On the road to success there are people who appoint themselves as ‘officers of doom’. These are the people who stand on the side of the road, pull people over and tell them why their dreams will not come true, why they won’t arrive at their destiny, why their business model won’t work and why their proposed project plan won’t succeed.

Sometimes they are family members, sometimes they are trusted friends, sometimes it is even the prospect themselves.
Personally, I have experienced all of these scenarios. I have experienced them so much that I have gotten to the point that I really believe that some people are delusional about their prophetic abilities. I mean, some people will cling to their ‘Doubting-Thomas’ status even when they can see that you are proving them wrong.

I find the human spirit such a stubborn gift, I call it ‘spirit’ because I really do believe that what we have in us is a super-natural being, that dares to believe even when the odds are stacked against it. I think it was the human spirit that lead people like the Jennifer Hudsons of this world, to rise above criticisms at the highest levels. It is the human spirit that spurred people like Tiger woods back to world number one, after he had fallen so high from grace. And it may even be that this is the same resilient spirit that got people like Nomzamo Mbatha (the lover of my soul, the one who warms the cockles of my heart) to rise to such stardom after losing the MTV Base VJ search.

The human spirit is funny, every time you tell someone that they will not do it, even though the mind, surroundings, statistics and current situation of the person may agree with you. The laws of logic, mathematics and economics may very well agree with you but if the law of the human spirit doesn’t agree with you, then you’ve got another thing coming.

This spirit refuses to let Doubting Thomas’s have the final say on peoples’ dreams. It refuses to let naysayers have the final word, or the professional pessimists have the last laugh.

So I have a word of strategic advice that Sun Tzu neglected to put in his military strategy manual, ‘The Art of War’, if you really want an adversary to fail, or a foe to fluster…please, for God-sake, do not add fuel to his fire by telling him he won’t make it, you are just causing trouble for yourself.
-SGM