CHAPTER 74
THERE IS A “FIRST” IN EVERY ONE
Let’s take a walk back to those little days as a child in primary or secondary school who was always conscious of the academic position that arrived after every term’s hard work. Your parents often anticipated the topmost “first” position for your academic brilliance and expected you to gun for that top position.
Those parents whose children managed to make the top of the class were considered privileged to have wards who were brilliant while those children who made the lower side of the rankings were considered dull headed even by their parents. Parents then and today’s parents assume that the child who takes first in class is the best or smartest of his peers.
I recently decided to quit using academic positioning as a method of measuring the capacity of the pupils in my school. A parent had met one of my teachers and pleaded that the child is offered help in order to enable him make the pole position in class. I smiled at the offer and decided that I’d removed the place for position altogether. Parents had become overly conscious of position than the mental development of their wards that I decided it was time a new system for measuring the development of my pupils was developed. When my teachers asked why I decided against writing academic positions on the report sheets, I replied that “there is a first in every pupil in class, every pupil takes first position.”
In life, we have come to accept the assumption that there are those of us who are meant to take pole position and that if you don’t catch the top position; you are not worth the number. We often consider ourselves not good enough for the high rank because some other person has gotten there before us. We think that we have to strive to be the best at what some other person is easing his self at. Its time you realize that the ratings don’t suit you.
While it’s great to have a high rank that you are striving to reach, if you are not meeting up the demands, it’s alright. Just check around, there is something else whose demand you outdo. Einstein discovery of the relativity principle had put pen to paper and sealed the very fact of our competition. Everyone is first and best in some special deal that no one else has capacity to achieve. That’s often why the best teams don’t have the most brilliant or gifted guys working together. The best teams have the most diverse of talents working together.
Every time I study my pupils, I find diverse incredible gifts and talents. Yes, some of them may be academically on the high side and some others are creatively on the high side. I often marvel at the resources of talents within my academic sphere that I find it difficult measuring the performance of a child just by his book rhetoric.
Are you trying to measure up with your neighbor out there who you think is doing way better by one statistic? There is always the temptation to think that way. Get off that thinking pattern; you are just being blind of the possibilities that abound in you. There are absolutely incredible possibilities beyond what you are finding in some other person that you like. You are an original.
You are first and you are best. You may not be all that everyone is and that is good because you are great at being you. Leave the ratings of everyone trying to force you into a grade hunt to meet up their ideal. Just try to make yourself better at being you. It’s only a matter of time before you become the ideal for others to look up too. Truth is, if you are not an original, no one finds it necessary copying. If you are a copy, people will prefer the original.
Are you thinking, you haven’t worked hard enough to make the ratings? You will be working too long and too hard to meet some other person’s ratings because the qualifications for the ratings are always reviewed. When you work in your ratings, no one has to change your qualifications because you create and define them.
What’s stopping you? Be first!!!