Attitude is everything

Yesterday was May Day. A day set aside for workers to relax, reflect and rededicate themselves to work for the advancement of humanity and justify their earnings. We salute the Ghanaian worker whose toil and sweat have kept us afloat despite all the challenges.

While saluting workers, we urge them to consider a serious matter before us all. The question of the attitude towards work especially what has become a cliché for public service work – ‘Obi adwuma’ to with someone else’s work.

We cannot afford to see the duties and demands imposed on us as workers as someone else’s duty or responsibility. No progress is made with that attitude. We must work as though we had no time left at all. We must be in a hurry as the President admonished at his investiture.

We share in the advice Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr gave some five decades ago that “If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

It does not matter what one does as it would matter how one does what they do. Duty calls on all workers to rise to the occasion to be called or addressed properly so – WORKERS! Workers who would abhor laziness, greed and procrastination. Workers who in humility would challenge authority and put right that which would save the public purse. Workers whose strength would be their commitment, dedication, honesty and industry, NOT petty partisan connections.

There are many academically endowed persons who acquire the best of grades from colleges and institutions of learning. Yet when they enter the job market, they find themselves in discomfort because at the work place, it is not merely about intellectual display. It requires discipline of thought, flexibility to relate and adapt to new environments and persons.

Our disrespect for time must give way to punctuality and strict adherence to timelines. In today’s information age, time is everything. It waits for no man. But men of purpose and plan work time to their advantage. What our forebears did with one year can be done today with the aegis of technology. All we need is to employ and submit to the freely flowing tide of time heeding every command it gives. Hurry, Hurry, Hurry, Hurry. There is no time left.

Engineer, Doctor, Lawyer, Teacher, Pastor, Mason, Carpenter, Electrician, Mechanic, Tailor, Seamstress, Baker, Student, Judge, Politician, Minister, Chief Executive, Law Maker, President, Speaker of Parliament, Chief Justice, Police IGP, Army Commander, Chief of Defence Staff, Citizen; Remember that your skill, beauty, eloquence, may take you to the proverbial marriage but it is your conduct that would determine a successful stay or otherwise.