KNOW YOU
Who are you? What are you about? Can you, on the spur of the moment, describe yourself in one minute and it would give others the insight to connect with you? Simple as these questions are, they hold the key to self-awareness: a great code to personal accomplishment.
Personal awareness precedes personal development. Personal development precedes capital development. With capital development, we mean wealth building. You have got to know who you are and this knowledge must drive you towards learning and mastery through consistent development and quality service before it can earn you riches.
Have you found yourself? How much of yourself do you know? Have you developed yourself enough? Who do you serve with these skills? These are critical questions you must answer. You can start now.
BE TRUE TO YOU
It's one thing to know who you are. It's another thing to be true to yourself. What does it mean to be true to yourself? You already know that you are quick to anger. Do you accept that fact? What do you do about it when you sense that a chat or conversation is tending towards anger?
This is the attitude you must adopt towards other emotions, whether they are positive or negative. Emotions are energies. They are potent forces. It's not enough to know them. It's more important to manage them well: mortify the negative and unleash the positive.
When you achieve the effective management of your emotions and mental faculties, it means that you are true to yourself because you are able to ignore or walk away often when people irk you.
You can imagine the degree of bitter exchanges that go on, on social media platforms. People throw massive e-punches and invectives you begin to wonder if they are in a contest of sorts.
EMBODY YOUR PHILOSOPHIES
Anyone who desires to win in the game of life must do one thing for self: Have personal codes, doctrines and philosophies for life. You must live your ideologies and be one with them.
Ideologies are crafted from the reality of the experiences that life throws at us: your failures, your successes, your disappointments, and rejections. They are not things we just read from books and adopt as our own knowledge. They are personal experiences.
We have to simulate these experiences and make principles of them. Some of these experiences may not be good ones, in terms of the fact that they were earned through the bitterness of disappointments, rejections and failures. Yet, they become great sources of personal strength.
Embodying your philosophies means that you become one with your beliefs. You become one with your product and service. This is a hard place to arrive at and abide in. It comes with commitment to the cause of purpose.
DON'T EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM OTHERS
You must understand that disappointments and rejections are just part of the grind. If you experience them, great. If you don't experience them, it's okay, too; but whatever your experience, you should use gratitude and trudge on. If you get disappointed from rejection, you do know that you are being redirected.
From these, you learn how not to rely on or depend too much on people. When people make you a promise, hear them, and play your own part to fulfill your end of the bargain, but don't you ever permit any situation to put you down or turn you off the course of purpose and vision.
When I published Ascents-and-Descents, I reached out to a couple of "friends" who have huge and loyal followership on social media platforms, to share thoughts about the book. They promised to support in sharing news about the book. Perhaps those promises will be fulfilled tomorrow?
YOU MAY BE IN LONGER THAN YOU THOUGHT
When you are pursuing a cause or working on a project, you may have envisaged that you will cash in and cash out, but then something happens, and you find out that it wasn't as easy as you had envisaged.
One year can become two years or more. A lady I used to know in my community carried a nine months pregnancy for three years. As I write this, I am still in disbelief, but that's the reality. How do you explain that? The business of pregnancy took a longer than usual time for her.
In business or entrepreneurship, things may stretch out longer than you had expected. The Covid-19 experience is a reference. Prior to the pandemic, there are economic and otherwise situations that adversely affect plans.
A PEST analysis may not always work as planned. Things do go awry. You must be ready to experience things your own way. However bad things may be, there are lessons to learn. What someone else did may not work for you. You must find your way. And that takes time.
MANAGE RELATIONSHIPS
Be a good, if not a great relationship manager. While you may not need many of them, you do need the relationships, small or big, that you can manage. The degree of your EQ per time should support you right where you are.
Sometimes, people don't patronize you or buy your product or use your service. Don't make an enemy of them. Don't give an attitude. It will all come back to you. Learn to ignore. Learn to be calm. Learn silence. Learn to use patience with people.
Yet, it is instructive for you to use observation as you watch, analyse and apply yourself to situations. The only thing that's constant is life's changing experiences and you can't cease to have them. Again, being curiously observant will help you build a discerning quotient. Those who have earned competence of these values through learning, bestride their space like a colossus.
While these concepts are not exhaustive, you can be sure that if you practise and apply them to yourself, they will take you to the place of purpose, vision and accomplishments.
If you haven't already, click here to get your e-version of my book, ASCENTS AND DESCENTS.
