I know you might be a bit surprised at my advice. How can you advise me to be like the small ants? Of all the animals, you could only recommend the smallest. Yes, I emphasize this again, be like the ants.
The ants may be the smallest of all the animals but its features are really wonderful. If we humans can really emulate them, we will always find a way to navigate through the thick and thin of life.
What’s really special about the ants that made me recommend them?
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I’ll explain with these features that made up the ants – Agility, Network, Teamwork, and Savings. If you pick out the first letter of these four words, it summed up the ants.
- Agility
- Network
- Teamwork
- Savings
Let’s delve into these words and see how they help us as humans in our general ways of life.
- Agility – ants are known to be agile in spite of the size. Ants are not bothered or limited by their size. You will always find them going after something every time. Aa humas, the world out there is really intimidating. It’s like an uphill battle that everyone must climb to arrive at a particular destination. You’ll need to be agile irrespective of who you are. Nobody is ready to give you a chance until you prove that you deserve one. You have to climb the hills before you. Even when you face disappointment several times, you have to continue climbing. You must not stop if you want to make progress in this crazy world where everything normal is not normal.
- Network – they say your network is your net worth. Definitely, yes. In this present world, people want to work with people they know. People will only recommend people they know for jobs and political appointments. People will only stand to be a referee for people they know. Now my question to graduates – how strong is your network? This reminds me of a day, I was sitting on a couch when my eyes spotted a soldier of ants parading the wall. Out of curiosity, I stood up and followed the direction they were heading. I saw a dead cockroach they were trying to carry. Since a few of the ants couldn’t lift it, they had to send for others to help them. I was amazed at the power of networking these ants demonstrated. In a few minutes, they had broken down the cockroach into smaller parts and transported them home. Here’s what I deduced from what I saw, the ants have different types of professionals in their network. They have those who can help to carry food home, those that can break down food, those that can go out and look for food. How intelligent are these small creatures? What if we inculcate this into our daily lives?
- Teamwork makes the dream work. Back to the previous story, I shared above, the ants are good team players. I could still remember the ants trying to carry their food in and they got stuck at a particular point. The size of the food was quite bigger than the hole. They needed some sets of ants to come and join in the task. I was a bit curious to see how they will execute this task but to my surprise, they did exceedingly great. Their execution was down to team play. Each ant took responsibility and they took the food in. As humans, we are buried into unnecessary competition amongst ourselves. Some people want to be successful overnight because they want to impress and oppress some people who don’t even care about their existence. Isn’t it crazy?
- Savings – the ants work hard in the dry season and store up their food. They can foresee the future. When there will be rains and storms. They won’t come out. Instead, they will eat from their barns. Nigeria has a country is suffering from mismanagement. You look at the wealth of the country and nothing good to write about it. Scarcity and inflation have always been the order of the day. It’s time we all learn from the small ants.
Even the Bible commended them for their hard work and suggested that the lazy ones should go and learn from them. Though the ants may be small, the wisdom bestowed upon them is top-notch. How good our world will be if we practice the features of the ants in our day-to-day activities?