BE A QUIET ACHIEVER.

One thing I have found with people that is odd is, nice people will say others are nice, but rude or arrogant people will say another person is rude or arrogant, yet won't acknowledge it within themselves.

30 years ago, today, I had a maths exam. Maths was never my strongest subject (History and Japanese were my best) and this was an important year at school. Only a few weeks beforehand, an obnoxiously arrogant kid in my maths class (he was a bully to boot) claimed he was so much smarter than me (he did different subjects, so you cannot directly compare) and claimed that Japanese was a subject that homosexuals did. This kid assaulted me after he asked, and I told him to mind his own business, and NOT QUIETLY ONE TO ONE, MIND YOU, what I was doing about my face (my acne) and what he sought to do was humiliate me in the classroom. My "mother" blamed me for it, without knowing the kid was a prick.

I was determined to beat this kid using my head not my fists, and beat him that day I did. When he heard that I scored a higher mark than he, his response was not to walk across and say, "I'm sorry, but you did better than I thought. Well done." He snarled, "Peter got the top mark," and leant over me and roared. I thought he was just displaying his narcissism and immaturity, while I just sat there quietly.

Good results are always the best rewards for good efforts, and the following semester I was to shock myself by scoring an A for maths. I didn't act in a vain or arrogant manner, and I can remember, the following year, being surprised at my marks and asking the teacher if I had scored a B and he said, "Did you get a B for maths?" He checked his book. "You did." I didn't gloat to others, I just sat that quietly.

I remember saying to my mother, last year, when I achieved something, "Remember something you told me when I was sixteen?" "Oh, I don't remember back that far!" My father said, "He doesn't mean, do you remember the exact day, he means, generally." "Well, what was it?" "You said to me that if you are all mouth about something and get it wrong, you'll look silly, but if you are unsure and you get it right, you'll emerge better." I had wanted to put my father's 4WD in the garage and my mother was all, "No, he can't do it." I accepted guidance from my father and got it right, and my brother said, "Tell him he got it right." "No, I'm angry!" Then, the next day, I repeated what she said and her response was, "But a Ford Falcon is different to a 4WD." "That's not the point, the point is, you can have egg on your face if you get something wrong when you boasted it was easy and if you aren't sure and get it right, you can achieve." My mother, I suspect, was just trying to cover her own things.

Be happy with your achievements, yes, but don't brag or boast about them, because if you do, your next move could be a crushing blow. Looking at last year's election, I wasn't happy that the government was returned but I was delighted that an arrogant former leader was defeated. This was a leader who won on the basis of a terrible lie and who, when he was defeated, had the same immaturity as the bully, by saying that he thought it was better to be a loser than a quitter, a subtle dig at another former leader. The problem with that is, a quitter can often go out at a time of their own choosing; a loser goes out when someone else decides that their time has come. This was a former leader who boasted when he won, who boasted, after he lost the leadership but retained his seat that his electorate liked him because of things he did, but was then forced to face the fact that enough of his electorate had turned against him.

If you are a quiet achiever, you won't be left with egg on your face. As my paternal grandfather said, the one piece of scripture he wanted to quote was, "You pass through this life but once, and I want to pass through unnoticed." And he was a man, who, in every sense of the word, was a quiet achiever.