CHAPTER TWO
ESCAPE? NO ROUTE
It’s amazing that some persons want to achieve championship without heading to give a challenge. They choose to escape from the competition. They feel they can escape. For a champ though, there is no escape route.
A champ will often talk himself into the challenge. He brags about what he intends to do and shouts at the top of his voice that he can and will dare the future challenge. The reason is to propel all the forces to believe he is able and can
Leading to a boxing competition, you would have watched one of those intros where the two challenging boxers meet perhaps in the dressing room to give themselves a word challenge. They’d talk so loud about their credentials to win in order to buy the attention of the crowd who would come to watch. The organizers of the bout would fix a date while both boxers prepare to keep the date. In a situation where one boxer fails to show up for the fight, he is said to have chickened out.
If you truly think you are a champion, once you set your eyes on the goal, you cannot afford to look back. One who turns back is not fit for the challenge. A champion often wants to prove himself even if he comes eye to eye with defeat. He chooses to go down fighting, something honorable. Only a timid fragile and fearful man bucks at a challenge. He is the only one who runs away after he has being able to convince his supporters that he can and hopes have rallied around him. These types of men don’t get anything done. They never get anywhere close to being a champ. They are chickens. A champion however blocks the entire route to return and chooses to die on the course.
Napoleon the great French general who took over Europe was said to have told his army to always burn down behind them every bridge they used in getting into the country they are to attack. They did this against Great Britain. It seems suicidal that one would come into another land and burn the same equipment that brought them in. The logic was that his soldiers must be aware there was no escape route. They just had to win the war or die fighting. That was often the rallying that made Napoleon so successful a warrior. That singular act often sent tremors to the land they desired to conquer when they see the enemy’s ship at sea in flames and the enemy running towards them in fury.
Napoleons lesson was, if you must become a champion, burn the bridges of escape behind and have your eyes set at the prize only. For Napoleon, conquering new lands was his prize and his men had to gaze intently at this prize.
A life champ must understand that the things that are prized are things that are worth giving up everything behind and looking up towards the mark. There will certainly be drags on the way. No one loves drags but it happens. These drags will whisper in your ears escape! Escape!! You aren’t fit for the battle. A champion however learns to say no! I am fit to challenge and win I must.
Many times people make plans with defeat in mind. When you plan an escape route, it means you are defeated already. You’d hear someone say just in case that one fails, we have an escape with this. It actually fails and the escape becomes the ludicrous option.
Champions don’t think of an escape. It’s never an option. What will make you never get the prize? Why do you think of accepting gold when your gaze is on diamond? Or why think silver is acceptable in case you don’t get gold? What’s stopping you getting the desired gold or diamond?
A champion thinks he deserves the best and that’s all. If he doesn’t, he regrets. That should be the mentality. If you are not first, you are not best. There is nothing like second best, or is there? I know that once the winner takes the gold, no other person takes gold. What makes the second best if the best takes gold and the next takes silver? The winner is best and others are next.
It is interesting to note that those who don’t look back but head on in spite of the drawbacks actually get the champion accolade. The champion often has many things that seek to pull him away from his pursuit. He’d often have his fears, doubts, opinions of people, history that had being, attitude of people round him etc. so he thinks that he could fail but pushes on in spite.
When you see that big huge heavyweight champion in the wrestling bout, you’d think he expected to win with that huge size. He wouldn’t tell you that he has to contend with all those fears. We celebrate his championships but we don’t know how many bridges he has had to burn behind him so as to keep him from gunning for an escape. If he tells you, you’d marvel.
Now you’d say I want to be a champion but you are looking back to the sofa on the bed where you have often made those sweet dreams. You think the dreams are so sweet, I should return to them again. Thank God you had a sweet bed to dream big dreams. You’ve got to burn the bed to make your dreams reality. Got it?
Sometimes it could be friends who are hell-bent at distracting you by telling you, guy, that your idea is great but do you know any who has succeeded at it? Those kinds of friends will have to be given up. They are creating an escape route for you and you don’t need them. You need people who’d tell you go! There’s nothing stopping you.
It’s amazing that Wheatstone Churchill of Great Britain understood this. When he became prime minister, the former had always offered that the kingdom pleaded to be loyal to Hitler’s rampaging German Nazi so that the catastrophe characterized by the Nazis would be averted. Well it was too late and the royal house wouldn’t succumb to such gibberish talk. They found a new prime minister in Churchill who knew he was a champion and would never buckle to the tirades of the enemy. London had being attacked but Wheatstone’s mind had not being. He rallied his soldiers with the words never, never, give up. They never escaped. They fought and that was the turnaround for the war.
You have no escape route. Fight till your last breath.