“Read a book, exercise, meditate and keep the spirit in.” – SchoolBoy Q (Blessings)
This is probably the craziest period in recent history.
The idea that humans have to stay indoors to stay alive is even double crazy. Food supplies aside, many people aren’t mentally conditioned for this.
Naturally, humans aren’t wired for isolation. And it’s worse when you can do absolutely nothing about it.
Which makes me wonder, what would it be like if we didn’t have the kind of technology we have today? Smartphones, video conferencing apps and software, social media et al.
I wonder how survivors of the Black Plague and Spanish flu managed this.
Whew! It’s incredible.
Well, the mark of a beautiful mind is your ability to find opportunities in the most mundane activities and events. Which leads me to my next question. What have you been doing this period?
At the risk of sounding inspirational, this global pandemic gives you an opportunity to reassess your life, and do better.
A lot is going to change going forward.
Jobs would be lost. There would be a global shift in wealth. New millionaires and billionaires would be minted. Lots of ideas would burst forth from creative minds.
Are you even getting ready for this?
You could be anywhere on the spectrum.
The world is going to change. Will it find you ready?
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” wrote the French philosopher Blaise Pascal.
The greatest example of isolation of human beings is the prison system.
How do people in prison survive it?
I have no idea, but many of them find a way to pull through. You should too.
This is that time you’ve always wanted for deep personal reflection. It’s yours now.
For the uber-busy folks, this is the alone time you’ve always wished for but never had. Spend it wisely.
Read a book, exercise, meditate, keep the spirit in. Spend time with your family. Call your friends and coworkers and check up on them.
Hopefully, when all this is over, we’ll talk about that time in 2020 when the world almost ended.
“Being humble don’t work as well as being aware.” – Drake (0 to 100/The Catch Up)
Reading books like Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness help to reinforce my complete and total faith and belief in God.
And no, it’s not even a book on religion or morality, but rather about options trading. So, how would a book about options trading and investing in the stock market relate to faith in God?
I wish I could do a book review, but I’ll keep it simple.
In Fooled By Randomness, Nassim Taleb insists that success in investing is more about luck and other lesser-regarded variables and less about intelligence or ‘insight’.
Many people would disagree with this.
Personally, I did the first few pages too.
But on closer inspection, there’s a great truth about what Nassim is saying.
During a Toast Masters’ Meeting last week, this delectable lady comes up on stage and talks about how much happiness she’s achieved in her life and how it’s been tied to her insisting on following her dreams.
Naturally, we all applauded. I mean, who doesn’t love these kinds of stories?
The next speaker starts with “…I’m here right now because of my dreams. I climbed every mountain, overcame every challenge, conquered everything but nothing. My dreams made me a broken man.”
😮 You could have heard a pin drop. No, scratch that. You could have heard a rat fart.
I’ve never heard a story of that magnitude in my life. Never ever.
And it really put a lot into perspective.
Most of the successes we’ve enjoyed, even losses we’ve had to endure were simply lucky breaks. Some of your losses even directly lead you to success.
Been at the right place at the right time? Been suitably qualified for a role? Starting a business that became successful? Buying a house? A car? Going through university?
If you really think about it, you are where you are today because of so many little things you can’t even explain.
Faith? Grace? Luck? Good fortune? God?
Whatever you call it. I believe that something greater than I am keeps paving the way for me. But that’s me though.
And even though I firmly believe in working hard and creating your own luck, humility reminds me they are people who work harder than me somewhere yet haven’t been blessed with the opportunities I have been blessed with. Not just in the present, even in the past too, and in the future.
I mean, I’m alive.
I’m lucky and blessed to be here. You should be too.
And this isn’t about being humble. It’s about being aware.
When you eventually hit success, never forget it wasn’t just you that made it possible.
“They’d rather talk about how you got it over how much it cost you” – Drake (Headlines)
It’s funny that up till last night, I had almost 10 different ideas to write on and I still couldn’t pick up one exactly.
Not because they weren’t interesting or worthy to write about. But something was missing.
As God would have it, I woke up today to an argument about disruption on Twitter. And it suddenly clicked.
Stories about Apple or Ford or Tesla or different market disruptors in various industries are very sexy. I won’t even lie.
Those are the things that inspire.
But there’s a lot about the disruption that you and I don’t know about.
So instead of a class on business and marketing, let’s talk about something in our lives that is related to disruption.
The story of overnight success.
We love to hear things like “…wow, he just came from nowhere” “Nobody saw her coming” “He just blew up in 6 months” “His business made 10 million in 30 days”
But nobody comes from ‘nowhere’.
There’s a lot of stories that you don’t get to hear.
The lean years. The failed trials. The money lost. The hungry days. The sleepless nights. The sacrifices. The experiments that went wrong.
When motivational speakers try to make a point, they talk about how Edison tried 10,000 different times and failed to make the light bulb and finally made it after trying one more time.
Nobody asks what the backstory was behind those 10,000 different attempts.
What did he lose? How much did he lose? What happened those 10,000 times?
People think the punchline is to keep trying.
But it’s wrong.
The punchline is knowing that most successes are majorly accumulations of lessons and processes learned from different failures.
But failure stories aren’t sexy at all, nobody wants that. We only care about the outcome, never the process.
They are people somewhere in a basement recording music. They are people somewhere working 16 hours a day to make their businesses work. They are people somewhere taking rejection like Mike Tyson punches, left, right and centre.
They are people somewhere practising hours upon hours on the same thing every single day. Shooting 1000 free throws. Taking the same shots 100 times in a row.
Sometimes with no visible results even.
They are people somewhere making plans, taking action and failing repeatedly. Over and over again.
The loneliness and isolation that arises from focusing on and working single-mindedly at your craft.
There’s no overnight success.
There’s just someone who worked in the night, so you could see it in daylight.
“Half the time I got it right, I probably guessed” – Drake (The Resistance)
I think I’m the luckiest guy in the world.
Someone said I should say blessed, but does it really matter?
Over the past 3 years I’ve made some really crazy gambles. “Stupid,” the casual observer would say.
I’ve had to walk away from persons, jobs and situations.
I’ve had to turn down what seemed on the surface like really good opportunities.
I’ve had to walk in unplanned into even crazier circumstances.
Some turned out beautifully, some others were batshit crazy, but I’ve been forced by life to learn to take the wins and losses in equal stride. What have I learnt from it all?
There’s no gain in shrinking yourself, your abilities and capabilities. There’s no medal for self sabotaging. There’s no medal for self limitations.
There’s no medal for being conservative or cautious hundred percent of the time. You just rob the world of your awesomeness when you chose not to take risks.
This is not a post promoting destructive behaviour or uncalculated risk taking or outright gambling.
The life that you live, sleeping and waking up in mediocrity every day is a gamble already.
The truth is that most of the things you want, or that could change your life are on the other side of ‘what if’.
“What if it doesn’t work?”
“What if he/she says no?”
“What if I lose everything?”
“What if they don’t buy it?”
“What if they don’t like it?”
But, what if it does?
What if they say yes?
Even if they said no, what if saying no turns out to be the best thing that happens to you?
Ask yourself “What if not?”
The fear of rejection or failure or loss or ridicule or being labeled a nonconformist shouldn’t hold you back.
Everything you need you’ll get, but some take time, while you might have to work your butt off for others.
The universe is waiting to respond to you but you’ll have to be in a position for lightning to strike.
So, yes, I’m lucky. Yes, I’m blessed, but I’ve had to learn to keep moving. Win or loss.
It’s pointless to stay fixated.
You might get it wrong, yeah, but what if you get it right?
“…blind, baby/Blind to the fact of who you are, maybe?“ – Jay Z (We Made It)
If you couldn’t read or write you wouldn’t be able to use the Internet, talk more reading this post. So, read on.
I almost named this post ‘What Is Stopping You’ but at the risk of sounding cliche or motivational and stabbing this issue indirectly, I rather took the direct route of addressing it head-on.
The first time I heard about dyslexia was while reading Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants’.
Before that, I never knew there was something like a learning disability.
I mean, I grew up in Africa.
I still live in Africa.
Naturally, things like this sound alien. Almost inconceivable even.
How can you tell me that my child isn’t retarded or rebellious? That the only reason why he struggles in school is that he has a learning disability.
For the life of me, I can’t imagine a parent sitting still listening to a doctor say all of this.
Wikipedia explains it thus: Dyslexia, also known as reading disorder, is characterized by trouble with reading despite normal intelligence. Different people are affected to varying degrees. Problems may include difficulties in spelling words, reading quickly, writing words, “sounding out” words in the head, pronouncing words when reading aloud and understanding what one reads.
I remember this one time in SS1.
After our second continuous assessment tests for the term, I walked up to one of my classmates and asked him how his tests had gone.
He replied, “Uche, I no sabi wetin happen. I read yesterday night but I no remember anything.”
This wasn’t amnesia or someone suffering from some temporal forgetfulness.
It was a documented fact that this guy struggled with school.
What’s even ironic is that this wasn’t due to a lack of trying.
On his part or his parent’s part.
This wasn’t some sort of genetic predisposition either.
If I had to count off the top of my head, his father was one of the most brilliant men I knew growing up.
What was the problem?
Our teachers would even beat him, bate him and ridicule him relentlessly while the rest of us laughed.
I remember all of that and my heart aches.
On Friday, while we were working, my boss kept playing some retro hits from a slew of old songs on his laptop.
My workspace is a cool place. My boss is one of the coolest persons in the world too.
While these songs kept playing and we sang along and worked, some R. Kelly songs came on.
Naturally, we started trading facts about R. Kelly. And then BOOM!
We discovered R. Kelly was dyslexic.
This man can’t READ or WRITE.
The first question that came to my mind was “how did he manage to write all those hit songs over the years?”
The answer came in an interview he gave.
“I never write anything down, since I’ve been in the songwriting business – 20 years, I never write anything on paper, everything comes off the top of my head. I get in there, do the track, and whatever the track feels like, that’s what I do.”
Kelly has sold over 75 million records worldwide, making him the most successful R&B male artist of the 1990s and one of the world’s best-selling music artists. He is the 55th best-selling music artist in the United States, with over 32 million album sales. Kelly was named by Billboard as the Top R&B/Hip Hop Artist between 1985-2010 and the most successful R&B artist in history.
This is someone who can’t READ or WRITE.
This is not a post extolling R. Kelly’s greatness or virtues.
My love for his music or my awe of his greatness can’t dim the light around his personal life and his documented issues with women. I don’t and would never support that.
This post is for you.
Literacy data published by UNESCO displays that the adult literacy rate at the world level was 86.2 percent in 2015. Although the number of illiterate adults is about 745 million. About two-thirds (63%) of the world’s illiterate adults are women. Children make up a very large number too.
Read through Malcolm Gladwell’s book and you’ll see many notable folks that overcame their inability to read or write to achieve the impossible.
If someone who can’t read or write can be such a profound success, then what is holding you back?
Don’t tell me it’s talent, please.
Money? Background? Fear?
Or are you just blind to the fact of who you are, maybe?
While you think about this have a great week.
And be kind to people who you meet who can’t read or write, children especially. It could be a learning disability.
I appreciate your comments. They even help me to curate future posts. Please, keep commenting. Thank you. PS: I’ve decided to start sharing any books I’m currently reading, or just any book of note I’ve read in the past with you guys. My book for this week is Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.
“Let go, and let God deal with it.” – T.I (No Matter What)
This was put together with you in mind.
As humans, there is an innate obsession with control. An insane infatuation with perfection. We always want to get it right. But most of the time, we don’t.
Because that’s exactly how life is.
Of course, you have control over a large part of it, but there’s an even larger part that you have no say over.
The Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niehbur reads:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.
Half of the things you are worried about won’t happen. Even if they do, not the way you thought they would.
Worry postpones today’s joys, robs you of tomorrow’s happiness and then paints a future that might never happen.
A true test of character is letting go sometimes.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put in effort, work hard or be concerned. It’s not an excuse for laziness or procrastination either.
It’s just what it is – that there are forces outside your human capabilities that make things happen or not happen.
Call it favour. Call it grace. Call it fortune. Call it luck. Call it God. There’s just something infinitely bigger than you or I.
I have no idea what it is you are going through, but then looking back I know that most of the things that kept me up at night in the past weren’t worth it.
But then again, don’t take my word for it. Just ask yourself, “how much has worry improved your life?”
“Sunny days wouldn’t be special if it wasn’t for the rain/Joy wouldn’t feel so good if it wasn’t for pain.” – 50 Cent (Many Men)
Be sure to read every word of this.
The irony of pain is that over time it becomes bearable.
Ask fitness enthusiasts and people in abusive relationships. Some days I feel so tired to work out, but 30 Jumping Jacks and 16 Pushups in, my body starts responding.
That’s why over time you build muscle, adapt and somehow even begin to enjoy and crave it. You go from complaining to enduring to tolerating. Human beings are hardwired with adaptation and evolution.
But your pain is useless if you don’t reflect on it, and find ways to feed and grow off it. No, be suffer head you be!
So, instead of luxuriating in a situation that you have the power to change or to fight or to flee entirely away from (e.g an abusive relationship) just because you think you have to endure it, for no plausible reason whatsoever, you have to learn how to differentiate.
Don’t kid yourself!
There is a right and wrong pain.
And though I can’t claim to know what the right and wrong pain is at every crossroad in my life, there’s always the opportunity to learn from prior events. Yours and others.
The lessons you learn from life come from the tuition you’ve paid overtime in the form of experiences, directly or indirectly, your experiences or others’.
Some wise man once said, “life is a journey, but nobody was made to travel it alone.”
Our individual existences are so connected in such a collective way that your life is a conduit that the universe runs through and is a part of.
When we die, our mortal bodies will be laid into the ground, either as dust or ashes. To become part of the Earth. Our spirits already a part of the supernatural. An ever continuous cycle.
You and I are connected in ways that we don’t even understand. You might have never heard this, but even in our individual pains, we are so damn connected.
Therefore, understand that all your battles and blessings, wins and losses aren’t yours alone, even though your current troubles are yours to bear alone. And though it feels unbearable, understand that your story wouldn’t be yours at the end alone. Yours to tell, yes, but a part of someone else’s too.
So, no matter how much pain you are going through now, it is meant to teach you, and then to inspire and motivate someone else.
Your tears, blood, and sweat will lead you to success and possible greatness, but it will also lubricate someone else’s path. Your pitfalls and mistakes would be the lighthouse redeeming someone else on verge of getting lost.
And this is not an attempt to justify pain and suffering, rather it’s a call to arms for you to show empathy, and at least ‘mourn with those who mourn.’
A call to be of help – to be part of your brethren’s distress and trouble. Nobody was made to feel alone.
So, keep grinding and growing, there are people waiting for you.
