A few days ago I met an old friend that I have known since high school. As usual with old friends we started discussing about our past (of cause it starts with the past) and we laughed at how we used to encourage each other and how that managed to pull us through high school with enough grades to take us to some of the best colleges in the land while most of our peers had ended up somewhere around the city (forgive me is that sound arrogant). Now that chapter was over and with our undergraduate degree in our hands we found that we still hadn’t made it in life (and the irony is that a good number of those who couldn’t make it to college started businesses and some of them are doing good) at least in the way that we expected. We went to touch on a number of issues but the central point was that we needed to come up with something that would ensure we lived the lives we had dreamt of back in high school. The tricking reality for both of us was that education “alone” could not give us a financial freedom we wanted and that reality was already with us. Not that we have any good education but an average person would think that with our degrees the sky is the limit but we know that is not true. Now we realized that financial freedom can only be achieved by through financial literacy and vigorously pursuing that knowledge that has given financial freedom to people throughout the ages. As we looked at our options we realized that we needed to think beyond our education and outside the box. We needed to think the thoughts of the rich, talk the language of the rich and dream the dreams of the rich if we were to live the lives of the rich as we had done with our education. I remember how a few years ago we were some of the few people who “knew” that we were going to pass our exams with flying colors and indeed it turned out that way. We needed to take the same principles and apply them to the world of wealthy and create what others have termed money consciousness, success consciousness, or wealth consciousness. That was the beginning of what is turning out to be a very long and exciting journey that I am going to share with everyone I have the opportunity to freely talk to. I reviewed my library, decided to upgrade it and went through a couple of books that made me realise that there are certain fundamentals that rich people have and that are preached by success coaching gurus everywhere today. I decided that the best way to understand things is to read through volumes and integrate the learned knowledge from different sources and come up with your own version from the different volumes. That’s what learning is all about. In this series I am going to be relating what I am learning from my coveted library in my own language understanding and interpretation. I have also realized that my academic training in psychology sociology and other subjects is invaluable when it comes to the understanding of how the money world works and it would be good for me to preserve for others what I am leaning and deducing. Thus what follows is my treatise on what I can call my understanding of what the success path looks like especially when it comes to the world of money. Hopefully this might lead to a book that is going to be written with young people from this side of the world in mind and already we have set the pace by establishing a young entrepreneurs’ club at our university.

It takes a vision, passion and action for anybody to achieve a worthwhile and coveted goal.
Now there is an obscure relationship between these three elements and these elements themselves are pretty much dependent on each other and other forces and this series will try to extrapolate (in my understanding and wording) the complexity of these relationship and how we can use these connections to sharpen our focus and extend our chances of achieving financial freedom.

Let’s start with vision – the dictionary definition of vision can be – the formation of a mental image of something that is not perceived as real and is not present to the senses. (www.wedweb.com). A vision is the first thing that anyone needs in order to achieve whatever small a thing in life. In fact the word achieve has a presupposition that there was some deliberate planning towards the goal and that assumes that there was some understanding of what the person wanted to come up with and that’s what I call a vision. It keeps you in focus, motivates you, maintains the tempo and vibrations while it makes mountains easier to climb. When the going gets tough the vision keeps you holding on and when everyone is getting out of the boat you remain hopeful because you have seen something. I am reminded of the Apostle Paul and his on the way to Damascus vision. You see it seems it was the most important thing that happened to him in his Christian conversion and walk. Even in the face of persecution, trials and doubts the only thing that held him together is what he had seen on the way to Damascus and it was too clear to be ignored. Its very unfortunate that he was the only one who saw that vision although he was walking with hordes of other people and there is nothing that’s as straining as trying to sale your vision to people if they just cant see it and usually its bad enough to make us quit but not for this Christian hero. He rode his vision through and through to the extend that he became the most important figure in the history of the Christian movement and despite the fact that he was a late comer into the movement. What distinguished him in my opinion (and of cause you are always at liberty to differ with me although that should not make you not want to carry on reading together with me. Learning involves retaining your independent thinking and I would be most greatful is my readers were able to that.) was the fact that Paul had a vision and the sight was too clear to be ignored and through the vision he had clear and straight forward instructions to carry on a specific mission. We have a lot to learn from this great apostle for the Gentiles in the art of having visions and pursuing them. (Maybe we will come back to him some time.)
Now this can equate to What the Book of Hebrews in Chapter 11 defines as faith. In my own words and simplified version I would say ‘a vision is a mental creation of who you are going to be in the future and this is often tied to what we think we are capable of being and doing. In other words every one of us has a vision – whether to the outsider the vision is negative or positive is something else – and whether we consciously seek to pursue that vision with the other two elements is something else. The bottom line is that at least most of us have a rough idea of what tomorrow is going to be and for those who don’t the world has a default line for you which might be in most cases falling in line with the visions of the significant others around us, the people on whom our lives are dependent and whose plans affect us everyday. If these do not plan directly with us in mind we still have a benefit of doubt in the trickle down effect. It still comes back that even the person who has “no vision” actually has a certain dependence on a particular rallying point for on which their future is anchored. This might be a spouse for most wives and or prospective wives, an education for most students, parents for most kids etc etc but there is somewhere were your hope for the future is holding on and without this I think we become good candidates for suicide. When all hope is lost and there is no future, then we have a serious problem. I think that may happen to most if not all of us once in a while but most of us manage to get back to our senses and not let that false reality take us to the grave. For some of us who don’t manage to pull ourselves out of the quagmire then things such as suicide, depression, total madness etc are an ever menacing possibility.
Life is a journey of hope, faith and vision – in ourselves, in our relatives, in the government, in donors, in well wishers, in fate, in the Devine or in something else. Now to me the difference between history makers and those who are made by history is that the former make a deliberate effort to create a life, a legacy and a trace of their own by setting out their own visions, generating their own hope and holding on to their faith. They do not put their faith on the government, their family, or any other source except maybe the trust in the willingness of God (nature or whatever you might call it) to help them achieve their goals. The most important point is that they know what they want, have made up their minds to pursue it and work with all the other forces that can make that thing work. In other words I would say they have a vision. While everyone else is hoping for a better future through government policy, international help, good connections or something from beyond, they know that its either they have a vision or their life will sleep into the control of external determinants and believe me they don’t like that (neither should we). These are the kinds of people who do not get bogged down by hard times, bankruptcy, economic depressions, credit crunches, political turmoil, or any other thing that threatens their visions. These are the people who have seen something (like biblical Paul, Bill Gates, Thomas Edison, Luther King and others) and are ready to sacrifice everything that they have, are or could be to pursue what they have seen.
This is one thing about vision that I need to touch on here. Vision in everyday language or in the realm of neuroscience is simply ‘the perceptual experience of seeing’. Now – that is not lost even in the world of success and I think the choice of the word to describe this phenomenon is very very exceptionally relevant. You see, in perception sometimes they say that we do not only see but we see through us. In other words when you are looking at something you don’t just see but you see yourself or rather you see through some personal lenses that have developed over the years through experience ( to use a single word to describe many processes that build up these lenses). Now in other words sight is not as objective as we might want to think and that’s very valuable information. A little further we realise that what actually sees is not the eye but the mind because after the impulses have entered the eye, gone to the retina, through to the brain part responsible for sight – the mind then interprets the electromagnetic and chemical impulses into perceivable objects or reality. Here what becomes important are not the actual meaningless visual impulses that our eyes receive but the images that our brain (for a lot of reasons I prefer the word mind) produces.

The point that I want to bring home is that our visions are shaped by our past and present experiences and circumstances that have defined who we are hence what we are capable of doing or achieving. In other words one can only have a vision of what they “already” think they can achieve. In another way we can say that our visions are set within certain limitations or stretches in relation to what we already think about ourselves. If we think greatly of ourselves then our visions are likely to be a little higher hence our success and the opposite is true (i.e. if we think lowly of ourselves then we will have small visions and our achievements in life will be likewise). The Bible says that “were there is no vision the people perish” and I think its a truism and that’s the critical factor in our quest for a better future for ourselves, families, nation and the world at large. It follows then that the only connection between our past experiences, present situations and the future is the extent to which we let our visions be limited by our present and past experiences and situations. Beyond that there is no connection.

Now the daunting question is that if it is true our perception hence visions (both in biology/psychology/neuroscience and success planning) are shaped by our previous experiences and the belief systems that are built by them what hope is there for a victim and prisoner of bad or negative past. At first it might seem like there is no hope but a closer look at how these mental beliefs are built give us a clue and hope for the future. Dr Frankpan a renowned Medical doctor, author and psychiatrist once said that events on their own have no meaning serve to that which you the perceiver give to them. This same massage is echoed by well known Dale Carnegie in his book How To Stop Worrying and Start Living as well as in many other classical writers and speakers. Psychologists have even gone as far as discovering that sometimes the only way to help a person deal with past evens that are affecting their present lives through stuck stubborn beliefs and tendencies is to take the patient back through the passage of time to that past event and when you get there you help them see the event in a new and positive light that can help them deal with the present in a better way. This is done through special therapy techniques and the results are often phenomenal. Now obviously most of us might never have that opportunity and better still its not even necessary at least in most of the cases.
I am not going to pretend as if I know all the answers and solutions to these problems but I honestly believe that there are extremely simple strategies that most of us have been using everyday to achieve our greatness. There are various strategies and I encourage everyone to search for the best strategy that suite their needs and experiences but the bottom line for me is that we all need to get to that level where we no longer create a self defeating bond between our past, present and future. For me one of the best strategies is to realise that a person is after all not just a collection of past experiences but a semi independent entity that can make decisions and create new belief systems in spite of what surround them. I do not want to mislead anyone in thinking that the past has no hold on your present and future because that would be a plain lie and some psychologists might want to drag me to court with clear compelling and convincing evidence to the contrary. However I am saying that the remnants of the past in you are belief system and thinking processes that were created in you and that is what growing up or experiencing life is all about but it is always possible with some effort to recreate a world of your own that has little or maybe no connection with our negative past in a destructive way. After all its the information that was fed into your mind that led to those ways of thinking and the same process can be used to change the same mental beliefs and processes.
One of the ways to do this is to expose your mind to new information and new ways of thinking that go in line with what you want to achieve and that may even contradict your past hence default experiences and mental conceptions. The good news is that some psychologists have found that the mind cannot distinguish between true physical experiences that actually happen in life and those just mental experiences. In other words to the brain a person who thinks of exercising and a person who actually exercises both have the same experience. The brain has no way of distinguishing mental processes and human behavior because they are all psychological experiences hence can have the same effect. All experiences are real to the brain and the result might be the same although the sources were very different and this will actually leave a strain on the imprints of your mind. Now it might not be necessary to understand (at this level of our discussion) why and how this happens but its good enough to make us realise that if you decided to change your mental neural processing and belief systems you could as well do it just by creating mental experiences that mirror the kind of thinking that you seek to achieve and the results will be very positive without doubt. Simple as it might sound but all the successful people we know do that whether its intentional and taught to them by a success coach or its personal intuition and we can also do the same and get the same positive results. The idea is to create new ways of thinking that will set the pace for us to dream big and stretch our horizons so that we start reaching out for a higher life and set out visions that are higher than we ever thought we could achieve and still be able to achieve them. (more of this in the next article).
Like we said above its important to note that perception, reality and thinking processes or beliefs have no objective existence of their own. I always find it funny to realise how many religions and beliefs of different kind we have in the world and yet those who hold them think that their beliefs are the correct ones. We all do that everyday but i always think that maybe that’s why we loose too many opportunities to embrace the other world and get insight into a better future. There is a debate as to the influence of culture on thinking and for me the evidence is compelling to prove that we don’t just think but we think within frameworks, worldviews or cultures (depending on what culture is to you) and such an understanding can help us determine the best way to deal with our lack of success consciousness. The point here is that our present realities are a product or past experiences or rather ways of thinking and tendencies – and that’s all. There is no other objective force or reality of existence beyond and besides that. Now – that means that if we can change that way of thinking we can also change our reality or material prospects by setting new better and higher visions and pursue them to completion. The only conceivable reason why we are not setting goals and visions worse still higher ones is because we don’t believe we are capable of achieving such and until we get to that point then we still have a mammoth task before us. Henry Ford the motor industry mogul once said “whether you think you can or you cant you are always right” and I think that sums it all.

Now to close on this chapter lets give a round of what we have been saying. To start with we said that success is often based on three elements or components which are vision, passion and action in their order of relevance and applicability (the last part my opinion and you can always change the arrangement in a way that suits you best). In this part we tried to explore what a vision entails and the forces that determine how much we can dream. We tried to bring out how visions are formed and how they are informed by our past and current experiences and most importantly how we can with some effort bring about a change in our belief systems and mental processes as a sure way to expand our level of seeing. This is not meant to be an exhaustive treatise in the field of success coaching but my own way of understand and relaying what too many writers have done and are still doing. Next time we are going to be exploring on the concept of passion as our second ingredient to success path and that might be a very important articles to those who think that they have visions and have been pursuing them for some time without any recognizable results or those who think that they are ready to go beyond dreaming planning and visualizing. However we might have to touch a little bit on the quality of our visions before we got to the next element because a clear vision is always important before one can think of developing intense passion for the expected achievements (Its very to passionate on the wrong thing and unguided zeal can be disastrous). Even in the physical world of seeing except if you have some acclaimed exceptional gift such as clavoyance them you can only see up to a certain horizon and that’s also important in the world of success. After all even it’s a true nature of dreams that you can only dream within certain limits of your mental experiences (hence we should stretch our mental experiences beyond our present physical experiences).
It is my sincerest hope that every one of us who is serious about changing our life fortunes start thinking of reading books such as What I did Not Learn at school but Wish I Had, Science of Getting Rich, Think and Grow Rich, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Seven Habbits of Highly Effective People, Acres of Diamond, The law of Attraction, Happy Pockets Full of Money, Mach 11 with your Head High, Rich Dad-Poor Dad and many others. That might be the best library collection you will ever possess and do not hesitate to contacts me should you need any of those books and more.

By CLAUDE

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