Avoid shortcuts and stick to the path of greatness and integrity.
Shortcut means a route that is shorter or more direct than the usual one. Although, shortcuts are faster, they may rob us of the lessons were are supposed to learn while passing along the usual way. If God wanted to, He could have created the world in one day, but He didn’t. Instead, He took His time in creating the world in six days in order to make a beautiful and perfect world for you and me. So many people want to be successful without taking the time and effort to learn the rudiments of achieving success. The truth is that, there is no shortcut to success. You have to work hard and be focused along a particular direction in order to succeed. Life itself, is one long journey with a final destination, we do not need to look for shortcuts that can lead to regret and compromise.
If you want to accomplish something worthwhile, it takes time and effort. The path to achieving greatness is more valuable than becoming great. The lessons of life are not learnt in one day or in a hurry, but over some length of time. Avoid taking shortcuts with your life!
Mark Zuckerberg in a speech, pointed out that it takes years and years of hard work and practice to make an idea successful, and that building a company or product like Facebook is just about determination and believing that you can do it. “There’s no shortcuts.”
Here is a story to buttress the futility of taking shortcuts. There were two great friends known as Paul and Tayo. They were both hardworking and intelligent. Paul wanted to be a mechanical engineer, and Tayo was interested in law. They gained admission into one of the foremost universities in Nigeria to read their careers of choice. Just about the tail end of their first year, Paul met a fellow engineering student who introduced him into ‘internet scam’. He made so much money duping innocent people, at a point he could not concentrate on his studies and so dropped out of the university and started leaving large in the society. Few years down the line, Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFFC), was clamping down on internet fraudsters, and Paul happened to be among those arrested. He was charged to court with glaring evidence of nefarious internet activities that caused the lives of some innocent people, and the presiding judge happened to be Justice Tayo Adebayo, his long forgotten childhood friend, who held on to his dream and persistently pay the price to get to the zenith of his law career. At the end of the case, Paul’s belongings were confiscated, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison with hard labour.
There is a price for taking shortcuts. Sometimes the price may be so terrible and irreversible. Whatever you wish for in life, invest your time and diligently obtain the desired result. Avoid shortcuts, it can only lead to regret and strife.
Lesson: ‘There is a way that seems right to a man, the end thereof is destruction.’ Shortcuts can shorten one’s destiny; avoid it, and endure the process of taking one step at a time towards your desired result in life.
