After I graduated from University, I started working for this consultancy firm – a very good company with a list of world-class clients.
I found some folks there who had been with the company, 10, 15, 20 years.
They were good at their job and I felt I could learn a lot from them.
But I also noticed something from many of them, they appear to have come to the end of their career progression.
Whether they just accepted their positions, or the company offered no opportunities for further career progression or they had lost any motivation for seeking to climb up the ladder any further, I saw folks who seemed frustrated especially about a situation that they felt they could not change.
In those folks, I saw myself in 20 years.
I told myself, 20 years on & I will be exactly like one of these folks.
So I told myself, I am not going to spend the next 20 years going through the motions of life in order so I can discover what I already know today.
I decided to do things differently. Instead of pursuing a corporate ladder, I decided to form my own consultancy company and build it up – the best decision I made.
The point of this is to say, in Zambia, we don’t seem to take life lessons seriously.
It is often the case that we all know the destination of the path we are on.
Even when dealing with political leaders, it is often the case that we know that this collection of leaders will not take us where we want to be.
It is often the case that we know exactly what our lives will look like in 5, 10 or 20 years but still we allow ourselves to go through life’s motions to get to a place we knew we would be years before, which is often the same place we were some years ago.
The essence of life on earth is that we are supposed to adapt, take lessons from our previous engagements or the engagement of those who have gone before us and alter our course and do things differently.
When I was young my elder brother said to me *_”he who can not learn must endure.”_*
I have found that to be universally true and in Zambia, we have become a people who have to endure a miserable existence because we simply refuse to learn – especially so entrenched in our ways even given irrefutable evidence that our ways have failed.
– Given Chansa