CHAPTER 1
Mound Hills Are Easy To Climb
If you find yourself comfortable leading an easy life, it's a pointer that you cannot do anything outstanding in your life time; this is because very many people are attracted to doing the easy things in life. Consequently, there is no room for greatness.
The hallmark for greatness is the dissatisfaction in doing easy tasks.
Great minds enjoy attempting what small minds see as difficult or impossible.
This word of wisdom is very true about hard and easy tasks, when you get used to harder tasks, hard tasks become easy, but when you get used to easier tasks, easy tasks will become hard. Life in itself, though simple, it's not easy. Therefore, loving to do things only when it's easy, will not count in life.
This is why you should ignore the mound hill. From a great distance afar, you could still see a man who has climbed to the top of a mountain, but the man on top of a mound hill goes out of sight at a little distance away.
If you prefer to always do easy tasks in life, you will remain undeveloped.
It takes little effort to recognize a man when he is walking alone, than when he is walking in the crowd. Easy life is already crowded, you will not be noticed living it. I agree with Theodore Roosevelt when he said that "nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty".
One of the early signs of mediocrity is loving to do easy tasks. We limit our potentials when we shift difficult tasks to others and choose the easy ones.
An easy life is a worthless life.
"I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life", said Theodore Roosevelt.
I can't agree less with T. Harv Eker who said in his paradoxical quote that "If you are willing to do only what’s easy, life
will be hard. But if you are willing to do what's hard, life will be easy."
In the animal, and also the plant kingdom, overcrowding brings about grievous consequences like death. The same thing happens to the people who choose to stay at the overcrowded plain of easy life, instead of diving into the deep of challenging life where they could find many variety of fishes - they stay on the plain, and fight for crabs.
Today, people, for their want of easy life, look for shortcuts to greatness, but there's no such thing like that. It's unrealistic. Any destination a shortcut gets you, can't be greatness but mediocrity.
There are no shortcuts to any place worth
going, said Beverly Sills.
I have not heard of any human, who was honored for what everyone else could do. But I have heard of many who won Nobel Prizes for doing what no one else had done before. It's in your hands either to easily get to the top of a mound hill, or struggle to the mountain top.
Learn from the wise fish who counselled her children that easy to find food is usually a bait.