It is needed in any of our daily activities…the way you deal with challenges on your way matters. Good character begets greater benefits. Learn from experts on how they encounter challenges with good character.
ONE WAY, MANY WILLS by Tope Fabusola is the latest piece in the BurnUporBurnOut Series hosted on Olawale Daniel website. You can read the previous editions by clicking on the categories below.
Hands up if you still look both ways before crossing a one-way route!
Don’t be shy now! Legion is our name, because we are many.
Whenever I cross a one-way route, I still look both ways. I don’t care if the vehicle was supposed to come from just one side. Thanks, but no thanks.
While I understand the law enough to obey it, I don’t trust it enough to heal my aching bones or bring my dead body to life if someone decides the law doesn’t apply to them.
But then, that’s just me, right? Many others just trust the law blindly and cross the road…
To za oda world.
I have learnt in life that the presence of a law is not the same as the obedience of it. Because a standard is set doesn’t mean everyone follows it.
I have seen people set high standards for themselves — in their business, life and relationships. And it works. High standards bring great benefits.
However, I’ve seen these people trust others to respect these standards. And yes, I’ve seen them screwed over and over again.
It’s not that deep, really. Most people simply don’t care. They don’t necessarily hate your guts. They just don’t care. Unless there is a dire consequence, most people don’t care.
It’s your standard, not theirs. Deal with it.
Does that hurt? Calm down, sir.
It is important you understand this now and save yourself avoidable hurt this year.
“Don’t be so green to think the world revolves around you.”
It doesn’t.
Unless you are the sun, but that is a whole ‘nother subject.
If this is business and your standards are that important, be ready to enforce it. Don’t expect others to look out for you.
Have you heard about backstabbers? What about backbiters? Well, they exist and they are everywhere. Now, they are also on social media. Isn’t God wonderful?
People get hurt in this strait alley. People eat people for supper. Even if the law would eventually defend you, remember that dead men don’t bite.
An interesting perspective of Ben Sobola on milking from Laziness.
Laziness doses not equate dirtiness actually, it does equate creativity and cleanliness.
The future of work will be to employ more lazy people than hard working people.
Surprised?
It’s a mystery actually because a lazy person naturally hates working so he tries all he could to avoid work. But the creator created man to work, a lazy person understands this so subconsciously, he tries to creatively look for how to reduce time taken and energy required for every single task and still achieve the same or a better result.
I choose a lazy person to do a hard job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it – Bill Gates.
Let me bring you back home, I mean to your household. It’s only a lazy person that will cook in the kitchen and wash every utensil after each use, why? Because he does not want to have to wash a pile of kitchen utensil after cooking unlike a hard worker who would rather be sweating and singing just to wash and that could have been avoided.
If a lazy person is eating and a grain of rice drops on the floor, he’ll pick it up immediately, why? Because he hates sweeping so he would rather avoid it by simply obeying the “a stitch in time” rule.
Lazy people are very neat. As a matter of
fact, they are the smart workers of almost every organization. They creatively find a smart way around hard jobs and get it done with less effort.
Let me take you back in history. I am sure that the very first automobile was designed by a lazy person. He probably got tired of riding on horses and camels and he then felt that why can’t we have something faster and less stressful?
So he started thinking and here we are today with Bentleys and Benz everywhere.
Well, is it not too much stress to drive from South Africa to Canada? To a hard working person, driving from South Africa to Canada is achievable but a lazy person does not even want to think about it. The brothers that invented airplanes were way just too lazy!
Instead of them driving, they wanted to start flying. Can you imagine?
They wanted to cover longer distances in lesser time, but see airplanes everywhere today…Thank God for laziness!
Study Guide: How Lazy Are You?
This image is a perfect explanation of how a lazy person reasons at times. Instead of having to write a long sentence of between 80 to 100 words, he thought about another creative and short ways of expressing his thoughts. Did he got it? To the teacher, it might be a big No, but to you reading, he actually got it technically.
I won’t be surprised if there is a lazy person somewhere as I write this piece who feels that the time taken to travel by air from Nigeria to Australia is too much and he is already working on a machine that will teleport him there in ten minutes. It’s not possible right?
Well, he might be thinking that if he can send his voice over telephone and get immediate response and actually have a real time conversation with someone that is thousands of miles away, why can’t he have “TeleHuman” too?
Don’t scream at me please, but let’s give that lazy person more time, not me though.
Can you see the enormous power that lazy people carry?
Although, a lazy person might need a little push every now and then but I would rather employ a lazy person than a hard worker because in the lazy person is a huge cost saving ability.
Soon, lazy will become a compliment. The future of employment criterion will be “how lazy are you?”
Thanks to all the Uncle Thomas’s on my way up here. Without them, I wouldn’t have had the courage to chase (or better put, pursue) my dreams or get up to this level.
Yeah, they deserve some accolades! A really big one for that matter.
Hear this, if you don’t have uncle Thomas in your life, I bet you ain’t doing shit. You ain’t going nowhere bro/sis!
Getting to the top isn’t a child’s chess board game. It is a battle you have to win or lose.
“It is either you believe in yourself or believe what other people think, or makes you think, of yourself. Sounds familiar, but quite different from each other.”
In life, it is either you are in control or someone else is having total or partial control over you. You always have the choice to make.
This morning, I’m going to discuss with you ways to deal with uncle Thomas syndrome without getting swept under the rug.
How to Win The “Uncle Thomas Syndrome” Battle of Your Life Without Throwing a Punch
It’s time to celebrate all the amazing UNCLE THOMASes in your life who are indirectly pushing you to go activate your dreams.
I present to you a definitive guide on achieving greatness in life in spite of unfavorable circumstances.
1. Define your goals
Know what you want. Identify the reason why all the punches they might throw at you won’t have much effect on you. Winning the battle of life starts from within. When you know where you are going, you’d hardly get confused along the path.
Like an old saying of my pastor:
“if you don’t know where you are going, every bus stop would look like your own.”
Know your WHY?
Take your time, if that’d be all it would cost you to really know where you are heading.
2. Be resolute about your dreams
Decide and commit to your dreams. If your goal is to get to destination Z from A, be deliberate and decisive on how you get there. Mind you, there are several other destinations like B, C, D, E, F,….and Y et al that you are going to discover on your way to Z. NEVER GET CARRIED AWAY on your way to your WHY.
3. Know your strength
I am a free thinker and love to be of value to others, but when it comes to throwing punches in the ring, I’d leave that to Anthony Joshua of AJBXG because it is not my strength. In getting to your destination without allowing uncle thomas to get to you with their poisonous feelings about your dreams, know your strength and stay above the drop limit.
Never go above your limits to make them special. Just celebrate whatever their opinions are, but stick to the lyrics of your life. You only live once, YOLO.
4. Create space to accommodate them with a massive smokescreen effect
Uncle Thomas could be anybody; brother, friend, class mate, and even close relatives. Not all of them would have ulterior motives towards you. Some as a result of trying to be too good, they’d ended up being an obvious enemy without any knowledge of it.
There’s an urgent need for a special space in your life for some certain uncle Thomas’s to occupy. If you don’t create that room, they’d force themselves in by joining the haters association of your dreams. For you not having such experience, create space and distance yourself from all the uncle thomas’s as much as possible. Let them exist and beam from afar, give them what to see which would be their reality while you focus on your own reality.
Don’t let people pull you down by their negative words. Build muscle to accommodate negative comments about your products and services – and never, ever try to justify yourself.
5. Accept your shortcomings but hold on to your reality
All the Uncle thomas and sister thomases out there wouldn’t want to believe you could do it without them.
They’ll always feel their opinions are the shield that is protecting you most of the time. You should let them keep that feeling as is. That’s why you will have to conceal your ideologies until it would make sense.
You can hardly make sense in the midst of irrationally minded people.
5. Strike back with result.
What is the best revenge in this world? RESULT. Learn to channel all the negativity, hate and disbelieving attitudes from uncle thomas into a positive charges towards achieving your dreams. #BeMentallySexy about your life goals.
Do all it takes to have that evidence that you know what you are doing. Only fools, I mean professional fools, argue when they see fact.
Common facts about uncle thomas
Watch out for these traits in people if you want to know where they belong in your life.
Always negative about situations and things
Always bitter about others around them
Complains about processes
Always have a better idea of doing things without actually doing anything
No matter how great a news is, they’d certainly find something bad about it which might makes you sad.
And many more…
Whenever you sense these kind of people, don’t take offense, just put them on their own lane. Let them feel important to themselves, but not you.
Conclusion
This article is not intended to berate anyone bearing Thomas by name. But instead, it was intended to spew out greatness out of someone feeling too low of his/her being. And finally, celebrate all the jerks in your life. It is because of them you made it where you are today.
A plague swept through a village, leaving many people dead in its wake. Zed decided to suspend his main goal, and use his magic to heal the people.
This is how it worked.
He would touch one villager at a time, “soaking up” the plague into his own body. The villager would heal immediately, while Zed would rest for a bit so that his magic could kill the plague in his own body.
Only that there was a problem.
The people didn’t care. Immediately, they found out he could heal them, they paid no attention to his terms. They were dying. They couldn’t afford to wait.
So, Zed was encompassed by the villagers, all touching him at once. Zed would have died if his friends didn’t return to save him on time.
Are you Zeddicus?
They’ve told you.
To be a leader, you must be selfless.
So, you jumped into the sky, saying yes to everyone’s needs. You neglected your own farm, but it’s all right. You are the Messiah of us all, after all.
Not so fast, Billy!
To be truly selfless, you must risk being selfish.
Here. Take some water. Let me explain.
Imagine you have 5 hens in the middle of a famine. The hens lay 5 eggs a day. You and 4 friends take one each, but you’re not filled.
You have three options.
1. Keep managing the eggs. It’s not enough, but you are alive. You should be grateful.
2. Kill one hen a day. You will eat and eat… And run out within a week.
3. Starve for a day. Let the hens hatch 5 eggs. Let the chicks grow, and you have 10 hens laying 10 eggs. You only have to starve a day.
Make a choice now.
You make this choice each day.
With every resource you have. You can choose to help everyone right now, and be the nice guy. You will have no time for yourself, but people will loooove you.
Or you can choose to focus on your YOUniverse. Serve your YOUniverse first. Focus on the things that will grow you. Focus on the life you are building.
Focus on your dreams. Stand tall while people tell you about how wicked you are. You are so arrogant. You’ve forgotten your people. This is all right.
You are doing it for the YOUniverse.
Guard your resources jealously.
Ruthlessly defend your empire.
Everyone else will use you if you drop guard. And they won’t be evil. We all need one another’s help. Of course, they will ask you.
And you should help when you can. However, even too much honey can make you vomit. Helping others at the expense of your life isn’t always wise.
Understand that being nice can actually be evil. While we are at it, Google “The etymology of Nice”. See where the word comes from.
It isn’t so “nice” now, is it?
You see, playing Messiah sounds so noble and romantic… Until the proverbial shit hits the proverbial fan.
And when the said shit blows up and you lay there hanging, the ones whom you sacrificed yourself for would ask, “Didn’t he save others? Let him save himself now.”
For the YOUniverse, for the future you are diligently creating, learn to say no. Good people will understand if you explain why.
As for the others who will talk you down, I only have one advice for you.
Don’t take constructive criticism from those who have not constructed anything.
Is it possible for our nation to translate from third world to first world?
Oh yes it is! We just have to begin to invent products and services that will compete favourably in the global market. I must say, a few Nigerians are already doing this. We need to make it a national culture.
So what is my part and yours in this? It is for us to value ideas.
However, it is the degree to which we have invested in our minds that will determine the quality of ideas that will flow through our minds.
To create world class products, we must have world class ideas and world class ideas come from world class thinking.
To think world class, we must expose ourselves to information. We need to start now.
This is my charge to you. Over the weekend, as you fulfill your social obligations to family and friends, schedule time to become a global Nigerian inventor of our time. Listen to my resource products Creative Thinking and Imagination.
I believe that very soon, this country will move from third world to the first. And this will happen in your lifetime and mine.
