A couple of hours ago, I was lying down on my bed in my room at the topmost floor of Block D, Sultan Bello hall in the University of Ibadan. The weather was cold and chilly and I was trying to get some sleep but couldn’t, so my mind drifted back, floating in the recesses of my memory to a time when I was a young lad. I was wearing the blue and white stripes of my primary school uniform. I looked ahead and i saw a fair-skinned young man who happened to be the school’s newly recruited music teacher. He was teaching us something about the aesthetic values of music before he stopped abruptly and told us that he wanted to teach us a song. Up till this present moment, I still cannot fathom the circumstances that made him teach us this song. But what I do know is that, over a decade on, that song still plays itself over and over in my subconscious and has an impact on me one way or the other. The song went thus:
‘Whatever you can do today,
Don’t leave it for tomorrow,
Whatever you can do today,
Don’t leave it for tomorrow.
For tomorrow has it’s own problems,
And they would surely come.
Whatever you can do today,
Don’t leave it for tomorrow’
The reason why my primary school music teacher might have sang the aforementioned song might have been in order to curb laziness and procrastination in his young proteges. To think in this direction is very much proper and even plausible. But in my little experience in life, I’ve come to understand that the factors that militate against doing what is expected of you, when it’s expected of you is much more grave than Procrastination and Laziness. Oh yes, these two play their parts in not getting things done….and yes, they are the most important reasons why we don’t get things done. But how could we ever forget about the syndrome called, ‘WAITING FOR THE GOOD WEATHER’!
We are all guilty of ‘waiting for the good weather’. For some, this syndrome is mild, while for others it’s moderate while for some others still, it’s so severe and deeply ingrained into such individuals that they don’t even know that they are sufferers of the syndrome. ‘Waiting for the good weather’ is characterized by the desire and willingness to have all variables swinging in one’s favour before one decides to make any move in getting things done. The truth remains that no matter how much we want an ideal world similar to our worldview of how things should be, there is nothing that’s going to change the way things are-the real world-except we make moves NOW to create our ideal world. Many of us know what we do, in actions and thoughts, that typifies the syndrome of ‘waiting for the good weather’, so I’m not going to spend any more time on that. However, I have some recommendations that could be helpful for us in our bid to break away from the syndrome of ‘waiting for the good weather’. My recommendations are:
1. Don’t be afraid of trying new things. This might be difficult when all the resources you need are not in place. But you just have to start the new thing first. Remember, ‘To begin a task is to have half completed it’
2. Challenge yourself. You want success, don’t you? If yes, the fact that you want success in a task should provide enough drive for you to prevent you from ‘waiting for the good weather’. If conditions are not favourable, make them to be.
3. Reach out to others. Don’t sit still within your area of comfort and wait for others to meet you, as if they are owing you or something. Step out of your comfort zone and you’d be surprised at what you’d find.
4. Before you get into something, make sure it’s God’s will for you. Even if you wait for the ‘good weather’ and God’s hand isn’t in what you want to do, you are asking for frustrations and disappointments.
5. Expect criticisms and move on. Someone quipped that, ‘the only way to avoid criticisms is to say nothing, be nothing and do nothing’. Unless you have plans to remain a nonetity in life, I don’t think you will still want to wait for the ‘good weather’ just to avoid criticisms. Hear all criticisms, learn from the constructive ones and discard others.
6. Accept mistakes as the price of progress. Because you want to avoid mistakes is no reason to wait for the ‘good weather’ before performing tasks. A benefit of making mistakes is that you learn an additional way NOT to perform a task. A mistake every now and then won’t kill you. Learn from them and move forward.
Don’t ‘wait for the good weather’, but in your thoughts and actions, make the ‘weather’ how you want it to be!
YOU ARE A WINNER!!!