Look ahead with renewed optimism
My headline for this week may sound like a cliché, the promises and resolutions that dominate our thoughts every year around this time.
It is that time of year when we engage in deep reflections about our lives, families, friends, work, and life in general. We flip in and out of our thoughts, trying to make meaning of it all.
Most of the time, we receive a few pointers on the successes we chalked up and the failures we made, too! But it is the few failures that should be your compass moving into the next year.
And that is why I think moving ahead with renewed optimism is the best foot forward into 2026.
The life lessons are in both success and failure stories. But most of the time, we ignore those who have “failed” and chase after those who have succeeded in life. I understand that.
We all know success has many friends, and failure is an orphan. Or, better still, we would prefer those who had a hard beginning and later made it. Perhaps that is the story that will resonate well with you. Fair enough!
But do you also know that such down-to-earth stories are not what they are? There is nothing wrong with believing that “the charcoal seller’s son will also wear a white shirt one day” because that is what life gives us—a world of opportunities and not impossibilities.
So going into 2026, I have decided to walk my dream because impossibility is only the mind of the pessimist. A pessimist sees the problems in every situation, but an optimist sees the opportunity in every situation—including where there are glaring problems. So, walk me on this journey of possibilities.
Reimagine! Of course, it is natural, as human beings, to dwell so much on the negatives in life, forgetting that you gain more when you concentrate on the positives in life. Reimagining is about creativity; it is about looking at things differently with the aim of achieving a better result.
So, if you think 2025 has not brought about your desired effect, what are you going to do about it in the year ahead? Do you need any clues here? Okay, let me offer one: Clue number one is that, in your attempt to answer this question, you should not apply the same methods that you used in 2025 to answer.
That won’t change anything! So, my direct answer is that you must get into some form of creative thinking, brainstorming and coming up with multiple perspectives. You can examine and analyse each perspective against your expected outcome.
To give you more inspiration, I am going to use some of the key points I raised in my March 16, 2024, edition of this column.
In that edition, my headline was “Disturb the present!”, admonishing readers to overcome self-imposed limits to make the next leap forward, and I used the life examples of many trailblasers, including Sharon Wood.
Wood, one of the first women to climb Mount Everest, had this to say: “It wasn’t a matter of physical strength but inner strength.
The conquest lay within my own mind. I had to penetrate those barriers of self-imposed limitation and get through to the good stuff- the stuff called potential, 90 per cent of which we rarely use.” You certainly need to disturb your present to move from good to great, and that is what this week’s issue is about.
How many times have you tried to get yourself out of your current situation to try a new job or another opportunity, but felt afraid to do so? Well, if you have, remember that you are not alone in feeling that way.
There are documented periods when people felt the fear of failure, and they never tried anything different. And there are situations too in which people felt the fear but did it anyway! These daring ones are the ones we call trailblazers today.
The right mental model to develop is that state of mind where you see an obstacle as just an opportunity to show your strength. Nothing in life comes easy, and staying above average is not good enough.
To move from good to great, you must be ready to dare when others are afraid. Look at the story of the lion, for example. By the way, I am Leo, and the lion is my symbol and my inspiration!
The lion is not commonly referred to as the “king of the jungle” because it is the fastest or the biggest in the jungle. No.
The elephant comes in with the right weight, size and tactics to be the biggest, and in terms of speed, perhaps, the cheetah will beat the lion in a 100 metres dash!
But when the lion sees the elephant, he doesn’t see a big animal.
The lion sees food and knows that if the game is lost, hunger beckons, so it will adopt the right approach to deal with the risk in such a way that the game will be
