How to Make a Meaningful and Progressive Life

There are numerous and diverse ways of making a meaningful amount of progress in life. In fact, almost every successful person has a method or way of approaching different circumstances they encounter in life that has brought them remarkable success in life.

In here, I want to share with you three concise steps of achieving a meaningful and progressive life.

First, always choose the best. For each time you make decision about anything in life choose excellence. When you have a strong will to want the best, it will often come your way. At the beginning of each new month, week, or day always expect the best to happen. Nevertheless, you might have had a terrible or an unfair experience from the previous day or week; in spite of that you should not allow this past incidence to be a hindrance to your daily activities. 

Most times we are weighed down by unforeseen circumstances that affect how we feel during and after each event. Yet, you don’t have to keep giving reasons for your innocence or guilty conscience, because if you continue to do this, you are indirectly living the experience anew, and every emotions attached to this comes alive again. There is no need to refresh your memory about all the negative experiences that cannot bring you happiness but only sadness. Instead, pick up those beautiful dreams of yours about how and what good you want in your life. This is an everyday decision you need to make at every moment of your day. And make sure that what you want should be of high standard.

Moreover, most times it really pays to think big, so that even if an odd thing happens and it sets you back, you may not completely go way down. I could still recall vividly when I use to tell my students in Toefl prep classes that “you should always expect to get the overall 120 marks in your exam, because if you aim for the actual school required score and afterwards you fall short of that score then you have to sit for another exam.” So, I used to suggest to them to aim for the whole mark while they study for the exam, and in most cases they score a bit above the school admission required mark for their course, although not scoring the whole 120 marks, which really doesn’t matter.

So if you were to choose between the mediocrity and excellence what would you choose? I guess you would say Excellence, of course! When you decide to make excellence your only aim in life it does not mean you are already perfect. What it means is that you have to keep working or practicing every day, so that even as you encounter failure you should only see it as a sign that say “take another path or be more cautious about how you do things.”

Excellence should not be seen as perfectionism, but should be seen as having a desired goal in mind while taking every steps of action need to attain it. It is a pursuit of purpose, of knowing that when you put your consistent efforts on whatever you do you become more of who you want to be. In fact, most times these efforts are just ordinary efforts but they are done more often than the usual amount of times others are giving to it. 

I could recall, again when I decided to take to drawing lessons with graphite pencils as well as painting on canvas about eight years back. I enrolled for this art class of about twenty students. It happened that I was the very best realistic pencil drawing student among all within just a month of class.

Immediately, I started this Art class, I spent more time on drawings before and after each class, as well as on lesson’s free day. 

The more I practiced my drawings, the more I was able to produce three to four portraits drawings in a week. And I was taking more drawings to the class for corrections than the other students. I rapidly made improvements as I draw more often. As time would have it, I improved a lot and my fellow students start looking up to me for the secrets of my drawings. I was asked one day by someone in the same class with me, how did you learn so fast?  I remember telling him, that I will show him the printed out pictures of the so amazing pencil portraits that is pasted on the wall of my room. That is where I get the ideals, which I hold in my mind always. And with this I came here to learn and practice these ideas which are been explained by our art master, just as we used to call him.

Secondly, how you respond to every situation in your life determines your progress in life. But first, you have to realize that your responses are determined by your interpretation of every circumstance in and out of your environment, and that is to say, what does failure and success mean to you. Does it mean that when someone fails she has stopped to moving forward in life? You may have perhaps heard about how the famous light bulb inventor, Thomas Edison answered the press reporter who asked him, “ Sir, I heard you failed 9,999 times, the reporter asked; and he replied the reporter, my friend, I did not fail 9,999 times, I only knew how not to create a light bulb 9,999 times. Like I said earlier, if only we keep the best in mind it will indicate a green light that we have not reached our desired goal and must move on. 

It is this manner of humility in reacting to failure that will open up new methods of attaining our ideal goals. And having an open mind could make us see our present success as a stepping stone to another greater height of excellence. At every level of success I would rightly agree that success breeds success. It is just like plucking a mango fruit from a mango tree and plating it to grow as another mango tree; this is what I call “real progress in life.” 

When you reach the top of any endeavor in life you better help others to reach theirs also or as well as you too still making your life a continuous learning and progress. You learn new ways of not only staying at the top but also new approaches of building to another top. But it is only your best interpretation of what success and failure means to you as you move on in life that will surely determines, how you response to every good and bad situations that happens in and out of your environment.

Knowing that the wisdom of life is a lesson that could be in disguised either as a success or a failure found in every event we encounter. It is only when you realize this fact that you would not want to give any disdain attitude towards failure event; instead you would treat it with respect because it could be enlightenment that can guide you to success.  

However, wisdom tells you to keep, keeping on in life because, opportunities are changing ceaselessly. So your interpretation of things too should change, based on your excellence oriented mindedness. Just as an Olympic 200 meter athlete record breaker champion would not rest on her heels because of her new feat, but would gladly practice harder to beat it again next time himself or someone else would do it. So all hands should be on deck at all times, be it success or failure as the case may be. Of course, we have been accustomed to celebrate only success, though I have no reservations about this, but with a truer interpretation, success is only a finer or refined wisdom gotten from failure. So, failure should also be appreciated and celebrated especially when it leads to success. More so, the only few most successful people that know the true value of failure appreciate it more than the majority. Just as mentioned earlier about Thomas Edison, who regards failure as a sign post that shows him this is the wrong path to follow and so he should change his path.

Moreover, this leads us to the final step of making a meaningful life progress which to change your strategy whenever you see the failure sign post. You must use a new or another plan when you find out too well enough that you are failing backward and not failing forward like our inventor mentioned earlier. 

Take for instance, for every single step that you take forward, you move two steps backwards. Let’s do some background check. Let’s say you take 100 steps forward and for each single step forward you take two steps backwards, so, 100 steps forward, 200 steps backward. Now with your calculator press 100 – 200 = -100. This means you are now 100 steps backwards from your starting point. That is to say, it is better to change your approach wisely and take meaningful or gainfully steps. To do this you have to take time to reflect, mostly in quiet before going to bed at night or sometimes in your quiet or private office during a particular hour of the day. Mark out those areas of your life that are pulling you down on the left and the areas that are making meaning the right.

A change of strategy may require giving up the old way of thinking. Just as the famous quote says, “you cannot put a new wine into an old wine skin” because it will tear or burst on the floor. So, when you seek a new way of thinking it affords you to leave the former way of acting which has been nothing but detrimental to your progress in life. I don’t know exactly what it might be right now, but you deal with it wisely. 

This radical approach could be fast while on the other hand it could take time to finally transit to the new paradigm shift. It does not matter when the physical shift takes place, but what much matters is finding out if you are failing forward or backward. And now with a new thinking cap you have to forge ahead.

For each step taken demands well predetermined, excellent oriented value with a healthy mind set of failure circumstances that could be of great value.

I may not have to arrange in any particular order or form these core values that have been our main course of discussion so far. But I will have to just bring all of them in a summary this way. When you have the best always in mind, followed by asking yourself to know and check how you interpreted what failure and success means to you then finally, you must be ready to change you old plan to an efficient and forward going plan for  a meaningful progress in life.