When Is It Okay to Give Up on Something? (1)

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I am no pessimist. In fact, I believe in great possibilities. But, no matter how smart, driven, awesome, tireless, or persistent you are, there are times when you just have to give up. Yes, I just published a series on why and how you should persist till you eventually overcome on this blog recently. But I know that there are times when we get caught up in situations where giving up on our goal is the best thing to do. I will share 4 examples briefly.

 

1. When You Do Not Have the Privilege of Trying Again (Repeatedly)

You may have to give up on something if it has a deadline and you cannot extend or keep extending its deadline. Of course, you should have given it your best shot and absolutely confirmed that you cannot overcome the deadline challenge before choosing to give up. Once you are sure you have exhausted your chances, you should give up on it and find something else to focus your energy on. As an example, if you’ve been trying to become an executive in a prestigious club or professional association that has an age limit for eligible candidates and you set a personal deadline to attain that position but are unable to win the required election till you exceed the applicable age bracket, then you should be willing to give up on that goal and find another gratifying goal to pursue within or outside the organization.

 

2. When What You Are Pursuing Becomes Irrelevant or Less Valuable

It is okay to give up on something if while trying to achieve that thing, it becomes irrelevant or less valuable to you than it was when you originally set out to achieve it and if it is clear that stopping where you are or abandoning it is better than going through to completion. Once it is obvious that you will eventually waste time, money, efforts, etc., if you continue to pursue the goal but will save those vital inputs if you choose to stop where you are, then stopping or giving up is the right thing to do. For instance, if you set out to start a generator-manufacturing plant in Nigeria and the power supply from utility companies in Nigeria suddenly becomes so stable and reliable that the government unprecedentedly implements a climate-change policy that severely discourages the use of generators in the entire country, then you may have to abandon that particular business project and pursue another one.

 

Disclaimer:                               

While it is okay to give up on almost anything when doing so becomes necessary, it is never okay to intentionally give up on life. Life represents hope. It represents hidden opportunities. Each extra breath and each chance to exist represent endless possibilities that range from being an apparent nobody to becoming a fulfilled person. As such, this post or its sequel should not be mistaken for an approval to give up on life. That is absolutely not one of the things you should give up on.

 

Get ready to give up profitably but never give up on life!

 

To be continued in the next post…

Overcoming Serial Failure

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Many of the things we enjoy today in every aspect of life were once undiscovered or non-existent. Just take a moment to think about it, for something as simple but important as feeding, some people had to keep trying out things until they discovered the kind of plants we can eat and the types that are poisonous and must be avoided. Also, in the history of technology, some people had to think creatively and build cooking implements (like pots and stoves), farming tools (like hoes and cutlasses) and even transportation means (like carts and coaches). Later on, man invented time telling machines (or clocks), electricity (which is something everyone cannot do without today) and telephony (which has pretty much made long-distance communication easy). Today, we even have the Internet and many new and helpful inventions keep coming up every day.

Of course, there are other areas too. Like health, housing, education and economics where novel inventions and modifications of previously existing inventions have made life easy for all. But the most important thing is, some people had to discover what was already existing or work on what was already existing to create solutions to the problems people face in life. Just as some people had to do all that for all of us, you have to do something similar for yourself and other people. You need to ask questions and find answers. Build on existing knowledge. Consult the right resources. And in time, you will find a way out.

If you keep failing at something, know that you can still succeed at it. You just need to know the right efforts to make to achieve the success you deserve. Serial failure is not evidence that something is unconquerable; it simply shows that you are yet to apply the right input or access the exact information or skill that is necessary to overcome that thing. So, if this is your case, keep trying and keep getting better. Keep finding new information and ideas. Keep asking questions and finding answers to fully understand your challenge. Take a break if you have to. But, keep attempting to obtain a breakthrough. If you don’t give up, one day, and maybe very soon, you will have a very inspiring story to tell, of how you conquered and eventually broke through.

And when you do break through, you will be able to show others coming behind how to overcome such a challenge in future. Besides, you would have earned the right and gathered the strength to take up greater challenges and attain greater heights in future, thereby creating a WIN-WIN situation for everyone. 

Cheers to a better you!

Overcoming Challenges & Failures and Making the Best Decisions

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There are times when you will fail, times when your best efforts will not be good enough, and times when an unforeseen circumstance will hinder your success. Though, the experience can be very painful and quite destabilising, the best attitude is to learn from the experience and move on. Find out the actual reasons for the failure, seek practical means of absolutely eliminating or effectively mitigating those reasons and try to succeed again. Failure should be a learning experience on your way to a desired destination; it should not be a final destination itself.

Take the experience of infants for instance. An infant learns to crawl until they are due to start walking. When they are strong enough to start walking, they begin by trying to stand without anyone’s assistance. They often fail serially at standing without assistance until they eventually overcome that failure. After overcoming the failure of falling, they start trying to walk. They also fail at it until they eventually learn how to do it and do it repeatedly.

Similarly, when you fail at something that can be achieved, you are just learning how to succeed at it. It may take you more time or efforts than it took others. But when you develop yourself to the point where you should succeed or access the right information or network that would help you succeed, you will finally succeed. Just like infants, we will fail at anything until we are adequately prepared to excel in it. In fact, all things being equal, we will fail at anything and everything that requires efforts we do not presently satisfy because every important goal has its own requirements. 

If you do fail at something, spend less time feeling bad. Spend the most of your time asking useful questions. Gather feedback. Note what to do and what not to do next time. The right attitude to failure or mistakes is to learn from the experience and put in the right or better efforts next time. Brooding over your failure or mistakes will not change the present outcome. So, focus on improving your ability to think creatively. Seek and obtain guidance from those that have successfully overcome the kind of challenge you’re facing or the kind of failure you’re trying to overpower. Explore other useful sources of information online and everywhere else. And take the right steps at the right time.

Oftentimes, challenges or problems exist, mistakes or failures occur and the inability to make the best decision or even know the best decision to make prevail when there is an information gap. When you know what to do to overcome a challenge, get a desired result or make the best decision in a circumstance, the only outcome is success. If it is an obstacle that other people have overcome before, then that is enough evidence that you can also overcome it. Also, if it is something you are not certain that anyone has overcome before, know that you still have the potential to overcome it. Just find out and put in what it takes to overcome it. Though many factors come to play in cases where there is no evidence of prior triumph, the most important factors still remain your ability to think creatively and persist till you obtain a breakthrough.

Cheers to your forthcoming breakthrough!

Overcoming Challenges

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It is okay to face challenges in life. In fact, everybody faces challenges in their life. If you’re not facing challenges, you’re probably not aiming high enough or maximizing your full potentials.

But what should really matter when you face a challenge? What should your disposition be? What should you do to get by?

What matters most is your attitude towards the challenge. How badly do you want to overcome that challenge? Are you willing to give it what it takes?

You should do your best to attain success in every endeavour because that is one of the attributes of an effective person. No one, who prioritises personal effectiveness, should want to do anything slothfully. Your goal should be an excellent result. If eventually, you don’t get the kind of outcome you desired or worked for, putting in your best ensures that you still get a result that is better than what you would obtain if you don’t put in remarkable efforts.

Whenever you obtain an excellent outcome in a routine task or goal, raise the bar further. Keep raising the bar until you reach the peak and achieve consistency. When you reach the peak, find another aspect to improve on while maintaining excellence. For instance, reduce the time it takes. Enhance efficiency. Or, find something else to improve. There is always room for improvement.

Do your best to avoid failure but don’t be afraid. Don’t let the fear of failure incapacitate you. Instead, be courageous. Be inventive and creative. Be wise. Be cautious. Try to outsmart all the possibilities of failure. Consider all alternatives and make the best decisions. But don’t be afraid. When you’re not afraid, you tend to improve your chances of success. So be positive and maintain focus.

And if you do all you should, success undoubtedly awaits you.

Cheers to your success!

5 REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD KEEP LEARNING

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Learning is the act of acquiring knowledge or skills through personal study, life experience or intentional studentship. We learn every day through observation, practice or conscious study. We learn through conversations, news, book reading and even surfing the web. But what are the reasons why we should keep learning? Are there really any benefits attached to the act of learning? Yes, there are lots of them. But in this short article, I will share just 5 reasons with you.

Learning improves your expertise

The first reason why you should keep learning is because it improves your expertise. No matter what you do, learning more will definitely improve your expertise. You acquire new skills when you learn and certainly become better at what you do when you take some time to learn more about it. A crucial outcome of learning more about a skill is that you become more productive over time or you are able to do more in less time.

Learning builds up your confidence

The next reason why you should keep learning is because it builds your confidence. As you learn more and more about a subject matter, you develop more confidence until you become an authority in it. You grow to a point where you feel both knowledgeable and competent. You are able to face new challenges and even teach others on the subject matter. Your doubts are cleared and you share ideas based on conviction.

Learning improves your earning potential

The third reason why you should keep learning is because it improves your earning potential. When you learn more, you tend to earn more because you know more. When you know more about something, you probably have good knowledge on what works and what does not work. As a result, you are able to place a higher price on your services because of what you know. In addition, learning opens doors to new opportunities. When you learn something new, you gain access to new areas that may be financially gratifying.

Learning improves your ability to interact

The fourth reason why it is important to keep learning is that it improves your ability to interact with other people. When you know more, you are able discuss with others and interact with them. When other people want to have conversations with you, you are able to engage them because you are knowledgeable about what they want to discuss. You have learned about what they want to discuss, have formed opinions on it and are ready to share those opinions with them.

Learning makes you more competitive

The final reason why I think it is important to keep learning is because it makes you more competitive. Whether you are an employee or you are self-employed, learning makes you more competitive in your industry. It helps you keep at par with new developments in your field. When new technologies come up and you are able to use or apply them, you become more relevant and competitive in your industry.

So, those are the 5 reasons why I think you should keep learning. Please feel free to share this article with your friends and on your social networks. Thank you!

Recent Lines

I’VE COME A LONG WAY

Days of daylight struggle

Nights of fluorescent-tube study

Laughs of assessor tormentors

Cries of a certain unique survivor

Life has not been peaches and cream

But I’ve come a long way

The eyes are heavy

The breathe remains calm

With cloudy thoughts filling a bleeding heart

Tired butts can’t help but fart

Life has not been a ride in a Prado

But I’ve come a long way

A man of purpose living among the blind

A man of intellect dining among imbeciles

He soon grows weak, lacking nutrients of vision

He goes bunkers, wandering in dire illusion

Life has not been a Christmas package from FedEx

But I’ve come a long way

Robbers serially ran their hands in a poor man’s knapsack

Death once laid its sting upon the life of the King’s Heir

No one was safe; no man could say he saved

But if no one would save, why wouldn’t God save?

Life has not been without the breaking of precious vessels

Yet, I’ve come a long way

I ran when the fear within chased me

Fell when doubts sank me, and flew when lies around loved me

The hitherto of my life may seem a sour story to tell

But its future will be a good tale to share

Life has not been lullabies and bedtime stories

Yet, I’ve come a long way

Lemons may taste sour

But sweet lemonade shakes are made from them

Sweet medicine may taste like tawdry poison

But many bitter medicines remove deadly poisons

Beware, for life has a way of deciding your outcome

Keeping this awareness, I determine my fate with harmless faith

GETTING SOMETHING DONE (PART TWO)

When you have an idea you’ve got to be careful who you speak to. If you speak to people you think should know more because they’ve been reading the same kind of books you read, you may not be exactly right.

When I look back today, I realize that we could have done that business. Though I don’t know how successful we would have been with it. Anyways, our academic goals did not manifest as expected. For me, I did not even finish with a strong two-one but I managed to do lots of human capital development work on campus and made some money from simple publishing. I made much money from emergent investments too. One of my two friends went into commercial motorbikes investment. He owned bikes and had some folks ride them for him on agreed profitmaking basis. He went on to become a National Executive at a renowned Christian Fellowship in Nigeria. He did not meet his original academic goals too. After making money from investment, the third guy went on to continue his studies at the university’s teaching hospital. He had always wanted to become a pastor and he did become one in a Pentecostal church. Surprisingly, he did not meet his academic goals either.

Lesson learnt; when you have a good idea or something you really want to do. Just start doing it; even if it is getting the plans in place and making findings. But be careful who you speak to because if you are actually meant to fail, you would and you will acquire the right lessons needed to succeed at another time or in something else. This is because, there are people who actually go into what you only planned to do and they do succeed. But if what you planned to do is not meant for you, you are most likely not going to succeed at it. Usually, people succeed at what is meant for them and only have the inherent proclivity to persevere when it is really meant for them. When it is not meant for them, they simply go through it because there are lessons they need to learn from it to succeed when they move on.

The guys that eventually put up the barbing saloon ran it till I graduated. I don’t know if they stayed back but we never planned to stay back even if the idea succeeded. Our plan was to sell it off upon graduation. We had planned to incorporate additional business value such as sales of recharge cards, our own newsletter and other in-demand publications. That was something they did not do. But the commendation there is that they added much value into the actual barbing service that I thought it was worth them having the idea. I know this because I was one of the customers that they managed to win. They did it like we would have done it. They respected their customers so much and made each service seem like a big treat. But unlike we planned, they did most of the barbing themselves and probably spent less time in class than we eventually did.

So, when you find something that you’d really like to do, start doing it. It probably won’t hurt if you start it inch by inch, task by task or stage by stage.

In our own case, we thrived in the things that we put our time, focus and energy into. We did not thrive in areas where our fears, doubts or discouragements had a better part of us. We set academic goals but did not reach them. There were times when I got very angry upon seeing my results because I had bad grades. For one of my friends, dropping from strong two-one straight into two-two was never anticipated. In fact, none of us saw it coming for him. For the third guy, I don’t even know what happened. He just told me he finished with a two-two despite all the scholarships and awards he got in secondary school. Though our academic goals were not met, there are lessons learnt and insights applied into other areas of our lives for positive results.

The key to getting something done is doing it on paper and in practice. There is much good in the saying that in pursuing greatness, you don’t count the years. Rather, you count the hurdles you need to jump to get to the finish line. Just like in projects, you may plan to finish early and actually finish late. Interestingly, you may even plan to finish late and find a twist of earliness in reaching your ultimate goal than anticipated. Aiming for the very best, finding effective workarounds for external limitations and working towards expected deliverables often guarantee great outcomes. This is also in line with the saying that if you shoot for the moon, at worst, you will eventually find yourself among the brightest of stars.

Cheers!

Wishing you the very best,

James Olumoraks

GETTING SOMETHING DONE (PART 1)

It is common for young people to dream and desire what they want to do in future. This behavioural trend hardly leaves even when they become young adult. Nevertheless, the desire to do something great and become someone spectacular also comes with a price. The price is the determination to overcome whatever challenges may prevent one from reaching that dream.

                For some people, the challenge may be lack of funds to transform and sustain the dream from its intangible form into full manifestation. For others, it may be lack of network of people that will help to build and shape the idea or promote its success. Lack of either or both factors often turn ideas into precious burdens or procrastination channels for most people.

                I remember when I was in the university, I and two friends started brainstorming on a business we could do while studying and soon realized that there was no barbing saloon in our neighbourhood. Anyone who wanted to have their hair cut had to take a cab to town or trek across the school into another neighbourhood where a barbing saloon was already existing. Our neighbourhood contained hundreds, if not thousands, of male residents. To say the least, this means that about five hundred potential customers were available for the business to thrive. Yet, no one had started equipping an obvious barbing saloon at that time.

                Myself and these friends eventually thought of starting a barbing saloon business on a landed property near our hostels. We planned to use a metallic cabin and had figured out that a portion of the land could be leased to us. We were still putting plans together when one of us brought in a negative report. He had approached one of the more experienced students that we revered in a religious organization I also attended and had discussed our business plan with him. The guy he approached gave him enough reasons why we should not come together to start the business. The reasons ranged from potential academic challenge to possible negative factors, and even the fact that one of us was going to migrate from campus to continue his education in a neighbouring state.  At this point, starting capital was not our challenge because our plans on funding was very feasible. However, we needed to leverage on reliable network to solve potential challenges while building the business. These ranged from knowing the right person to speak to about the landed property to getting night security coverage and increasing free publicity.

                However, we got enough reasons to not do the business as an early feedback, procrastinated for a while and eventually forgot about the idea. The positivity of three people could not overcome the negativity of one person who was not even a co-founder. We wanted to leverage on someone for guidance to succeed but were shown reasons why the idea would not work. Yet, telling someone who had the funds seemed like an obvious trap because who else has the power to steal an idea except he who already has the wherewithal and does not really owe you?

                Few months after we slowed down and forgot about the business, we saw a barbing saloon start up in that neighbourhood. In fact, it was very close to where we had planned to establish our own. The only difference was that they had waited for a shopping complex to be completed and had rented a room in it to do the business. When my friends and I saw it. We realized the truth in the axiom that when you want to do something, you should just do it. We realized that we were not the only ones thinking of starting the business. When you have an idea, don’t think you are the only one receiving the hunch. Ideas come from somewhere and if you don’t use them, someone else would.

To be continued...