Discover Yourself: Keys to Maximizing Your Strengths and Minimizing Your Weaknesses

By Cally Cussons

DISCOVER YOURSELF is a captivating book by a man who had every raw material to manufacture excuses and give up on life. Having challenged his challenges, the author indirectly relives his challenges and shares how he conquered them. The book vividly gives you practical and proven strategies on how to conquer yourself and achieve success in all areas of your life. Discover Yourself helps the reader make practical sense of the seeming conundrum called life. The reader immediately fi nds answers to these questions: Why? Why Not? Why Not Me? Why Not Now? The principles enunciated in this book are novel, yet timeless, and fundamental. The principles turn your ideas into results, your end of the road to a bend in the road, and your obvious disadvantage to advancement. It turns the reader from a chameleon taking colour from the environment to a painter putting colour in the environment. This book teaches that life is a wrapped gift. It also shows the reader how to unwrap the gift successfully.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jul 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496985866

Cally Cussons

Cally Cussons, PhD, was hit with poliomyelitis when he was a year old. Crawling on all fours, life was very difficult growing up in a developing country under a harsh environment, which forced him to learn early in life that he was not like other humans. To walk aided with crutches and calipers, he had to undergo seven orthopaedic surgeries. But he has, through some strategic Life-Skills and Management-Skills that can be learnt by any willing mind, conquered his challenges to build a compelling identity for himself. He knows that all things are possible to those who believe. He is a university academic, motivational philosopher, high performance coach, songwriter, singer, and management consultant. He is the president of Sean Cussons Business School and chairman of Sean Cussons Consulting Group. Cally travels the world teaching the strategic principles that he distilled from God’s word, which turned him from a very ordinary disabled person (VODP) to a very, very important person (VVIP). He is married to Desire CallyCussons, and they are blessed with children. He is a highly sought-after speaker/trainer/consultant in strategy, personal development, idea generation and critical thinking, both nationally and internationally. All to the glory of God (Phil. 4:13).

Book preview

Prologue

If we want to become great, we must determine to

expose ourselves to great books and great people.

Their input will influence our growth more than

anything else.

—John C. Maxwell

The importance of reading good books cannot be overemphasized. Seventeenth-century philosopher, mathematician, and scientist Rene Descartes says, The reading of good books is, as it were, to engage in talk with their authors, the finest minds of past ages, artfully contrived in which they give us more but the best and most sweet of their thought. This book was never written as an object of abstract philosophizing, vacuous theorizing, or sentimental theologizing. Practice and action are its mood and intention. You may discover some departures from conventions in this book, especially in the areas of thought sequences, diction, terms, concepts, and perhaps in a few coinages. Let us not allow them to distract us. All conventions were once ‘unconventional’. You too may be the potential founder of tomorrow’s conventions.

If we discover who we are at present from this book, it will be wonderful if we moved from who we are to who we ought to be or who we were created to be. Constructive planning and hard work go a long way in constructing our fates and futures. The Book told us this in the first chapter and first verse: In the beginning, God created … (emphasis mine). This means that God started the beginning by working and working hard for that matter. However, most of us who claim that we are his children rather than working hard are waiting for manna from heaven. Well, these ones may as well wait forever for the manna that will never fall. We should examine ourselves for disability if at any point in our lives we find ourselves in any place where a human saviour is needed and we are not able to do anything. Dare to prove yourself a human among humans, for all humans are not human; if all humans were human, our world would not have had a need for men and women.

You may know everything offhand, but until you apply what you know, you cannot become your knowledge. There is a great interference between knowledge and action, which you alone can conquer. Napoleon Hill, the bestselling author of Think and Grow Rich, says, Education does not consist in knowing everything in your head but in what you do with what you know. The moral laxity and decadence we experience in our society today do not arise from the fact that we lack the knowledge of what ought to be done or what should be done, only in who is willing to do what should be done. In our contemporary society, almost everybody is hero in words but zero in actions. What we need to better our society is for you and I to do all the good we truly can, whenever we truly can and wherever we truly can.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to identify real role models. All we have are sinful saints whose sins are that they are afraid to speak out for the truth for fear of death. But Martin Luther King Jr said, A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live. As Edmund Burke puts it, All it takes for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing. Putting it slightly different, Abraham Lincoln points out, To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men. Epictetus said, Only the educated are free, but even a careless observer knows that this wise saying does not hold true for today’s society. Among the educated and indeed in our Ivory Towers, we have a greater number of those in bondage because they know the truth but are afraid and/or unwilling to defend the truth. The Holy writ tells us that the truth shall set us free, but the truth we know and refuse to act on will instead put us in an underground prison.

Machiavellianism as a philosophy of ‘get whatever you can, however you can, for the end justifies the means’, as enthroned in today’s cultures, has inverted morality. Society seems to be going topsy turvydom. The youths of today, who are supposedly the leaders of tomorrow, have nothing to make even the least critical observer optimistic about tomorrow. Virtue has since been replaced by vice. While the virtuous is now a social misfit, the vicious has since become the real thing.

Our inability to make a positive difference in our society results mostly from false self-discovery. This is the inability to discover ourselves properly. This is true because if you know who you really are, you should know who you are not. If you know who you are not, you will know who you ought to be – and you will go ahead becoming that. Naturally, if someone asks you, Who are you? it tends to be an insult. But it is one of the commonest but hardest questions, where a conscientious answer is difficult to come by. The truth, however, remains that without a conscientious answer to the question, many things, if not all things, will seldom be right.

Hardwork, diligence, perseverance, prudence, courage, boldness, persistence, and other such positive virtues are important factors; in fact, we should never neglect these factors in our lives. They have a lot to contribute to who we become. We must refuse to see anything from the spectacle of impossibility. About 95 per cent of those we call great people, past and present, were ones who refused to take no for an answer. They stubbornly and continually demanded their fairer share from nature. Robert Kennedy captures the mindset of great people in what this book calls his stubborn maxim: Some men see things as they are and ask ‘why?’ But I dream things that never were and I ask ‘why not?’ Experience has taught me that most situations we nickname impossibilities are merely mindsets, with no actual foundation in reality. The mind can build; the mind can destroy depending on its set.

I consider myself a living example to the testimony that we can become our dreams if we positively dare. I was hit with poliomyelitis when I was a little over a year old. Growing up in a developing country was extremely difficult, if not tortuous. I crawled on all fours on bare hands and ate with the same unwashed hands. Life seemed miserable, and I considered suicide severally. But when I changed my mindset about my physical disability, I discovered that life is full of opportunities. We just need to be sensitive enough to pick up on the signals of these opportunities because they do not always present themselves as such; they even present themselves as adversities most times. I hope to have enough space to discuss more about the life skills and management skills I leveraged on to move from a very ordinary disabled person (VODP) to a very, very important person (VVIP).

In all we do, it is important that our actions and inactions are beneficial to our generation in particular and to the humanity of all generations in general. Any goal or success that does not benefit humanity positively in the end; any goal or success which flagrantly breaks moral rules or principles cannot be the real goal or success. Because life as lived can be paradoxical and more engaging than theories, the immediate preceding assertion could be a beaconlight in our daily activities.

As I humbly but enthusiastically welcome you aboard this flight, Discover Yourself, I must emphasize that self-discovery is self-recovery. A self-discovered man is a step away from his paradise. Life here on Earth can be vanity upon vanity, but you do not live to ‘vanitize’ yourself. As it were, God’s own heaven is paved with gold; it will surely never have rooms for vanities. So those who are desirous of it must make positive meaning out of their earthly lives. A self-discovered person dies empty, expending all his potentials.

As the ancient Chinese proverb says:

He who knows, and knows that he knows is a Wiseman, seek him.

He who knows, and knows not that he knows is asleep, wake him.

He who knows not, and knows that he knows not is a child, teach him.

He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool – shun him!

This book thinks that a Wiseman is he who knows, knows that he knows, and puts to positive use what he knows that he knows he knows. Like Tai Tung writing on Chinese history, yours truly joins him in acknowledging this truth: Were I to await perfection, my book would never be published. Just make yourself comfortable aboard this flight. Loosen your belt and steady yourself. I can’t wait to see you inside.

From me with love,

Cally Cussons, PhD

Chapter One

False Self-Discovery

Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what

each man wishes,