Sunday, September 14, 2014

Content Verses Container

What is beauty without intelligence, container without content, body without mind and hardware without software? The mind is the root of success and failure depending on what it is daily fed. The mind here can be likened to “content” while the body is the “container”.

According to Napoleon Hill; a renowned psychologist, the mind is a gigantic power within us, which possesses unlimited capacity, potential and power. Psychologists have proven that every human is born Tabula rasa (blank). We are born empty but become the product of our environment and what we constantly feed our minds.

Just like the computer, the mind can only reproduce what it is fed. Unfortunately, a lot of us have not only starved our minds with little data but the little data we have fed our minds with are negative and derailing. Do not be deceived, just as the quality of a seed determine the quality of the fruit, so is the input (what we feed our minds with) a determinant of the output (our success or failure in life). It is a direct case of garbage in garbage out.

A student or worker, who spends majority of his/her time on any of the social networks for instance: 2go, Facebook and WhatsApp to mention a few, will obviously produce poor grades or poor service as the case may be. The present low academic performance in both secondary and tertiary institutions can be partly attributed to the number of hours youths now spend on these social networks. There is a cause and effect relationship between the things we daily feed our minds with and success or failure we daily record.

Tell me what you spend most of your time doing and I will tell you what you will become.

Many people spend the larger part of their time packaging their “outside” and neglecting their “inside”, beautifying their “container” and disregarding their “content”, feeding their body and inadvertently starving their mind. The container (physical appearance) is not in itself bad but spending too much money and time on it as opposed to the content (mind) is wrong. This is because the mind deserves more attention than the body. The “battles” of life are fought and won in the mind.

Mohammed Ali, a great boxer, attested to the supremacy of the mind power over the physical power when he said, “champions are not made in the gym but champions are made in something they have deep inside them.”

In conclusion, to be the best in our chosen fields, we must spend the larger part of our time and money in feeding our minds with ideas and information that are needed in our chosen fields. One could be derailing if he spends more time on “Chelsea/Arsenal” club matches than on his field of study. Identify your “selling point” (area of strength) and consciously nurture it to greatness. The vision you glorify in your mind, the ideal you enthrone in your heart, this you will build your life on and this you will become.

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