One of the most difficult questions I have had to answer many times is, ‘what kind of business can I do?’ These people have a sincere question but if the truth must be told it is the wrong question.

I honestly think that people cannot think about a business to do and succeed at it if they have not found out what to do with themselves as individuals. You can only say this is my business because it is what you like to do and want to do with or without the monetary remuneration involved. It can be your business and I can agree that you will excel at it if you are willing to hang on in there even when you have done every right thing for the business to succeed and nothing positive seems to be coming.

If you want to know what the right business is then I strongly recommend that you first discover who you are as an individual and what you seen naturally wired to do. The things you can easily succeed at if they were your businesses are the things that you do with all the energy inside you even when every other person around seems to question your interest and they do not understand why you will be so positive without any concrete result to look forward to!

When people hear me teach about entrepreneurship and business development the next question I can be sure to get in the interactive session is, ‘so what business do you suggest I do.’ As much as I do not want to be nasty I must confess that this question comes from people who do not even know themselves. I discovered who I am and what I am supposed to be doing. I found out what I really want and not what somebody else thinks is lucrative. I began to develop myself first to be a productive person and a relevant person in the society.

One thing that helped in which I have now converted into business was that I found a major skill in my life and my purpose in life became clear. When my purpose became clear I began to see what I could do as a business and still fulfill purpose. I found out that I could talk a lot and I was so passionate about getting some information across to people. when I started developing my speaking skills I realized the need to start writing what I have been talking about so that the people who could not make it to the meeting could get some of the things I said on paper. Initially my writing skill was developed because I had no stable speaking platform so I thought about a way to still say what I wanted to say even if they would not give me the microphone in the meeting. At some point I successfully said what I wanted to say through the papers written and the writing became consistent. Having built the abilities inside me it was not difficult to decide what business to do when I thought about doing business.

I simply took my gifts or talents and placed it in front of me. I thought about all the business that people with my talents were doing and that gave me an idea of what to do. That was how I got into professional speaking, compere services, writing books, publishing and management training was added to it because of my passion for excellence. This was easy for me to decide because I first found a skill rather than looking out for where to make money.

For some others it may not work just the way it has worked for me because I had a physical skill that was backed up by passion and I could convert it into services as a business. You may have seen one or two things that you like or you may have seen one or two things that seem mysterious to you. I remember the story of a young man who decided to study medicine because his father constantly had a pain and he wanted to find out why his father had that pain so that he could help his father.

There are people who also go into some kinds of businesses not because it is really their passion but they have discovered that it is a need and they cannot afford to always wait for someone else to come and meet the need.

For some others it may not be a need that they have stumbled on. It could be a mistake they made while playing around with several materials. You will be surprised by how many inventions we have all over the world today not because of ingenuity but because of mistakes.

While some are jumping up and down about what kind of businesses they should do or how they should work on their skills to give it a commercial value there are some who simply go in the direction of their role model. While this can be dangerous it is still proven to have worked for a few. The danger in it is that some end up just copying what someone else is doing without knowing what the person’s intentions were before he started what he was doing. The influence of the role model could be a positive one if the person who is replicating what someone has already done has a close rapport with the person whose works or strategy he seems to be replicating. At that level he will have an understanding of what the person is doing instead of just trying to do what the other person is doing without knowing why.

In plain words, apart from what I have said above, the kind of businesses you can do will be determined by:

1.) The gifts or talents that you have discovered in you.
2.) The abilities or skills that you have acquired through training or cultivation
3.) The dire or urgent need in your environment.
4.) A mistake that you made which turned out to be what someone needs.
5.) The influence of a strong role model in your life.

Whatever the case is just make sure what you want to do or what you are doing is what you really like to do.

Fola Daniel Adelesi, ASM
www.foladaniel.wordpress.com
www.debater5.blogspot.com
www.teenagersclass.wordpress.com
+234 703 790 7851
+234 805 247 2448
info@foladnaiel.com

I have been through stages and I am still going through stages in my life, just as almost every one of us, where nothing seems to be happening. At such times it is easy to get discouraged and call for a pity party hoping to find some consolation in something external rather than looking inward for solutions.

Whatever it is you are going through is not something that will remain that way for the rest of your life. Life will always look like a tunnel at some points where it is going to be dark and you still have to drive through. The problem with so many other people is that when they drive into a tunnel in life they want to wait for the light to come on in the tunnel but the tunnel probably was not designed to be lit up. You are not supposed to stay in the tunnel because it is a passage and not your destination! When you remember all the time that the tunnel is your passage and not your destination then you will think about what to do when something starts happening.

If you are hoping for a job I think it is safe to strive to be a part of some professional training before the job eventually comes and that will imply that you improved your earning capacity. You can’t stay out of employment for several years and you think your worth will be increasing without doing something like getting additional degrees or taking some other training. The truth is that the more you stay out of school the less relevant you become. For those who are entrepreneurs you also have the advantage to improve your service delivery or other relevant skills in your business at the time when your business does not seem to have all the demands you expect it to have. One thing we unknowingly do against ourselves is to continually wait for something to happen for us while doing nothing to make ourselves better.

A lot of people wait for something to happen and when something begins to happen they realize that what is happening to them is lot bigger than what they bargained for because they did not go after more information or seek to improve their professionalism. I honestly admit that waiting can be a difficult thing and sometimes can be very frustrating for the person who has to wait for months to get a client in a business. It is one thing to get people who really are interested in what you do and make a lot of promises but it is another thing for them to request your services and be paid.

Just as you know somewhere in your heart that a time will come when you will not beg for clients, then you should prepare for that time by knowing more about your field and improving your skills. The time to plan your innovation is when nothing seems to be happening to you. The time to increase your earning capacity is when nothing seems to be happening. The time to work out your professional excellence is when nothing seems to be happening rather than just waiting and hoping for the opportunity because you will get to a stage where people will say, ‘we know you can do this and we do not want to give it to another person.’ At that time there may be no chance for preparation. You will only have to go on with whatever you have been equipped with so far. Do something now!

It is easy to think that the teenagers are too ambitious and to conclude that some of them are already delinquent but what we are ignorantly doing when we do not help our teenagers to enjoy church is to cultivate a spirit of rebellion in them when they have to keep coming to church as a result of necessity. Nothing drives anyone towards rebellion faster than being forced to a place where you do not derive maximum satisfaction. For the fanatics it may be wrong to say that the church is supposed to be fun what is the entire essence of the church when the people coming to it do not look forward it in any way?

Many churches are preoccupied building projects and fund raising activities at the detriment of members and unfortunate at the expense of teenagers who still depend absolute on the information being churned out in the society rather than seating down to process information from within through mediation. It has come to a time when pastors and church leaders must recognize the fact that we are not building anything when we use people to build churches and we can be referred to as mega churches when we cannot point to the ‘mega lives’ that we have built. There are schools in the society today who can boast about the great men they have produced for the society and sometimes some of them boast about how many presidents they have produced for the nation and I think it is time for the church to focus primarily on the relevance of its products to the society rather than being to concerned about the relevance of those people to its series of activities within the church setting.

Teenagers are full of energy and are always waiting for something to do or always looking forward to the next engaging activity but too many religious bodies only deem it fit to keep them in the church and organize an annual youth conference to say we thank God for sparing your lives for another one year. For those who do not wait for one year they probably have some meetings where the teenagers or the youth bodies are just gathered and somebody talks over their heads.

For churches to be productive in these times they cannot only begin to think about productivity in line with how many parents are prosperous or look prosperous without looking at the productivity of the teenagers so it is imperative to have a structure that “engages and involves” the teenagers as a way to unlock the potentials inside of them. There are so many teenagers who have heard teachings on holiness and they have become so holy but also so useless to the society. The system of any purpose driven church must accommodate the capacity building for young people through which the church can refine lives not just with words but with proven skills that the teenagers have acquired or learnt.

We have told them too many things that they should not do but we have also left them to keep wondering what is the right thing to be done? They already know they should not smoke, drink, fornicate, lie, kill and so many other things. Unfortunately what should not be done is the focus of a lot of people who see to have been called into the youth ministry. We scare the hell out of them and forget that it is easier to go back to what should not be done when that is the only thing they are looking forward to. Let us remember that when Jesus told people what they should not do he also empowered them to do what they were designed to do. He found disciples and led them to God. He taught them upright living but did not leave them to start looking out for who was going to break the rules. While he was teaching them upright leaving he focused more on the productivity of the disciples and that was why he said stuff, ‘oh ye of little faith.’ What that implies is that there is something they had learnt by watching him or there is something he had taught them which they still could not demonstrate. We have instances where he spoke to the people about the talent which was a parable on productivity. We also have instances where he spoke to the people about the poor in the society which meant the focus of any productive person is not only to be blessed but to also be a blessing to the people around.

Rather than just saying teenagers are this and that we have to begin to create systems for these teenagers and build them after helping them to discover themselves. There so many churches who cannot boast of having helped their teenagers to discover purpose. When we cannot boast of having helped these teenagers to discover purpose then we should know that anything is meaningful to a purposeless person. It is when a man has become purposeful that it becomes more meaningful to begin to set priorities right.

For too long the church has built structures rather than people. Consequently the society has produced more powerful individuals than the church has produced even though we have people who are so anointed but cannot command national attention. This is not surprising to an extent because even some church members have relegated their pastors’ relevance to church activities or spiritual issues. You also may not expect too much because the same pastor that preached powerfully on Sunday is now at the economic mercy of the congregation from Monday to Saturday.

I strongly think that the church is one of the places where you can help teenagers prepare for life spiritually, academically and professionally and any church that does not do that is working against what it is preaching. When we have people who are so spiritual and are not economically empowered they will get to a level where they question the capacity of the ever invisible God and resort to ‘self-help’ which consequently is ‘self-destruction.’ The church has the great opportunity to make not just the teenagers but every other person understand that the rate of unemployment is not as high as the rate of unemployable people. There is unemployment but the bigger problem is there are unemployable people and the church to a great extent is indulging some of these people. You have kept someone since he or she was a teenager without questioning his or her productivity and now they have gotten to levels where their productive abilities should yield for them and you are praying for them to receive miracle jobs.

If I was a church pastor and you came to me about receiving a miracle job I would first ask you about what skills you have acquired before expecting a miracle job.

Let’s create systems that

1.) Challenge the mediocrity which the teenagers have grown to observe and are likely to pick easily.
2.) Help the young ones and every other person think outside the box and not always looking for help when they can unlock what they have and help others.
3.) Help people discover who they are and always know what they carry which has been lying dormant in them.
4.) Teach people to be upright but at the same time productive and seemingly indispensable in the society.
5.) Make people feel so grateful to the church for its impact on them and consequently look forward to church every other day.

Until we do this we are going to be complicating problems that we are supposed to be fixing when we know that it is easier for teenagers to rebel than to listen. While praying for our teenagers let’s also do something about their perspective to life!

A female Nigerian pastor who goes by the name Williams once said, ‘if your church does not change you then you need to change your church.’ I have also heard Pastor Mathew Ashimolowo say, ‘instead of the people to perish they change their parish.’ For so long a time we have had to debate the necessity of changing a church and I did keep quiet for some reasons but the long silence is killing some people and it is time to voice my opinion.

It is important to first note that when we were born we did not choose the churches that we attended and for a long time we sat in the pew not because we were blessed but because our parents got ‘stuck’ in some of those churches and we also had to stick. This is a time when people no longer just go to church just because it is important not to forsake the gathering of the brethren as it is the culture of some folks but we have to be in the gathering where tangible values are deposited and physical progress is made. Today we have people driving several kilometers to attend churches even when there are churches practically ‘littering’ the streets where they live. That should leave us with the important question of why would people want to leave tens of churches around them and go to some churches miles away from their house?

What happened to the churches people were in before they thought about leaving and why do pastors fight the people that are leaving their churches. I honestly understand that leaving a church could be for the right or the wrong reasons depending on the person in question. Some leave their churches for other churches because of the new facility that the other church has but some others leave their churches for another because the other seems to be delivering the values they can point to. Some leave their churches because they want to be seen as people who attend Pastor “So … So … So and So’s Church but other have discovered the connection in destiny and they understand that this other pastor has been through the paths that God wants to take them through.

At any point my opinion has always been that when you first get born again it might just be necessary to have a place where your soul is nourished but at some point it might be necessary to change church when you discover purpose and it is very obvious this other pastor can guide you through your specific path of purpose. Let’s be real here! It is not every pastor that can guide you to your destination so you have some pastors that can at best help you to be spiritually sound but you also need someone who can take you beyond being spiritually sound to being productive and purposeful. A lot of pastors can teach and preach but only a few have mastered the art of coaching such that when you sometimes need to take some decisions your pastor’s voice can resonate in your ears even if he is not there when your decision was being taken.

So why do pastors fight members who change churches? Some of the pastors are fighting for the soul of the members which means that they know the person in question is not mature enough to jump from one place to another. They would have had no problem with the person is they know that this person is spiritually sound enough to know what is good for him per season because there are spiritual seasons in every man’s life. For some others the case is not the same. They know this guy’s tithe is very heavy so he can collapse the church’s finance if he decides to leave. For some other it has to do with the key role the person has been playing in the church. They do not want a person to leave because he is a choir master or a unit leader in some key departments of the church. It has, in some places, gone as bad as pastors cursing their members which is an outright abuse of the anointing because it was given to you or any other person so that you can bless and impact the sheep.

It was recorded in the bible that some of Jesus’ disciples left but we never heard that Jesus fought or cursed them. In fact he never mentioned it again the moment they left. When pastors begin to understand that people can leave at any time then they will not make people so indispensable that their leaving unexpectedly will cause a lot of pain where it does. A church system is supposed to be an institution and at that it means that even when key pastors leave it will not shake the church! If anything happens to they key pastor the church will continue without any struggle because there is a structure in place to make sure that the focus is building lives and not enlarging congregation so that we can have a robust resume when talking about pastoring experience.

When people leave churches just as they were the ones who walked in willingly before you began to call them members it should be noted that a personal relationship with the people exiting the churches is more important. There are people who love you enough to be your friend or even listen to you as a mentor but they just do not want to be a part of the congregation and I think you should not fight people for that reason. Some of the people who have even taught about leaving could be won back into the church if only we genuinely follow them on personal grounds and they are convinced that these people are after my heart and not my money or talents which has always been useful to the church.

Instead of fighting people for leaving our church we are supposed to seat down and consider why people would want to leave our own churches for some other that might even be far away. In Nigeria I know about people who drive for about one or two hours to get to church every Sunday so the question should be what are they looking for that will make them leave all the churches around them and stay in traffic some times for as long as three or four hours just to attend a service!

Rather than fighting people who leave our churches I strongly suggest that church leaders should seat down and stop concluding that everybody who left the church has backslidden into sin. There are hundreds of people changing churches without backsliding. The truth is that they have even grown stronger in the word and have results to show in the new places their feet are now planted. Let’s re-evaluate things and sincerely answer the question of why people are leaving our congregation because it means there is something they are getting in the other places that we are not offering. When we find what it is and it is scriptural, we must provide such for our people because there are people who will not leave the church and at the same time they are not satisfied with the things they experiencing.

I should also have mentioned that some people leave churches because their values no longer align with the core values being propagated in the church and I would rather have a person leave the church because his values do not align with the values of the church than stay in the church and fight everybody. Sometimes it’s amazing how churches can tolerate the people who will not leave and still cause chaos in the church but will never celebrate those who decided to leave quietly because they do not want trouble and they still want to grow at the end of the day.

After all many of these pastors who fight people for leaving their churches preach that there is no denomination in heaven so why do you fight people to stay or come back to your denomination if you truly admit there is no denomination in heaven?

I over heard a group of photographers discussing in a recent conference that I attended and they lamented their state of stagnation. One of them believed witches and wizards were responsible and he also taught that they could have been richer if their parents taught them how to make money. It is true they could have been richer if their parents taught them how to make money but he erroneously believed that all the people in the developed world taught their children how to make money. I only wish he had read ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’ but the problem again is that people like that don’t read.

One day, a preacher said, ‘if the devil has an opportunity to defend himself before God he would say, ‘God you know that most of these things I have been accused of were not done by me. You also know that I was in Asia when this man in Europe said I was the one that tempted him’ but the devil will never get that chance because he is condemned forever.’ Unfortunately today we have people who are not putting things right and are attributing their failures or stagnation in life to the devil and his cohorts.

A long time ago I settled it in my mind that I am responsible for whatever becomes of me especially knowing that God already planned a great future for my life and that it will be my responsibility to access what he had preplanned before I came into the scene. Witches may be able to manipulate the destiny of others but yours is secured if only you know who you are and what you carry. You are an exemption to those who can be tossed in any direction provided you have found out the area where you do not have to struggle to stand out.

I have read in the Bible that if the ways of a man pleases God he will make his enemies to be at peace with him so witches and wizards can be at peace with you. Let me also shock you that witches and wizards can be compelled to join in helping you fulfill destiny and I will back this up by the story of a pastor that I heard. He went into a town for a crusade and it was time for him to begin to operate then the witches showed up. When they realized who he was they said, ‘this is a ‘no-go’ area and they also promised to back him up.’ That was strange because witches should be all out to destroy and not to help.

People have come to believe that they do not have power yet they agree that they serve a very powerful God. God is not like your political government that has so much power and its people are so powerless! It is written in the Bible that our names are inscribed on the palm of his hands so I do not understand how witches can control the destiny of a man whose name is inscribed on the palm of God’s hands. The one who watches over me does not sleep nor slumber and he is the only one that has that quality so who’s that wretched witch that can get God to go to bed and decide what happens to me if God goes to bed?

Do I agree there are witches? Oh yeah I do and I remember Jesus in the Bible helping some men to cast out the evil spirits in them and sometimes at the peril of the swine. The more important thing is for to understand that we have and serve “The Almighty” God who upholds the world by the word of his power and has made us Kings and Priests unto our God. He also makes us understand that we have overcome by the blood of the lamb and the word of our testimony.

The conversation of the photographers was that of someone who was mentally weak but unfortunately did not understand how much God had invested in them. You are too much to be stagnated or terminated anyhow. Your destiny is on a high voltage if you are on a voyage with God

Where in the world do you think would be ideal for a man to succeed if his present environment does not seem good enough for him to succeed? What do we really mean when we talk about greener pasture? For a long time I have heard so many people talk about a greener pasture but we need to ask ourselves what we really refer to as a greener pasture. Is it a place where there are greener grasses in the real sense of the word ‘grass?’ If all you need is greener grass why don’t you just pick a paint bucket with a brush and paint the grass around so you can keep it green for as long as you want!

If a man leaves a place because he feels the place is not offering him enough opportunities he just might be more frustrated in the new place that was formally referred to as the greener pasture. Before we say things are not working in a place we should be able to hold our heads high and say these are the things that we have done and they have been done the way they were supposed to be done. We must be able to say we know who we are and have discovered the talents inside of us. Beyond the discovery of the talents inside of us we should be able to say we have made bold steps towards using the talent for the progress of the community in form of a service that will in turn fetch us some money.

We live in times where people have not offered anything to the community but we expect so much from the community and we get so bitter when the community cannot meet our expectations. It is very important to note that the idea of greener pasture is about understanding where you were placed in life and remaining in that place. Understanding your place in life begins with knowing what abilities are inside you and finding out why you are the one carrying such abilities and not another person.

Why are you the one with the passion for people’s development? Why are you the one with the passion for young people and the less privileged? Why are you the one with the passion for a change in leadership? Why are you the one with the strong desire for excellence? All of these issues that give you grave concern first point to the areas where you have a gifting and consequently a solution. If you carry the solution to something then you are supposed to be in the middle of the problem where the solution is applicable.

If there is anything called the greener pasture I think it must be defined as the placed where your gifts, talents and abilities can be easily recognized and rewarded! If you seek a place called a greener pasture without knowing what you have and looking out for where it is needed then you are looking for what is not lost. At best you would be like the man in a beautiful book called ‘Acres of Diamond’ who had diamond right there in front of him. He had diamonds in abundance where he lived but went out in search of diamonds. Many today, in the name of a greener pasture are looking for what is not lost because what they need is staring at them but they cannot see!

Before you start out to look for a greener pasture, be sure you know what you are capable of doing which will make you relevant and “reward-able” where you are going.

Countries who do not have responsible leaders should be ashamed of themselves bearing in mind that my definition of ‘responsible leaders’ captures the kind of people who believe in and ensure the welfare of their people, pursue the developmental progress of the society, ensure that integrity is a priority and a culture, always say what they mean and mean what they say. Unfortunately some of the people have not recognised the fact that the greatest honour you can do for a fool is not to give him a platform to express his foolishness. If you think you are not concerned about his foolishness please be informed that the whole world will also question the wisdom of the person that gave a foolish man the platform for expression.
The disaster of leadership in any nation is to see the anomalies become the normal things and the normal things become the anomalies because of the misplacement of values. We live in nations today where it has become normal for people to die not because the death was unavoidable but because a politician was given money to equip our hospitals and such people have squandered the money. We live in nations today where political leaders who cannot afford more than two houses – going by their business empire or their seating allowances as politicians – already four or fives houses in the most expensive parts of the country forgetting that they will only sleep on one bed at a time.

We have leaders who cannot interpret the laws of the nation and execute as expected. We have leaders who do not even know what goes on in an area that is supposed to be their jurisdiction. There are leaders who have no idea of what their followers are going through and they are the ones who sit in the House of Representatives! What else would they be representing if not their selfish interests?

I make bold to say that the countries should be ashamed because we can deny our leaders as the reflection of the society but we elected them or did not do anything about those we did not elect but smuggled into our government houses. The television screens are filled with people who know next to nothing about leadership yet they are paraded as leaders.

For years we have battled with the opinion regarding the people who are in politics and the people who are not supposed to be. We all agree that not all the people who are there right now are supposed to be there but we are only talking about it rather than acting about it. Another election is approaching in a country like Nigeria and previous elections have been characterised by killing of political opponents, blackmailing, exchange of blames and bribing of the gullible electorate.
We have, for more than 50 years, in the case of Nigeria listened to the sweet talking politicians and we have still not taken a step to make sure that the people who get into power are not the sweet talking politicians. We let them get into power before we begin to question their leadership abilities and at that time there are limits to what we could have done because we did not do what we were supposed to do in the first place. We live in countries where people get on television screens and begin to tell us what we all can see as a black material is not black but white.

People are dying in hospitals as a result of the greed of some of the people we call politicians. There are people who cannot even go to the hospitals because they cannot afford what they were not even supposed to pay for in the first place. Schools are constantly involved in one industrial action or the other and those who are supposed to graduate in four years are graduating in five or six years.

The problems abound and you and I can talk about it for as long as we want but we are the ones that started the anomalies in the government even though we are not in government. We started it because we refused to vote when we had the right to vote. We did not even register because we believed that our votes do not count. We have said again and again that our votes do not count so how do we expect our voices to count in the government where our votes did not count?
Some of our friends, relatives, fathers and mothers collected money from the misfits in politics and could not voice out when the politicians where doing what was not expected from them. Those we elected into the National Assembly have begun to keep mute over the right issues. When they have to vote about their seating allowances they will speak up but they will not speak up when they are supposed to speak up against another person in politics who has stolen money.

We unfortunately gave these misfits in politics the open ground to act because we did nothing but we are the only ones that can still stop them when we are ready. The problem is that they can only be stopped when we are ready so when are we going to be ready to stop the people from ruling their pockets while claiming to be speaking for their people.

It is time to act and we may lose it again if we do not work against these misfits. They live with us and around us but we refused to expose them. A country will only know peace and grow as it should with a happy people if we are willing to expose and face the wrath of those who are not doing what they are being paid to do.

Fola Daniel Adelesi
www.foladaniel.com
www.debater5.blogspot.com
www.netlog.com/foladaniel
info@foladaniel.com

I was musing over the recent debate regarding the credibility of the police to fish the killers of Dipo Dina and a few funny thoughts came to my mind. I know this will be interesting to you if you reason with me.
1.) When these killers are fetched they will be more famous than you and I can imagine and that will happen almost overnight.
2.) If justice will be done and they have to be remanded in prison for as long as the judge decides that means they will have a house – prison – to live in free from charge and they may get a life sentence. If they do it means they will not pay rent for the rest of their lives and do not have to worry about buying houses.

3.) They will, in addition to free accommodation have free food from the Federal Prison service of our dear nation so they do not have to worry about what to eat or drink.

4.) The implication of their free food is that the Federal Government will remove tax-payers’ money from the Federation account or from the national budget to feed them when the Nigerian that are really paying the tax have not enjoyed the benefit of their tax.

5.) There is nearly no place in the country that has as much security as the prison especially for high profile criminals as they are called. It means they will have, probably, the most secured apartment in the country.

6.) There is no Nigerian who wants to eat that will decide to seat back at home, sleep all day and still have food to eat at the end of the day. Now these guys will be able to sleep all day, do nothing but still wake up to eat without working for the food or bothering whether it will come or not because it will definitely come.

What if they are not caught?

1.) They will roam our streets freely while their victim will be six feet under the earth. The “victim-by-extension” Dipo’s family and other dependants will mourn and will struggle more than they have been doing because the bread winner is gone.

2.) The killers will have the courage to do another one because this one succeeded

3.) Other politicians will be encouraged to think about killing opponents who get in their way if people keep dying and nobody gets caught.

4.) This kind of development will scare away the real people that we need in politics because the people with good intentions will not want to die and will stay away from politics.

5.) Some other up-coming politicians will think that politics is a do or die affair.

6.) We will not be able to learn the lessons people like Abraham Lincoln taught us – the man who failed about 13 times before getting elected.

So why do politicians kill?

1.) They are not leaders. They are politicians and that by extension means they do not have the people’s interest at heart. They are strategizing on personal agenda.

2.) Most of them trained through experience to win election but did not train to lead the people that elected them so they have nothing to offer.

3.) These people are carried away by the allocations in office and the surety of becoming prosperous through politics.

4.) They are not deep thinking individuals and will be frustrated by the right thinking people so they think the way out is to clear the opponent.

What’s the way out?

1.) We have to train leaders who see politics and governance as service and not as a career. If it still remains a career it will encourage desperation.

2.) We have to build political parties with ideologies because when parties do not have a vision and an ideology they do not really know why they are together!

3.) We know politics is dangerous but those of us who have the interest of the nation at heart must not stay away from it. We have to go for it and stay there until we succeed in changing it!

Some of us question the possibility of change and largely, but ignorantly, talk about the reasons things will not change. Unfortunate, all of those reasons for the most part only reveal why individuals do not want to change instead of the chances of having a changed situation. I do not like to argue the possibility of change in any given society but when I hear people argue about it and some people say it is impossible for the society to change then I see people who have forgotten that the society is just a collection of people, including the people arguing, with varying demography. Consequently, when some people strongly suggest to us that a society cannot change especially for good they are simply giving us an inner picture of people who do not want to change but are claiming that the society does not want to change.

We should begin to ask what it really takes for a society to change rather than join the league of pessimists who say that the nation will never change. The situation in America during the slave trade, in my opinion, is worse than anything we are currently trying to change. All that was required for the change process to begin was the decision of one person and the support of others. With persistence, the person who began the change process and the people who advocated the change began to gather momentum and consequently build a voice stronger than what opposition could silence. There was negotiation after negotiation and they lasted for hours that gradually turned into days. The days of negotiation eventually became weeks of negotiation. Several weeks of negotiation grew into months of negotiation but the people were not tired of negotiating a place in the society that was rightly theirs. The negotiation did not even stop in some months. It lasted for years and people gave their lives for what they were negotiating.

Some of us can readily talk about the negatives but is it not all about us. We start a change process and give up too soon on the end result that we saw. We conclude soon after beginning that it is impossible for things to change and we never encourage others who have not given up in the fight for change. All it takes to have an entire street painted is to get every man on the street to paint his house. All it takes to keep the streets clean is to have everyman clean the plots in front of his house. All it takes to have streets ridden of thieves and rogues is to have every house owner and tenant fight against the activity around their houses that build up to burglary.

I do not question the possibility of change but I question our willingness to change. We want to have the desired changes overnight but none of them will ever happen that way. The only thing that can happen overnight is damage. We can have disasters in the twinkling of an eye. Hundreds of people that grew over the years can die in less than a minute but it is never so with change.

There is such a huge price to pay for change. The first is that it will always stir up our anxiety because it will never come as soon as we expect it and when it does not show up in good time we would have reasons to give up. While working towards and waiting for change, it is very possible to offend the people that live with us or live next to us because in the fight for change we will have to fight mentality. And I must say, it will be the mentality of the people that we love so much. When we are not willing to begin the fight with the mentality of the people that we love so much, we resist change and give mediocrity a chance to thrive.

Lest we forget, change is not a weekend assignment. It is what we have to do day and night until we can think change without any reminder. We would need to see the change and talk about it before we have it. We would need to talk about it and fight for it before it can have a place. We would have to fight for the change and lose some things that are precious to us before the change can last. We will have to lose some pleasure to give change a chance because the process of change must be prepared for.

When a nation wants to experience change it is not only the leaders that can make it happen. If the change will ever happen the followers cannot afford to follow only. They have to be involved and contribute to the development of change in any area where it is desired.

Can we ever change anything? I strongly believe we can, provided we really want to. The reason we still question the possibility of change in our society today is that we do not realize change is a mental battle that must first be fought in the mind before it becomes a reality. If we do not believe the possibility of change then mediocrity has won the battle in our minds and we are left to grapple with the offspring of mediocrity.

We lose the chance to change anything when we agree that we are not in a position to change anything. We lose the very essence of change when we believe that someone else must give us a platform before we can start anything. When we think that what we do not have are the things that we need to make a change then we will never work towards any change and will not have anything new.

One thing is certain, the way we do things today is not the way we have always done things. We didn’t have computers to type what we needed to type. We didn’t have any internet where you and I can read the works of other people. We didn’t have cars that could take people around. We didn’t have mobile phones that could call from wherever you are. We didn’t have electricity to do most of the things that we do today. We didn’t have people flying and even going to the moon. Everything change!

We only need to be completely dissatisfied about what we have or see right now for the change to begin. Whoever still questions the possibility of change should remember that he or she was not born with the ability to read and write. It was learnt! Whoever still questions the possibility of change should remember that he or she was not born as an adult. There was growth! Whoever still questions the possibility of change should remember how we wake up to a new day though we cannot explain it.

When we refuse to change, we will become products of changes that we never wanted.

“How can I start out in business or in any other thing I want to do when I don’t have any money and the circumstances around do not encourage me? Is it possible to start with nothing when we all know that you will need money to start whatever you need to start and you will also need money to do some publicity for what you want to do?” These and many others are the kind of questions that I get when I go to speak in some meetings especially when I have to discuss entrepreneurship with young or old people. I know you can do a lot even when you don’t have money because I have done it and how to do it is what we need to look at.

For some of the people who ask me questions in the meetings where I speak I just perceived they are making excuses for not willing to try anything new and you can practically read the innocence on the face of some others. For those who are trying to make excuses they will argue with you even when you are willing to show them that it is very possible to start something with nearly nothing. The response of those whoa are willing to learn is rapt attention to your explanation and you find them asking question after question not because they are trying to find a fault where they can prove to you that you are wrong but because they are trying to understand you.

Some of the people who cared to listen are already doing fine today after listening to a few tips on how to start something with nothing. I have said in several articles that all I had was a gift when I started and so does every other person! For some other people they may be passionate about a kind of service that the people need and that will be of great commercial value to them if they are willing to try out those services.

There are two kinds of people who have two different ways of making money in the society. Some have the ingenuity with creation and they invent or innovate for the need of others. These are people who come up with products for others to buy, use or sell to other people. Other people’s ingenuity will come to play when they are rendering a service and the only way they can make money from that is to learn how to place a commercial value on the service they are rendering despite the fact that the service cannot be quantified. These two kinds of ingenuity will be interwoven in some places and they will be you understand how to create a commercial value for what you can do.

A great example of interwoven ingenuity is the fact that I did not invent the computer but I do a lot of writing. In this case the man who is inventing the computer can decide the cost of his computer based on the cost of production and the perceived that I, the user, will derive from it. Another example is that I do a lot speaking in conferences and seminars but there would have been no easy way for me to determine the value of what I have done if the clock was not invented. Now that the clock has been invented I can say I have been speaking for an hour therefore, my time is worth ….(Whatever amount you think). The ingenuity of invention (clock) and service (speaking) have come together to create a commercial value for me.

I don’t need to have all the money in the world to start speaking and to make money from speaking. All I need to do is to refine my abilities and be sure that it is ready to be commercialized. That means you must prepare yourself such that if you find your own gifts and abilities for sale on a shelf you will be willing to buy even when you do not know where it is coming from. If you think you do not have a gift I can tell there is probably a gift that you have not discovered inside of you. And you also need to know that your gifts may not be about a visible and an uncommon ability to be displayed. Your gift could just be that you can render a service but when you are the one rendering that service you will render it better than any other person.

You can build yourself to a level in some services where everybody will know if you are not the one who did what they are seeing on display. They may not be able to explain why they feel this one is not from you but they just feel it is not up to the standard that you render. This is what Fela Durotoye calls predictable excellence. Where to from this place is included in the following:

1.) Have an identifiable gift or service

When people mention your name a picture must come to mind and I make bold to say that the reason some people are still poor today is that they have not been identified with any service for which they can be paid. When people do not know what business they can do with you there is no point blaming them for not giving you money. People will not just throw money away because money was not designed to be given away just like roses. Money is a means of exchange and you must have something to exchange in order to have money.

2.) Refine it, and advertise it.

Whatever you have found must not be left in its raw state. Some people have found some gifts and services that can be exchange for money but they have not gotten a dime because they have left what they discovered in the raw state. Polish what you have. If you can write don’t just write it anyhow. Make it appealing to people. If you can talk don’t just talk anyhow. Learn how to talk because there is a difference between uttering words and talking or speaking. Every human being is expected to utter words except for an abnormality so learn how to stand out despite the fact that every human being is expected to utter words. Whatever gift or service you have must be advertised if not people will only admire you for your gifts. Those whose gifts are admired don’t make money until the gifts are commercialized. While advertising the gifts and services that you have it is important to note that you may not always wait for money to produce the goods before delivering them. If you care a great deal about integrity which you cannot do without in business you will let you clients know that you have integrity and that you will deliver if they trust you with their funds. With this you can collect money from clients to produce or purchase some goods and deliver as promised at the stipulated time. In the case of a service you can collect about 70 percent of what is required to render the service so that you have something to start with. This is what is also called ‘other people’s money.’ It’s about doing business with funds from your clients.

3.) Trade and transfer it.

The important thing which now answers the question of starting with nothing is to trade and transfer your gift. I have heard a few fanatics who feel your gifts should not be traded but I have s simple answer for them. When Jesus proverbially gave some people talents the Bible first recorded that the gifts were given according to their abilities which means he expected results in some varying proportions. When they eventually came back with gifts he also dealt with them according to the results from the initial gifts. If you are not supposed to trade your gift why will Jesus question the attitude of the man who did nothing but bury the gift?

The emphasis I would like to make here is that you are to trade and transfer the gift. Some people never make money because all they do is use the gift. You have to replicate your abilities and gifts in other people. When you do this you will be empowering some others directly or indirectly for their finances. When you are transferring your abilities to others you may not be expecting monetary rewards but you know that you are building other people and consequently contributing to societal development or nation building. At some point the people you have impacted may come back to say thank you using monetary rewards or refer some people who need your services to you.

Trading your talent is where you make money directly by structuring your gifts or abilities and services into a business organization. People pay for products that you have created or pay to consult you on areas where you are perceived to be gifted. At some point you would have to learn where you must trade and transfer abilities at the same time.

There will also be times when you will transfer abilities though you are supposed to trade it but you are doing it for the sake of building relationships that will now fetch greater platforms to trade.

I have said you do not always have to start with money. What you need to do is to start with a mindset about what you want and I bet you can get it.