It’s New Year for new you!

COUNT yourself blessed and count your blessings. It is a brand new year. This is an opportunity for you to begin again more intelligently, building on your experiences of the past years. It is a new season; an opportunity to do great things and manifest the greatness in you. It is your season to scale up, rise up and brace up to be what you have never been and do what you have never done. Welcome to the New Year!

As the earth turns around the sun, it is almost a disappointing routine process for those who live with no goals and just aim to survive. Do not allow yourself to plateau! Do not expire, while sitting on the shelf of life.

It is easy for life to become an empty routine grinding merry-go-round. Break the cycle of mediocrity and routine thinking. Your choice determines your destiny. Choose to break the cycle of recreational complaining, career-boredom and listlessness. Set empowering, challenging and exciting goals that get your mind racing, and your energy pumping. Boredom is a symptom of weak, impotent goals. A goal-less life is a wasted existence. You do not have that luxury. An unfocused life will likely result in empty abusive passions and misdirected activity. Activity without purpose rarely yields measurable exploits. You were designed for exploits, engineered for greatness and fashioned to manifest purpose.

Every New Year is an opportunity to begin again, more intelligently, more thoughtfully and more passionately. The earth circles the sun in the span of a year. Each step in the solar turn of the earth gives rise to a pattern of days, weeks, months and seasons. Life is governed by seasons and your experience of each season is determined by your attitude. Each New Year, is another opportunity to run another course, take another challenge and commit to the journey of life. The vicissitudes of life are not important. What matters is what you think about whatever you are going through.

So what are you going to be doing in the New Year? If you set your mind on nothing you are positioning yourself for disappointment. Whatever you focus on will grow. Whatever you magnify will determine your experience of the year.

Set fresh goals

Your life will continue on its current trajectory until you set new, empowering and inspiring goals. Use your hindsight to review the goals that have directed your life to date. Use insights from your experience to distil knowledge into wisdom. Look at what you have oversight over and decide to be a life-giver and visionary.

Make your goals big, inspiring, exciting and bold. Set goals that are so big that God becomes necessary in your life. Look at the goals that you had ten years ago. Knowing what you now know, would you not have stretched those goals and made them bigger? Ten years ago would have been the best time to have set some specific, empowering goals that you pursued with all you were and had at your disposal. The next best time to set goals with meaning is now, today, this hour. You cannot afford to lose another decade and waste another year. So do it now! Say it to yourself and repeat it all the time. Keep affirming: “I act now! I act now! I act now!” Set and commitment to action and massive sustained action. Spare no moment in hesitation, set great goals. Without goals you will just stumble into the New Year, hoping for uncertain miracles. Hope without an action plan is not a sustainable strategy. Gambling with your life is a sorry and sad joke.

Wear learner plates

When learning how to drive you need to have an experienced driver by your side and you must display an “L” plate at the front and back of your vehicle. The plate helps other drivers become patient with you, knowing you are a learner. This same attitude should apply to everyone and everything about your life. Approach life as a learner. Every day is an opportunity to learn.

Life is a continual process of learning and growth. What is your learning agenda this year? Make a point to read at least four books in a month. Never pride yourself with not reading. Learn as though life gives you an examination every week. What do you want to learn? Learn something that gives you greater capacity. Grow your potential and usefulness to others.

Instead of going around behaving like an authority, in everything don a huge L-plate. Interact with other people as a learner. Make learning your life vocation. Be a life-scholar, learn all the time, in every place and from anyone. Get better and deeper all the time. Let your house be a castle of learning not just frivolous unmetered television. The exalted position in life is that of a thoughtful and engaging scholar. Determine to make the New Year your season of aggressive learning. Every area you are weak in is likely an area you have not committed to mastering. Be so hungry to learn that you do not go to bed with the same level of ignorance that you woke up with. Wake you to great insights and revelations through learning. Desired things, determine destinies. The Latin word “desiderata” means desired things. In 1927 author, Max Erhmann (1872-1945) wrote the now popular Desiderata poem. In his life-time he never got credit for it. After his death the poem gained momentum including mistaken attribution to the 17th Century. The poem’s message continues to be relevant to this day. The day of new beginnings, fresh insights and new energy. As you step into this New Year, may you take to heart the message of the Desiderata:

“Go placidly amidst the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labours and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its shams, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.”

Step Up, Step Forth!

Charge forward with the resolve of a charging hungry lion. Pursue your goals until they are begging for mercy. Run forward with the sprint of a hunted gazelle. You do not have the luxury to be a host of negativity and a vector of depravity. Resolve that this New Year all things in your life will become new.

You have 52 weeks and 365 days to fill with purpose, love, exploits and achievement. If this New Year ends empty, it has nothing to do with the calendar, or weather, but you.

You are the silver bullet that you have been waiting for. You are the one who make a difference. You are the main actor in the movie of your life.

Step forth to do great things. Small steps taken consistently lead to great things. Greatness is abundant, and accessible. This universe is an open inviting field looking out for those who hungry and willing. As you desire, so you focus. As you believe so you become. As you speak so you are! See you in the greatness arena in 2019. Committed to your greatness.