Late last year, on a private phone call with a group of friends, I shared something burning in my mind with them. It was along the lines of wisdom.
Firstly, what does the dictionary define wisdom as? I love Oxford’s definition of wisdom “the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgement; the quality of being wise.”
Focusing on experience and knowledge, those two are the highlights of the definition for me. Back to the conversation mentioned above, I had told these friends to hold on to wisdom, pursue it, search for it, and apply it. But more importantly, I concluded that in holding on to wisdom, they had to identify their teachers.
Teachers and wisdom? What is the correlation? Oh well! God is the connoisseur of wisdom, I agree. But wisdom resides in everyone. However, some people have an abundance of wisdom because of the two words highlighted earlier: experience and knowledge. In simple terms, what they have seen, what they have learnt, and what they know. So in identifying your teachers, you also identify those with the wisdom you need in your journey in life.
Two vital things identifying your teachers would do for you are:
- Shorten your learning time: Basically, you don’t have to learn all by yourself and go around in circles if you learn from someone with the right wisdom for you.
- Accelerate your accuracy: This one ehn, you get to avoid making certain mistakes by leveraging wise actions and mindsets to help you achieve your dreams, goals, and vision faster.
Before this article becomes an epistle, what do you need to do in identifying your teachers?
- Sit with yourself, find what calls for your soul. Identify your dream and the next thing you’d like to achieve in life. Better still, imagine and identify the future you.
- Prayerfully search through people who have walked a path similar to yours. And who walked the course doing the right things.
- Identify achievers who, when they speak they literally speak to your soul. People whose words and actions resound with your belief system and values.
Having done the above, there is just one thing left to do – FOLLOW! Follow their media pages and handles. Consume their resources. Attend their events, glean from their speeches. Simply follow and follow-through
Caveat: There are teachers for seasons and a lifetime, be careful to identify teachers for your season and teachers for your life on earth.
P.S: Viva La Vida