Ngozi Adebiyi: What Is Your Rainbow?

The rainbow is a natural phenomenon noted for its beauty and its place in the sky. Over the years, it has become a very important part of religion, culture and art.

Rainbows usually occur when sunlight and rain combine in a certain way. Hence, we can say rainbows are the effect of rain (the cause). Like a lot of phenomenon in life, the effect is what people see. Most of the time, the cause is in the background and could be easily overlooked.

Rainbows can be observed whenever there are water drops in the air and sunlight shining from behind the observer at a low altitude angle. Colours such as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet (depicted with the mnemonic ROYGBIV) can be seen by the human eye.

You see an athlete like Usain Bolt dashing through 100m in 9.58seconds and we celebrate the ‘effect’. We celebrate the ‘rainbow’ but might easily forget the more critical part of the journey – all the hard work, preparation and sacrifices that went into the pre-race season. That is the rain that makes the rainbow visible to all.

What is your rainbow? What is your rain? Remember, No rain no rainbow. What rainbow –those acts that show forth the beauty of your genius – might people be celebrating you for right now? What are you doing to sustain it and more importantly creating more rainbow experiences in your life?

How much time are you investing in the actions and deeds that create the rainbows in your life? Are you beginning to get lazy or commonise those crucial seasons of sowing the rights seeds to reap the desired harvests? Never forget, nothing just happens.

Dolly Parton captured the essence of this message when she said “the way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain”. Success or succeeding isn’t a fluke. It is certainly not a result of happenstance. Deliberate actions have to be taken to create the desired outcomes.

What kind of rainbow do you look to create? Stop wishing and get to working on the rain. Sow the right seeds, take that course, read that book, take that step, build that relationship, make that phone call, start that business. Bottom line, create your rainbow by investing in your rain.