When things come easily in life we start getting cocky. Take this girl for example. At four she is taken to school to pass time long before kindergartens and pre-schools were invented in her land. She passes P.1 and by age 11 she finds herself in secondary school. Before her 18th birthday she has completed High School and goes to University as the best Arts student in the country. Then the real lessons in life begin but she chooses to ignore them. Before she graduates she is a teenage mother. At age 23 she has a Bachelors and Masters degrees, plus two postgraduate diplomas. So she is academically astute but is flunking really badly at motherhood - not that you would notice! She focuses on her success and expects more good things in life. And they come -a good job, a nice car and what appears like a good life. She moves from job to job and can't understand why people complain about unemployment. It all seems so easy. She quits working for others and tries going it alone in business. Flunks! She knows she was born to succeed and if business is not her thing she can always do other things. She tries politics and flunks! Wait a minute, what happened to Lady Luck? There must be a lesson in all this flunking but Missy is too cocky to acknowledge it because you see, she is not and never was a loser. The problem is not her: it's the business environment and the political environment because all things being equal she should be winning at anything and never losing. Right? Nope: wrong. After deep reflection she finally acknowledges the nagging truth that life is not all about her. That there are other in the equation. Kids, Family, Friends - and she needs to take time off from tooting her own horn and look at the people she has shoved aside to prove her worth. She struggles with admitting that she may be wrong about being 'The Lucky One.'
Life gives you many opportunities to learn humility but each time I have encountered a lesson in humility it still feels like a smack across the face.
At 50 I know that one of the hardest lessons to learn, even for the brightest of them all, is humility. Do yourself a favor and learn something each time you eat humble pie.
No comments:
Post a Comment