“The Revolution is Here. The Revolution is Personal” – Talib Kweli
2020 has demonstrated the fact that nothing is promised in this journey called life. We traverse through time as unknowing passengers constantly seeking meaning to this journey we are on. The routes we follow divert and create interesting experiences that we use to develop ourselves and foster relationships, which always direct us back to our path.
In the process of all this meandering, we build many things that we feel will aid us towards the zenith that we look to. Everything from our education, to personal development, careers, money, meaningful relationships, and even our legacies are all in a bid to create meaning to who we are.
COVID-19 has caused an irreversible change to life and business as we know. Everyone has had to pivot and adjust to new realities that required being innovative. We have seen homes become office spaces. We have seen office space now repurposed for other reasons. We have seen changes to behaviour that had been pre-defined for the last 70 years.
The irony is that we are all somewhat dizzy with the veracity of the change we have had to put up with this year, especially given that nobody anticipated and or planned for it. Such change can range from being scary to downright traumatic. You can even hear conversations about how all of this is “abnormal”.
What is so interesting about that statement is that there has never been a time in human history when things were ever normal. Every new frontier that human beings have experienced always required a new version of ourselves. How we have evolved from different stages and ages where we had to live off the land to survive to where knowledge became the currency of the day has never been an easy or “normal” experience.
I vividly remember in the early stages of my career when trying to introduce this phenomenal concept called email to a particular client, only to be told that “this email fad will soon burn out”. We have always been resistant to change, but we have always subconsciously known that it is the only constant we shall ever have.
In the early 1960s when then American president, John F. Kennedy, charged the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) with going to the moon, he delivered one of the greatest speeches ever made at Rice University. JFK, as he was affectionately referred to, said:
“But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.”
That single statement in his quote “not because it is easy, but because it is hard” is truly the personification of who we are as human beings and who we shall always be.
You cannot envision a future without laying the hard-core foundations today. COVID has changed life as we know it. Our capacity to respond and change with the times is the hallmark of our collective abilities. Believing it is meant to be easy is counterproductive towards building a better and stronger tomorrow.
So, we must embrace the enormity of the tasks ahead and appreciate that life is nothing more than a beautiful struggle.
Written by:
Nwaji Jibunoh
Head of Training
