Tuesday 27 August 2013

RICH YOUTH, POOR YOUTH









The urge to be financially buoyant is the dream of every youth. But not all will be. “For the poor shall never lease out of the land...” Deut 15:11. There are several young people that are willing to be rich in life, but they never know how. Mind you, there are some that get rich but still they lack the mind of success they will never succeed in life e.g. MICHAEL Tyson made $300million at the peak of his fighting career but today he his bankrupt, he lacks the mind set of success. Michael Jackson, arguable the most popular song artist and at a time made the list of top 20 richest in the world now has his wardrobe out for sales, left with almost nothing at 50 years birthday on 29 Aug 2008.
And there are two other Michaels that inspire me, so much that I feel like add Michael to my list of names. They possess or may be acquire some extra mind of success. For instance when Olympic gold medalist track star Michael Johnson ran he seems to glide across the track, his feet bearly touching the surface. His affable personality made him a crowd and media favorite, but I was struck by his humility during the 1996 Olympic games he shed fears as he crossed the line. His appreciation as he draped the American flag across his tired body for a gold-media was inspirational. He was a true champion. There is this other Michael. You know the one. The guy
who is arguable the best basketball player to ever grace the game. The one who proved that character is what you do when no one is watching. He was physically talented, yes, but his mental toughness, is legendary both of these champion left an inedible mark on their sport but it is the following two quotes that are forever engrave in my mind.
“I have missed more than none thousand shot in my career. I have lost almost three hundred games. On twenty-six occasions I have been entrusted to takes the game winning shots and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that’s precisely why… I succeed”
Michael Jordan (Five time MBA league MVP)
“Life is often compared to a marathon, but I think it is more like being a sprinter, long stretches of hard work punctured by brief moment in which we are given the opportunity to perform at our best”
Michael Johnson
(200m and 400m Olympic gold model winner)
We shall draw references from the Bible as we discuss the three drives to financial accomplishment we shall discuss the following.
· Diligence
· Mind of success
· 10 commandment

WISDOM SERIES #1. Steve Jobs

I











If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on ~ Steve Jobs
Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.~ Steve Jobs
Here’s to the crazy ones — the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.~ Steve Jobs
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.~ Steve Jobs
If you keep your eye on the profit, you’re going to skimp on the product. But if you focus on making really great products, then the profits will follow.~ Steve Jobs
If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.~ Steve Jobs
That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.~ Steve Jobs
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.~ Steve Jobs
I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.~Steve Jobs
Let’s go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday. ~ Steve Jobs

Monday 26 August 2013

Change Yourself.











“You must be the change you want to see in the world.”
“As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world - that is the myth of the atomic age - as in being able to remake ourselves.”
If you change yourself you will change your world. If you change how you think then you will change how you feel and what actions you take. And so the world around you will change. Not only because you are now viewing your environment through new lenses of thoughts and emotions but also because the change within can allow you to take action in ways you wouldn’t have – or maybe even have thought about – while stuck in your old thought patterns.
And the problem with changing your outer world without changing yourself is that you will still be you when you reach that change you have strived for. You will still have your flaws, anger, negativity, self-sabotaging tendencies etc. intact.
And so in this new situation you will still not find what you hoped for since your mind is still seeping with that negative stuff. And if you get more without having some insight into and distance from your ego it may grow more powerful. Since your ego loves to divide things, to find enemies and to create separation it may start to try to create even more problems and conflicts in your life and world.

Wednesday 14 August 2013

NIGERIA IS A LIE














I was born in the mid 1980s, about 25 years into the Socio-political experiment called Nigeria. I have lived roughly half of the lent of this geo-sociological fantasy. The political class deem it important to throw a Centenary Celebration of God-knows-it merger of the ill-assorted component of what Chief Obafemi Awolowo called “a mere geographical entity”. As much as I float in the pool of opinions for or against the Centenary Celebration...I hear you ask, float? Why? I do because the powers that be had calculatingly striped my generation of the knowledge of the past. We read our fathers histories from the sons of their captors, and until the wild have historians the wild will always be the vanquished.

Having said that...

I want to add a voice to the many lonely voices through this media. Have consciously dug into the precedence, background and history of this ‘entity’ especially as summarized by The Governor General of Nigeria between 1920 – 31, Sir Hugh Clifford, describing Nigeria as  “a collection of independent Native States, separated from one another  by great distances, by differences of history and traditions and by ethnological, racial, tribal, political, social and religious barriers.”  (Nigeria Council Debate.  Lagos, 1920).  This description captures the problems of today’s Nigeria vividly and I have come to this definitive and scholarly conclusion. NIGERIA IS A LIE

Nigeria was created by a lie to remain a lie

 I wish to quote the words Flora Shaw, a former Colonial Editor of the London Times wrote in the newspaper on January 8, 1897:

 "The name Nigeria, applying to no other part of Africa, may without offence to any neighbours be accepted as co-extensive with the territories over which the Royal Niger Company has extended British influence, and may serve to differentiate them equally from the colonies of Lagos and the Niger Protectorate on the coast and from the French territories of the Upper Niger.”

Therefore the proposed geographical entity tagged Nigeria is way smaller to what has come to be known as Nigeria today. Nigeria existed before 1914. When the British re-cloned the chimera called Nigeria in 1914 she did not intend for Nigeria to evolve into a nation. Nigeria was designed to last as long as it served the interests of the British. An internal switch was built into the design sketch; this was and still is the “Northern Administrator”. A low level British Administrator during the colonial days of Nigeria, Mr Harold Smith said this in 2007: “Our agenda was to completely exploit Africa. Nigeria was my duty post. When we assessed Nigeria, this was what we found in the southern region; strength, intelligence, determination to succeed, well established history, complex but focused life style, great hope and aspirations… the East is good in business and technology, the west is good in administration and commerce, law and medicine, but it was a pity we planned our agenda to give power ‘at all cost’ to the northerner. They seemed to be submissive and silly of a kind. Our mission was accomplished by destroying the opposition at all fronts. The west led in the fight for the independence, and was punished for asking for freedom. They should not rule Nigeria!”. A calculated masterpiece that had propelled the proceedings of our corporate existence since 1914. Nigeria was and still is a lie; Nigeria is a project of the British leased to the Royal North to manage and fetch dividends for the master, the British. 

 Fast-forward 1914 – 2014...

Nigeria is a filthy secret! “The foundation of this country was built upon dishonesty, corruption, selfishness, tribalism and all evil.