Potentiality Digest: The Demands of Meeting Your Standards

By Sodeeq Abdulakeem Sulyman

Every time we set targets and when we reach those targets, there will be a need for us to set another target. That’s how true growth happens. True growth demands raising your head to look ahead of yourself and do everything nobly possible to reach that stage and when you look down again, you could tell yourself how you have been when you were living a life that was below your worth. Great people task themselves to gradually shift from the life they have to the life they want.

That is what you have to realise. For every life is not going to remain the same. If you are not ready to move, life will move you. That is why it is important to cultivate the habit of setting standards for yourself and develop the mindset of sticking to the demands of the standards you have set. The truth is, when you set a standard, you give yourself a yardstick to evaluate yourself, to know whether you are getting it right or wrong.

However, it should be noted that setting standards is not the problem. The problem is meeting the standards you have set; holding yourself responsible and accountable to do what you are expected to do to elevate your game and position yourself for the opportunities you think you deserve. Henry Ukazu submitted that “When you decide to change, you are setting yourself up for growth. Whilst a change can happen overnight, growth always takes time.”

Some people have lost the tracks of their life because they failed to meet up to their standards. When you check the template for their life, there is every indicator that they have standards, but they don’t progress because they don’t hold on to their standards. Instead of empowering themselves to sustain their standards, they are distracted by the noises around them. They are unaware of Gbenga Adebambo’s caution that “Until you become the most important person in your own life, you would be useless to every other person.”

Suleimon Olanrewaju says, “The higher a person goes in life the better positioned he is to serve others.” This is to tell you that when you continuously meet your standards, your life will turn to a double-edged sword where one is meant for you and the other is meant for other people to benefit from you The first thing you should understand in meeting your standards is to know that the cross falls on you, to know that people only come to you because they know they would gain something from you and when you stop meeting their expectations, they would look elsewhere to get what they want!

No one ever amounts to a person of value by not striving to hold on to their standards. Everyday, they stretch to task themselves to be operating at a level that leaves them in awe of themselves. They knew that it may not be easy. But because they have known that inconsistency is not consistent with the life of the great, they remain steadfast in sustaining the values they have inculcated and nourishes their beliefs of the life they dream.

Every pedestal you are on is meant to lift you to a new level of your life. But you can only reach that level when you see that pedestal as an avenue for you to do more and become more, not a venue for you to be stuck in mediocrity. Tope Popoola asserted that “A successful life is not so much about what you achieved but what you become in the process.”