You become a success when you discover what you were born to do. That is the purpose of your life. In fact, you become a leader in your area. You are motivated by your vision to lead others. Your vision is what helps you to identify yourself and become your true self.
In order to be considered successful, you must add value to people’s lives. You must positively touch the lives of other people. Therefore, you must aspire to be a person of value. When you identify your value, people will seek you and demand your service. People pay for your service when they have value for them. Of course, you are known and remembered by the value you offer to people.
If you have a vision from God and you key into that vision, there must be tests, trials and challenges. These challenges are meant to strengthen and not destroy you. They are opportunities and experiences that are inevitable in the process of success. Therefore, you must welcome them with courage and understanding.
James 1:2 (ESV) counsels, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds.” Without these challenges, you will not experience personal growth and development and your business will not be resilient. In fact, a true account of any successful person or business is simply how tough challenges have been overcome.
When successful people share their testimonies, it is always a story of how God enabled them to overcome a difficult task. Without God, they might not have achieved it. In carrying out your assignment, always remember that God has promised to guide, direct and teach you, according to Psalm 32:8. He has promised to be with you and never to leave or forsake you.
I remember chatting with a colleague in community pharmacy practice and he said, “Mr Atueyi, you are lucky that you are not in practice and you can’t appreciate the problems we are experiencing. You don’t know what we are going through.” I quickly replied, “You are very correct. I don’t experience your type of problems, just as you don’t experience the challenges of publishing periodicals. Do you know the rate of morbidity and mortality in periodicals publishing in this country? Do you know that there are more sick and dead journals than healthy and living ones? If you want figures, go to the National Library”. He got the message.
You cannot succeed without challenges that will stretch you. Trials are generally part of life. They are in-built mechanisms for maturity and success. Any movement must experience resistance and any living thing must experience one type of challenge or the other. If you want to avoid resistance then don’t move; be still. Don’t do anything. That is why dead things have no challenges. Anyone who hates challenges does not love life; he loves death.
If you have a God-given vision, He is bound to provide all you need to succeed. First of all, you cannot do it without His help. If you can carry out successfully your assignment, without leaning on Him, that assignment is not likely from Him. Usually He gives an assignment that is too big for you to handle so that you will depend on Him. You must work with Him to succeed. We are co-labourers. He plays His part and you play your own part. He will not do it alone neither can you do it without Him.
Proverbs 3:5-6 says, “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine understanding. In all thine ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct your paths.” When God gives you a vision, He directs you and provides the necessary resources – talents, gifts, time, money, people and so on, to ensure its successful execution. He equips those He calls. God equipped Moses to lead the Israelites with Aaron and his staff. On his own, Moses realised he could not succeed.
God does not call any person for an assignment and then leave him to fend for himself. Instead, He provides all that is necessary for its execution. God’s projects never fail because He has all the resources at His disposal. He must succeed because He is committed and faithful. As Paul put it, “God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work” (2 Cor. 9:8). He is sufficient in all things and, therefore, His assignments always succeed.
