A clean slate helped me attain what I considered to be a success

A good person once told me, "Success does not make you happy. A happy person is a successful person" and I have gone through life since then and realized he was right. I am almost always able to achieve the goals I set for myself when I am happy. This doesn't mean I am always happy or I don't have things that make me sad. No, but amid those events that may try to weigh me down, if I have one thing I am happy about and grateful for, I'll be able to move past the hurtful ones and move toward my goals.

But there are also goals that unhappiness had made me not able to achieve them. Those were instances that really proved that friend of mine was right about how emotions have a way of guaranteeing success and failure.

Little wonder, we are told to always do the things that make us happy, even if it's finding a job, choosing a career, or starting a business.

But even though all of these thought processes are important, it doesn't particularly answer the question, "At what stage do you feel you have attained what you set for yourself?"

My answer is simple and straight to the point. There's only one point. If I set goals and I can move the needle that opens up newer worlds then I consider myself a success.

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For example, when I was in my Senior Secondary School classes, I had difficulty getting it right with my Further Mathematics classes, teacher, assignments, tests, and exams. I failed those exams every term, I struggled to get the assignments right, and even the test questions usually looked like Greek to me.

But when I decided I have had enough and started taking concrete steps to understand that subject, a whole new world opened up to me. I decided I needed a clean and fresh start when I began buying the necessary textbooks, studying them, trying to answer a lot of questions about a particular topic, and using the textbooks and past questions. By doing this, I kept moving closer to understanding that subject and being good at it.

When our SS 2 exams came and I ace them, I did not still feel successful because I still had to battle the rest of the terms before our final WAEC. But the best thing that came out of this was that during my SS 2 exams, the questions did not look like Greek anymore. They were familiar questions with familiar steps to getting the solutions in my head.

You know, my Further Maths teacher had always told us one thing repeatedly, " When you study hard and you find those questions in your exams, that's luck, but that's the luck you prepared for", which marked the popular phrase, " When opportunity meets preparation, success is inevitable".

When I saw those questions, even though they weren't exactly like the past questions and textbooks I studied, they were familiar because I knew the steps I needed to take to arrive at the answers. All I needed was to merge different steps from different questions and finally build up an answer.

Well, that's exactly how Further Mathematics works, you have to go through several steps and lessons you learned perhaps in your general mathematics to get to the end. In short, it's almost as though the first three steps will always be Further Maths, and the rest will require a basic understanding of General Mathematics.

So if you are lacking in your General Mathematics, then that's where you will be shitting on yourself. My clean slate started when I decided to learn my General Mathematics well and not cut corners. Cutting corners was something my further maths teacher frown upon and so I tried to stay off those tracks.

However, passing my exams wasn't my definition of success. It was when the mere fact that I knew my Further Maths and Mathematics well-opened doors for me after school that I considered that a success. My Computer teacher took an interest in me after the exams and he gave me ICT training for free. This was how I was introduced to the world of Computers and Information Technology. This is the same ICT knowledge I used to earn money in the first months of this year when I decided to take up an offline job which I finally left behind me because it was conflicting with building my Hive account.

If I did not take that clean slate when I did, kept my head down, and learn my numbers well, I'll probably be stuck in life. The fact that I am not caught living in lack is a clear indication that I succeeded.