Kenya is renowned the world over, for its excellent performance in athletics and every marathon they take part in, everyone knows there will be a Kenyan in the top three. This trend has repeated itself so many times
until suspicions started being raised of there being some cheating but though there were a few instances of cheating, I believe the majority of Kenyan athletes, are clean.
I take Eliud Kipchoge as our case study. For the last six marathons, he has lost just once and since 2013, he has remained undefeated. Many may wonder how this happens. I was going through his training program and what I read surprised me. He religiously wakes up at 5:00am daily. Five days per week, he has
morning and afternoon training sessions. On the other two days, he has morning sessions. Every week, he covers between 200 to 240 kms.
Despite having made a lot of money and having a nice comfortable home, he shares a room with a training partner and he is humble enough to chop cabbages and even clean toilets in the training camp. Discipline is the
hallmark of his training program and he sticks to it at all times. He doesn’t allow his past success to come between his preparations for upcoming races.
When I went through all this information, I found some lessons that we could benefit from.:
- DISCIPLINE – For anyone that wants to be successful, discipline is key. You have to know what you want to do, set a program and no matter how tough things become, you stick to it to the end.
- HUMILILTY – If there is something that affects people, it is ego. Some people believe they are above doing certain things or chores. Many startups fail to
take off because those involved, think they are too qualified for certain things. They pay huge amounts of money to other people to do things which they themselves, could so easily have done, thus raising the cost of the operation. - COMPLACENCY – Avoid complacency. Many of us, once we do something and it becomes successful, we are then satisfied. We just rest there and make a bed there. There is no innovation or discovering ways in which we can improve our products or, services. However, we cannot use our past successes as a
The world is evolving fast and we have to learn to keep up or risk becoming irrelevant. - NETWORKS – Our networks are vital. Naturally, we tend to want to associate with those higher up which is okay but we need both those high up as well as those below. We need those above us to give us guidance and those below us for support. All people we meet in our lives have a major part to play in our progress so we should respect and recognize them all.
I hope we get something out of this for I believe many of us are hoping to become successful entrepreneurs in the future. My parting shot is this: nothing in life is valueless for everything has some value it carries with it. Even the garbage we see has some economic value. This same case applies to every single effort we put in our work, every piece of information, every single person we meet all have some value we can get out of them. Remember the successful are very committed students. They are constantly learning and improving on their knowledge. They try to learn something new every single day for they know it will be of great use in future. All of us can be successful but only those who act will ever actualise this. All the best from Mwangi.
