Guest post by @crystalll; how ready are you?(his story)

I spend a minimum of 10 hours in front of my laptop every day. This number gets up to 14 on some days. In this time, I work, I write articles, stories, scripts and other stuff and I read so many things, from books to news websites to literary magazines. I write pitches to editors and proposals, come on Facebook in between to fight, I eat and of course try to have a social life.

A few days ago, I shared a huge win I once had with someone and this person said, “Oh you’re very lucky.” While it was not at all said in a denigrating manner, I am nonetheless averse to the school of thought that success is ever a product of luck. Especially because I believe this narrative dismisses the place for hard work.

I do not believe in luck. I do not believe anyone comes out of nowhere. I have rejections upon rejections piling my email and I do not tell you about them. Lol. I am never really comfortable with sleeping at night because I feel there’s something else I should be doing with that burst of energy. The best time to reach me is between 12am and 7am, I am always available.

I regard process. I trust and respect it. I think it an absolute honour to come from a place of desiring something to a place of actually having it, I think it’s the only way to appreciate what you have because you know what the absence feels like. What is life without process?

Pastor Steven Furtick shared once about a keyboardist in his church who had years before as nobody played to his messages on the internet, no connection to Pastor Steven and now here he was at the actual Elevation Church.

Zain Asher revealed in her TEDx talk how she got into CNN as a finance reporter. She had randomly met a staff from CNN who invited her for an interview for a finance opening and with such short notice that he was worried about how she would perform. But Zain had spent an entire year in the library every day reading up on finance without any prompt of a possible job at all, long hours so much so the librarians knew her because she was always the last to leave.

What we call luck might be the assembling of chance and preparedness, it might be that occurrence in which someone who had been geared up the entire time “luckily” happened on an occasion for which he had been prepared, but it is not the good fortune that meets an unworthy person, maybe in a lottery yes, but never in the game of life.

Earlier this year when I was on Rave TV, I remember the anchor telling me he liked how soft spoken I was and my friend said he didn’t think I’d be so calm on TV. I simply laughed it off then because I didn’t have a reply.

I do have one now however and I was calm simply because I was ready, I’ve been on TV so many times before in my head, I’ve been ready my whole life.