Inspiration - Education

Inspiration -  Education

By Nikki Viljoen of N Viljoen Consulting (Pty) Ltd

Today’s quote comes from Oscar Wilde who said “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”

Well ain’t that the truth.  Most of the biggest lessons that we learn in life comes from experience.  Having said that, I am often astounded by the fact that some people feel that it’s necessary to ‘experience’ every single lesson that they think that they need to learn!  How sad!  It is written somewhere (I’m sure) that we are permitted to learn from the experiences of others from time to time.  Then of course there are some people who live life furiously and actually never even get the plot!  Shame, that must be very frustrating (depending of course if they understand that they have missed the boat completely!)

For me this is about being a mentee and a mentor.  It is really important for me to have someone in my life that I can learn some of life’s lessons from and it is equally important for me to be someone in someone else’s life to guide and help them learn life’s lessons.  It’s about giving back to the Universe.  We can’t always just be the taker’s, we also need to give back.

My mentor is a  lady by the name of Vanessa Paige, and she, in my opinion, is absolutely fantastic!  She tells it exactly like it is and although I often don’t really want to hear what she has to say, I absolutely need to hear it.  She doesn’t pull any punches and she has saved me years and years of living some of life’s hardest knocks.

Vanessa has also taught me how to take care of myself (and I don’t mean with my fists), teaching me about things like ‘self worth’ and ‘confidence in my own abilities’ and so on.  These are definitely things that you don’t learn in any book, but are intrinsically valuable to the human soul.

Some of these ‘life lessons’ are extremely hard for me to learn and as I struggle with my own personal demons, I am often aware that she is standing quietly in the wings, just waiting patiently for me to grasp and embrace the lesson.  I know that she is always there to help pick me up and dust me off, when I fall over, and without her this journey we call life would have been very different and way more difficult.  For that I will always be grateful and I can only hope that I am the kind of mentor to my mentee’s that she has been mentor to me!  What a challenge that is, and how self rewarding it will be when I get it right.

So to all of you out there I say, embrace life’s lessons and then ‘play it forward’ and teach it to others.

Live life, Love life and embrace your own uniqueness.

Nikki is an Internal Auditor and Business Administration Specialist who can be contacted on 083 702 8849 or nikki@viljoenconsulting.co.za .