YOUR WORST ENEMY

   Michael flew from one church to the other. He was told his mother was a witch, another said he was dealing with an ancestral curse. He heard one story or the other everywhere he went. Michael is handsome, brilliant and was voted the most likely to succeed in his high school. He is thirty now and stuck in the same dead beat job he got after he passed out of the NYSC programme. The plan had been to work for two or three years and then start up his company. It’s been eight years now and he is still there. He had applied for other jobs but never got any. He had told his friends and family his plan but they all told him to
hold on to the job he had, that his idea would never work in Nigeria, Jobs are hard to find now does he want to be broke, this is a steady job that brings in money at the end of the month you want to throw away for a pipedream. Michael internalized it all. He gave excuses in his head on why he shouldn’t start his company. He brought himself and his capability down in his mind. Today, someone else started up exactly that same idea Michael had and he is now a billionaire. The media calls him ‘THE NEXT MIKE ADENUGA’, ‘THE KID WITH THE MIDAS TOUCH.’ Michael believes now that he is cursed and is jumping from church to church to find out what went wrong with him.
   This is what went wrong;
remember the Wright brothers; Orville and Wilbur, fathers of the first successful piloted heavier-than-air flying machine, the airplane inventers? Do you think they were the first to build a flying object? NO! They weren’t, others had. A particular man was closer to this goal but he was scared of letting a human being pilot it ‘the unpiloted aerodrome’ it was called. His name was Samuel Pierpont Langley. History doesn’t care to know his name or name him as the inventor of the first airplane. People told him it wasn’t possible. He was scared of failing, of being laughed at. He told himself, they are right and it just isn’t possible. You cannot imagine the regret and shame that filled his heart when he heard about the Wright brothers and their flying toy. He had done it first but let his fear paralyse him.  He let his aerodrome go up in the air without a human being in it; his fear killed it for him. He did his years before the Wright brothers. No one knows him today. Kids don’t recite his name and what he invented in schools. If he had only let himself be certain and worked at it to make it able for a human to pilot like Edison had tried numerously to make his own inventions work but Samuel Pierpont Langley, gave up. The Wright brothers took his place. They were fearless and made it work for a human being to pilot. They even flew it by themselves. Today we enjoy aeroplanes, helicopters and other airborne machines.
   Thomas Alva Edison in his lab tried hard to get the bulb to light up. He tried once, twice, thrice, the hundredth time and kept on till he got it. If he had listened to the doubt in his head or the fact that others had tried it and failed, he would have stopped on the third try but he kept at it. Today, we have electric light and so many other inventions of his. He is known as the ‘father of invention.’
   Martin Luther King Jr. Was a clergyman. If he had turned down the position to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association after a respected member of the society, Rosa Parks was led off to jail for refusing the Montgomery bus segregation laws and standing up for a white man to sit, we would never have known the man, Martin Luther King Jr. We would never hear his famous speeches, He would never have become a civil rights leader, led a peaceful protest against the segregation of blacks in the US. The truth is, if Martin Luther King Jr. Had had doubts in his ability to lead when called on and turned it down, there wouldn’t be a black man sitting in the white house as the president of the United States today. Martin Luther King Jr. Via his speeches and civil right movement paved the way.
   We all are our own worst enemies. What people tell us and think about us and our plans doesn’t really matter, what matters is YOU. What do you think about yourself? I don’t know if you have ever met someone that wasn’t handsome/pretty depending on the sex but the way they act, like they are the most beautiful/handsome person in the world. They just don’t care how you see them. They give off this aura of confidence and acceptance from them that it draws people like magnets. It’s how you take yourself others will take you. Sometimes that sentence will be wrong; take and treat yourself how you want no matter how others treat you. You create and build yourself, what you want and you can ruin yourself. You might say, I tell people good things about myself, I say it out loud that God will heal me, I say it out loud that I am a success. All that is on the exterior. What do you tell yourself when you are alone in bed at night before you go to sleep? What do you say to yourself inside your head where no one else can hear you but you? If you believe in yourself, others will too, it might take them a while. Don’t be your own worst enemy and let the voices in your head control you, you should control the voices, it is your head. Your thoughts are your enemies and not your neighbour. You are your friend and your foe; you spend more time with yourself than you do with others. So, are you an enemy or a friend to you?