The race may not be for the swift but it sure is for the optimists

After that golden touch at the Olympics, I’m not sure we shall tire talking about Stephen Kiprotich soon. I have read everything about the latest sensation and have concluded he is Uganda’s living number one optimist. This means he has always believed and nurtured his desire to become great.

“I want to be a legend. I want to be great and I know I can achieve it,” he told sports journalists in March. This is the optimism and self-belief I’m talking about. It’s the kind of optimism that has the endorsement of God since the Bible says a man is what he thinks. You think destiny owes you greatness, it sure does. You think you are an unlucky wretch who will never get anywhere in this life and sure you will rotate in one place and miserably watch your friends get ahead.

Impossibility may be just a word in the dictionary but it is very destructive if you give it a chance. Equally, it will flee from whoever rejects it. Inspirational writer Robert Schuller captures how devastating this “impossibility” word can be when uttered aloud: thinking stops, progress halts, doors slam shut, projects are abandoned, dreams discarded and the “brightest and the best of the creative brain cells nosedive, clam up, hide out, cool down, and turn off in some dark, subterranean corner of the mind…

“But, let someone utter the magic words ‘it’s possible’, Schuller writes on, “Those stirring words, with the siren appeal of a marshalling trumpet, penetrate into the subconscious tributaries of the mind, challenging and calling those proud powers to turn on and turn out new ideas! Buried dreams are resurrected. Sparks of fresh enthusiasm flicker, then burst into new flame…”

It is what happened to Kiprotich during that climactic marathon. The moment the word possibility penetrated his mind, his brains went to work and helped him at that bend to break away while his enthusiasm doubled, and there was nothing his challengers could now do to stop him.

This is as real on the running track as it is in life. Achievement is not dependent on present circumstances, but on drive and the positive conviction that we can make it. Greatness is a lover of optimists, not pessimists. When you keep hope glimmering even in the midst of the rot and the betrayal, against all the odds, you will do things others have long given up on, and you’ll be a gold medallist in this race we call life.