There’s No Gain Without Its Accompanying Pain

For many of us, we seem to have come to the conclusion that the development we want in our country and the subsequent changes we must effect to see it manifest in our time is nothing but wishful thinking. This is evident in the manner in which we tackle many of the challenges that we are faced with daily. 

We seem to have so given up on our nation attaining the standards we see in other nations we admire that we go as far as thwarting the good intentions of those who might even consider trying to fix it. What a shame! It’s like throwing in the towel in the fight to reap the fruits of the promised land by convincing ourselves that it is unachievable and then vehemently opposing those who think it is. We not only fight the opponent but turn around to fight the coach and the referee as well!

I have mentioned this in many interviews in the past that I wasn’t born with a silver spoon, but my success in life is greatly based on the fact that I never saw myself as an under-achiever nor a failure. There was this overwhelming enthusiasm in me to strive towards success that I didn’t relax enough to wallow in my immediate and depraved situation at the time. I simply pressed forward towards what I had constantly visualized, and my body and all my efforts were programmed to respond, not to my limiting reality, but to my visualized reality. I wasn’t going to be daunted by the situations and lack that I was experiencing, but my visualized reality was the force that compelled me to achieve the seemingly unreachable goals that I had set before me. 

I wasn’t qualified as an actress, but I had the desire, and that desire gave birth to the zeal to train myself in the art so that I can become the actress I am today. When I say I wasn’t qualified, I mean that I wasn’t born acting from my mother’s womb. I didn’t intuitively become an actress. The interest (desire) must first be present, which is then followed by the action (training), and then the fruit of that labour towards the attainment of the objective was made manifest. I was always part of the school and church drama; I never tried to be all things. Meaning, I tried to do sports but realized early my lack of zeal, and hence, my lack of fruit in that area. 

I was dedicated to writing, directing and producing drama whilst still in primary and secondary school. My dedication has now been made manifest in the performances that many of you get to watch on your screens globally. 

My zeal and dedication would have amounted to nothing if there was no medium to express it. It would have been the case with many people around the world today who have a dream to be recognized for the talent they have been nurturing, but no movie industry to give them the release. 

I thank God that while I was busy honing my skills in acting, writing and directing, others were busy preparing the stage for my talent to see the light of day. These are the men who didn’t stop because of their own situations and circumstances and wallow in their misfortune, but they took up the challenge to find newer and more profitable ways to bring this product, today called Nollywood, to the rest of the world. Living In Bondage became the first fruit of that vision and today the rest of us are riding in the wagon because they had the magnanimity to invest their energy into starting the engine. We are on the roll, and gaining momentum daily as the wagon’s engine is being renewed with better and more skillful materials to keep it running, and running faster. 

How do we draw a parallel with the complaining attitude of many? We must be clear on what we desire, then we can begin to envision the outcome and begin to set goals that are tailored towards achieving those desires. Success didn’t happen to me overnight (not that it’s impossible), and so we should work hard towards making our dreams come true. There’s no way around hard work, and many times when we do get what we desire without the necessary work, it seems to slip from our hands as easily as it first came. 

With hard work, character is also built into the individual, group or nation, because there is also a blessing in the process of attaining our goals. We can sit around and believe enough that it would and could not be possible to see our nation succeed, but others see it. They come in daily to reap from where we as landlords should be reaping. We can fold our hands and point accusing fingers at someone else, blaming them for our woes, or we can begin to train and expand our perspective so that we too can attain to those lofty heights that we have come to envision. 

There’s no gain without its accompanying pain. The gain is the anaesthesia that dulls the pain towards attaining it, and the pain is the rock (the strong character) that gives our dreams the needed foundation to build and also appreciate what we have and can accomplish through dedicated effort. I would love to be at the top of my game without any effort, but I’m also aware of the tremendous education that I’ve gotten from the pains I went through and still going through to be at the top of my game. 

This zeal becomes contagious so that many other star actors and actresses continue to deliver their best so that they don’t get left behind while others are improving. So it may feel good to get to the top without effort but there’s a good chance that when you do get there, you would feel like an impostor and end up making the mistakes others would recognize form afar, because they went through and welcomed the process of getting there. 

So let’s stop the negativity and start seeking the positive things in ourselves and in our nation, knowing that the desire and the effort needed to transform our nation lies solely with us by the grace of God.