste the garbage!) She doesn’t take anything for granted or simply at face value. She must explore everything. No matter how many times she sees something, there’s always room for exploration. Soon, I’ll have the nightmare of actually having to answer her billions of incessant questions about everything. Bracing myself.

Life Lesson: Don’t take life for granted. Don’t assume you know everything there is to know. Be curious about everything. Question yourself, your beliefs, your results. Smell every flower, taste every meal, try every adventure. It’s through curiosity that life’s greatest inventions, breakthroughs and adventures have come.

5. Don’t take no for an answer

“Kemi No. NO. NOOOOOOOO! Don’t touch that. Leave that alone. Stay away”. This is now what you hear all day long in my house. I often wonder if we’re not permanently damaging her spirit by constantly saying no to everything she wants to touch or do. Here’s the funny thing though. She doesn’t listen. For the most part anyway. She’ll keep on doing what your telling her not to. Now as you can imagine, that’s pretty frustrating. But there’s an upside to this. If she constantly acquiesced every time I said don’t do this, don’t do that, she’d never learn to walk, to develop her motor skills, learn from her painful experiences and grow. Huh! Who’d a thunk it?

Life Lesson: In life, there will always be naysayers. People who tell you NO. You can’t do that. You can’t be a success. You can’t achieve your dreams. You gotta learn to ignore them and keep on anyway. Life will never make things easy for you(and neither will most people, or the government) but you gotta keep pressing on. Be annoyingly persistent. Life will relent eventually.

So as you can see, children are brilliantly fascinating. I read once that as much as we think we are our children’s teachers, it’s actually they who teach us. I agree. I’m pretty sure I still have a lot to learn from my guru daughter and to be honest, I’m terrified but equally excited.

I’ll keep you posted with more insights as she decides to reveal them to my less than genius self. And for the rest of you who are also in the school of toddlers, what insights have you learned? I’d love to hear them.

Shalom

Some wise sayings;

“You can learn many things from children.  How much patience you have, for instance.”  ~Franklin P. Jones

“A child can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer.”  ~Author Unknown

“While we try to teach our children all about life,Our children teach us what life is all about.“
~Angela Schwindt

“Children find everything in nothing; men find nothing in everything. “~Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone Scelto

“There’s nothing that can help you understand your beliefs more than trying to explain them to an inquisitive child.  ~Frank A. Clark”

“There are no seven wonders of the world in the eyes of a child.  There are seven million.” ~Walt Streightiff

A series of events over the past few days have left me feeling low spirited, frustrated and defeated. I feel like a fraud and a failure. I’m not the person living the life I know I should be.I’m not achieving my goals or following my dreams. To encourage myself I decided to rewrite one of my favorite poems by Marriane Williamson, “Our Greatest Fear” that I came across in my usual morning readings.

What is My Greatest Fear

My Greatest Fear Is n­ot that I am Inadequate,
My Greatest Fear Is That I am Powerful Beyond Measure,
That I can do and achieve beyond my wildest dreams
It is my Light, ­not my Darkness That Frightens Me,

I Ask Myself, who am I to be Brilliant and Wise?
Who am I to be Wealthy and Respected?
Who am I to be Handsome and Loved?
Who am I to be Talented and Fabulous?

But the real question is, Who Am I not To Be?
I am a Child Of God, a Prince in His Kingdom.
My playing small does ­not serve the World.

There is ­nothing enlightened about shrinking
So that others won’t feel insecure around Me.
I was born to manifest the Glory Of God within me.
It is n­ot just in some people out there; it is in Me too.

And, as I let my own Light shine,
I am consciously giving you permission to do the same.
As I am liberated from my own fear,
My presence automatically liberates You.

~The Apprentice~

 Shalom blogren. Its time again to continue on our quest to learn the 9 habits of Millionaires. We are close to the end of our series. Today we look at something particularly difficult for most of us. And that is:

Habit 8: The Ability to turn failure into success

To most of us, failure Is a bad word. Infact, it’s an f-word. We don’t like to fail, so much so that most of us never try to do anything just so we won’t leave any opportunity for that f-word to appear. But this is the greater distinction between us and Millionaires. Most people think that millionaires generally never fail, I mean how else could they be millionaires, right? We’re not millionaires because logically, we’ve failed.

Here’s a truth for you. Millionaires fail a lot more than even you and I. Most millionaires have failed so many times it’s ridiculous. You all heard of Thomas Edison who failed 10,000 times in trying to make a working light bulb. Good grief, I’d have gotten the hint after the 10th time! But millionaires fail more than most of us because they inherently do a lot more, risk a lot more than most of us. The key difference is that millionaires don’t fear failure because they have learned to use it as an ally. Failure to them is simply feedback. It shows them what’s not working and this allows them to change strategy continuously till they eventually succeed.

I don’t know about you, but I’m the kind of person who fails and takes it personally and quits. 3years ago I failed in my first business and guess what I did? Yep, I quit. I didn’t see my failure as feedback that something needed to be changed. Right now, I’m back in the saddle and looking at my past failures trying to understand what I did wrong, correct them this time round and get a better result. Thomas Edison in an interview later responded to a question of how he dealt with such colossal failure, said “I never failed. I simply discovered 10,000 ways not to do it!”

A Chinese proverb says “Madness is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different outcome” That’s how a lot of people deal with failure. They keep doing the same thing over and over hoping that they will achieve a different result. You can’t keep spending all your money by the 2nd week of each month and hope that after one year of this, you will be debt free?!

In becoming the millionaire or successful person you dream of being, be prepared to fail many times before you achieve success. The important thing is to remember that failure is an event, it’s not who you are. Learn from it, change tactics and commit 100% to doing whatever it takes to achieve success and you will be victorious. I know it’s hard. One of the greatest human fears is the fear of failure.

I personally battle fear in many of its different persona’s so this habit is a challenge for me. As an entrepreneur, I can’t help but find myself fearing that I’m going to fail like I did the last time. That I don’t know enough. I’m not stong enough. I remember the ripple effects my failure had and it sometimes stops me in my tracks sometimes. But the grace of the Master helps me to face my fears each day and know that I’ve learned a lot since I was a naïve young man and I should trust that knowledge will see me through. The Rogue king wrote something about failure.

So my millionaire blogren, lets learn how to turn our failures into success. Our next habit is the last and not least of them which is Habit 9: Respect Money

Later

BARACK OBAMA:

Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it’s not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. it’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.

HAVELOCK ELLIS:

 It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success

JOHN DEWEY:Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

LLOYD JONES:

Those who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try nothing and succeed.

MICHAEL JORDAN:

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.

SAMUEL SMILES :

We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.