Inspirational Quotes for the WEEKEND

By Dr Charles Leyman Kachitsa

One area of study this author is interested in is on transferability of skills and processes from other entities including animals and sports to positive adoption for the behaviour and conduct of human beings. The statement that follows has been said a couples of times previously on this column and it\’s here revisited, that we can learn a lot from sports such as football.

Modern football game plans advocates for play to develop from \’history\’, moving on to the \’present\’, and onwards to the \’future\’. To understand this you need to first know that the usual set up of a team and therefore the game is divided into three sections of the football pitch. These may be called territories, but again modern football encourages each player in the team to have freedom of moving on to territories that are technically not theirs as to the position assigned. It requires multi-skilled players with ability to using both legs in all situations.

The football field is accordingly broken into these three as the back where usually you will locate the goalkeeper and the defenders, in our analogy that\’s the \’history\’. The centre is assigned to middle or centre players and that\’s our \’present\’, for the purposes of this write up. Further on the field of play for a team will normally be located the forwards also known as strikers whose sole purpose is to score goals though again in modern football that role may not be exclusive as it is combined with others such as causing menace to the goalkeeper of the opposition, time and again mocking the other team\’s defenders to wear them down psychologically.

My observation is that global successful big teams nowadays make sure to strengthen the centre, in our analogy, the \’Present\’. It is by strengthening the present that future goals can be achieved. A clearly strengthened middle/ centre field batch of players distributes proper balls for the future players who are the strikers to convert into goals. It is here at the centre, the \’Present\’, that most of the actions take place in any game, that separates the best from the poorer teams.

Of course strong modern football teams are also known not to shy away to going back to their history (back) in restarting play especially if they are being viciously challenged by their opponents and can not find passage to the future easily. All this is teaching us that, it is by paying more attention to our present undertakings that we can ensure a successful future, but of course now and again we have to look back to where we are coming from as our referent point and springboard. Indeed, when faced with challenges, quite often looking back to learn from our own past or from those who have overcome same experienced challenges before us, is the ideal thing to do.

The quotes this weeks are a continuation of teaching from the book whose author became respected in the field of understanding how individuals and nations make decisions on what they want. I am sure that the selected quotations below from this book will enlighten you to one or two life lessons. Read and enjoy:

THE WEALTH OF NATIONS by Adam Smith

\”In countries which are fast advancing to riches, the low rate of profit may, in the price of many commodities, compensate the high wages of labour, and enable those countries to sell as cheap as their less thriving neighbours, among whom the wages of labour may be lower.\”

\”A regulation which obliges all of the same trade in a particular town to enter their names and places of abode in a public register, facilitates such assemblies. It connects individuals who might never otherwise be known to one another, and gives every man of the trade a direction where to find every other man of it. —— A regulation which enables those of the same trade to tax themselves in order to provide for their poor, their sick, their widows and orphans, by giving them a common interest to manage, renders such assemblies necessary.\”

\”There are some sorts of rude produce which nature has rendered a kind of appendages to other sorts; so that the quantity of the one one which any country can afford, is necessarily limited by that of the other. The quantity of wool or of raw hides, for example, which any country can afford is necessarily limited by the number of great and small cattle that are kept in it. This state of its improvement, and the nature of its agriculture, again necessarily determine this number.\”

\”…  That that increase in the quantity of the precious metals, which arises in any country from the increase of wealth, has no tendency to diminish their value, I have endeavoured to show already. Gold and silver naturally resort to a rich country, for the same reason that all sorts of luxuries and curiosities resort to it; not because they are cheaper there than in poorer countries, but because they are dearer, or because a better price is given for them. It is the superiority of price which attracts them, and as soon as that superiority ceases, they necessarily cease to go thither.\”