No quick fixes in life

Life is all about building. Some are building careers. Others are building businesses while some are building marriages. Some are building families.  Some are building physical structures but the truth is everyone is engaged in building one thing or the other. Any building that will last will involve certain processes.

Anything we are building demands putting parts and things together to form a complete whole. Any building should by reason of common sense be built on a solid foundation. A foundation is the base and lowest support upon which a structure rests.

The quality and strength of the foundation is a great determinant of what kind of structure that can be built. The recent cases of collapsed buildings is primarily due to trying to build what the foundation is not designed to carry. You cannot build a three story building on a foundation designed to carry a bungalow.

Foundations are designed and built to carry weight and to handle pressure.

“The higher the skyscraper you want to build, the stronger foundations you need. Without strong foundations, the skyscraper will collapse sooner or later. It’s the same with achieving your goals in life. The more ambitious goals you have, no matter in which area of life, the stronger foundations you’ll have to build.

The secret to setting strong foundations lies in Bruce Lee’s quote:

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10000 times.” Building strong foundations is a process. It takes patience and time, and you must do all the boring work over and over again. The skyscraper that everyone admires is the final result. Without the process, there is no final result. We all want the final result without the process. We all want our skyscraper without putting the effort into building it floor by floor and even more than that: we want it without setting strong foundations. Because it’s hard to set strong foundations. Extremely hard. But without strong foundations, without putting in the effort to build firmly floor by floor, there is no skyscraper to admire. At least not in the long-term.” Blaz Kos

Building a foundation has certain features and characteristics. To build any foundation one must dig into the ground. It takes digging deep. The deeper the foundation the stronger it will be. Usually a deep foundation is designed to carry a tall building. Whatever we want to build will demand digging deep and what we dig and the depth of what we dig will be determined by what we want to build. We must dig deep to acquire as much knowledge as we can on what we want to build.

A shallow foundation is no good for a great building. Great expense must be expended to build a solid foundation but the irony of the matter is that once the foundation is finished it is covered up. A foundation is not designed to be seen. It is the hidden structure that sustain the visible structure which everyone admires. The beauty and majesty of any building is powered by the unseen foundation on which it stands.

Whatever we are building must be powered by the unseen ground work we have put into our foundation. An athlete who wins the Olympic gold medal is envied for the glitz and glamour but whatever glory of the medal presentation ceremony was the result of the hidden years of preparation and hard-work . A student who gets an award for academic excellence has put in many hidden hours of study.

The quality of our preparation will determine the quality of our manifestation. There are no quick fixes.