There is a seed of excellence in every man. Every student, irrespective of color, age, religion, experiences or background has this in-born ability and desire to learn and develop himself in a particular area until he/she becomes proficient. However, not all students achieve this dream. What are the five things that you must put in place and continually maintain in order to ensure that you cultivate and fully express the seed of excellence inside you?
1) Choose to excel: a quality decision is important. Make up your mind to excel. Make up your mind to understand and learn all that you need to learn. Forget the failures. Some students find things difficult because experiences of failure have forced them to make the decision that they can’t understand some subject. Don’t let the failures of the past decide what your future will be like. Don’t let the failures of the past limit what your future will bring you. You can make up your mind today to take up that book and understand. Woodrow Wilson said it, ‘the world will step aside for the man who knows where he is going’. If you know what you want in life and you commit yourself to it resolutely, you become unstoppable. If you fall, get up and do it again. Study again and again until you get a hold of it. Write the exam again and again until you excel. Excellent student excel because they don’t allow failure to stop them.
2) Have a plan: no one builds a tower without first drawing out a plan of what the tower should look like. Having a plan helps you ensure that you’re doing what you should be doing. With a plan, you know exactly what you should be doing at every moment of the day. You need a study plan. Your plan should be clear, and written down. A plan helps you measure your progress. It helps you know how close you are to your destination. It helps you know how far you have gone from your starting point. It helps you know if you are actually making forward progress or you are just burning your energy. You should take time to review your plan regularly. Assess yourself and determine how well you are faring in following your plan. Your plan should not be rigid. If there is anything that needs to be changed, change it and move on.
3) Be diligent: excellence does not just happen. Cultivating excellence is like making a gold ring. You go to a gold mine, dig deep and bring out the ore. You’ll then take the ore to a furnace to refine it and get rid of all the dirt. Then you mould it into a ring. Diligence is the furnace that develops your seed into a mature fruitful tree. Be diligent in studying. Be diligent in applying the things that you’ve learnt. Have an open mind. Be curious and hungry for knowledge. Diligence will always pay you rich dividends.
4) Exercise daily: The secret of success is in your daily routine. Practice everyday. This is the key to cultivating expertise in anything. If you want to be good in any subject, set aside time to study it every day. Set aside time to answer questions on what you have learnt every day. Sharpen your recall skills everyday by working with past questions and other questions that you can formulate yourself.
5) Keep the right company: birds of a feather flock together. This applies to all area of life. If you want to stand out and excel academically, surround yourself with people who want to stand out and excel academically. Surround yourself with people who believe that you can excel and stand out. Surround yourself with people who are committed to excellence. Talk with them. Work with them. And let them do all that they can to bring forth the seed of excellence in you.
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