Who Are You? (Part 2)

Mike Adenuga, Aliko Dangote, Jim Ovia, Bill Gates, Donald Trump…….. what do all these names remind you of ? Of course you are right, multibillionaires, the very rich, and the very successful. Okonjo Iweala, David Beckham, Christiano Ronaldo, Barack Obama, Christian Dior, Michael Jordan, Bill Clinton, Wole Soyinka, Kanu Nwankwo…..and so on. These are names of people that we believe that are achievers in our society, successful people you might want to say. Yes I agree with you.

When you think about your future, these people’s pictures, achievements, lifestyles come to your mind. You often see yourself as them in your own future. I might not have listed the names of those you admire and wish to be like or even surpass in terms of achievement, because if I attempt to do that I might be writing 10 million names. Too much!

Never mind. But you know what? There are more than 6 billion people on earth with about 2.5 billion as adults who should be listed as one of these people but we just have 10million names or less. That’s just less than 1% of the world’s population, what??? Okay maybe we have been a little unfair with our figures, so let’s push it to 1% of the world population. That’s 60million people. And that would be 1.4million people in Nigeria of the over 140million population.
Really these figures are actually generous, but as generous as they are it only tells me that only one person ( or less) out of every ten people in your clique or school or neighborhood or family would one day be referred to as successful in another 15, 25 or more years by the teenagers of that generation. I mean that by the year 2025, which is by the corner, only a few people…a handful will be named by others as great people. That’s food for thought for anyone like me who would want to be a general in the house of God and a nation builder in a few years from now.

So if you’ve been spending time fantasizing about what your future would look like, pause for a minute and think deeply if you have what it takes to standout of your ten friends who equally have such desires and ambition. Because that future YOU will not be different from today’s YOU. There will be no magic to make you change automatically into your dream future but YOU would be an accumulation of the things you have done and what you keep doing daily from now till then.

So we all have equal opportunity to be tomorrow’s greatest today. Every man on earth has a talent or gift that can be nurtured into a tool for greatness. All the names we listed earlier have something that they are particularly best at, which some would describe as their talent. But I believe that yes they have a talent but it has been refined and developed into a skill over the years. What’s the difference? A talent is ‘a natural ability to do something well’, but a skill is 'an ability to do something well after you have learned it and practiced it over and over’ and it can even earn you an income.

People get paid for their skills and not necessarily their talent. You know many people around you who are talented singers, talkers, footballers, drummers, cooks but do not earn anything much because they have not trained themselves enough. Now imagine what you could be if you can turn you talents into a skill. Like Manchester United’s Christiano Ronaldo or Bill Clinton or Nicole Mullen or Bill Gates; all have identified one thing they do naturally well and have trained themselves so well at it that they are respected and even described as the best at it.

So wherever you find yourself know (in school most likely) be your best. Do all you can to be on top of your class. Develop yourself daily through the word of God, build your relationship with God, build your mind through Christian and motivational books and recordings, cultivate good relationships. These are things that will make you better. Identify your talent and over the next few years, turn it into a skill. Remember you want to be in the top 1% worldwide. Hmm!

Written by Dade Akinwande (modadeakin@yahoo.com ; 08087005300, 07028777752)