The Bushy Path

You have been thinking about it. And it has been giving you migraine. You had high hopes for your career. But now you feel your career has gone stagnant. You have been told to sweat the big things, the important things, and ignore the small things. You have followed that to the letter but your career is still stuck in mediocrity. Are the small things unimportant? This advice seems to imply it. However, it is a really bad idea to follow. Because the small things are more important than you think.

Ego can be a cause of downfall for anybody. When you have succeeded in a task or in your career, it is easy to think that you are the best. It is easy to think that you achieved success because you were flawless. Ego can blind you to things that people around you try to warn you about. It is even easy to think that those people are unqualified to offer advice to you because they have achieved much less than you have.

Sometimes, you think about your disadvantaged background. It becomes a source of discouragement to you. You believe that this could be a problem to the achievement of your lofty goals. You think people who have more privileged backgrounds would have it easier to fulfill their dreams and become successful.

No matter how bad a failure you are, you have achieved success in some things. No matter how successful you are, you have also failed in many pursuits. This is common to everybody but we usually differ in the number of failures and successes we have.

In the movies, it is usual to see people solving problems creatively without even trying. It is common to see a protagonist in a movie plot the antagonist’s thought patterns in under a minute of thinking hard. It can make you feel dull in comparison if you have ever tried to find a creative solution in 30 seconds without any success.

Every day, we take on risks. Some of these risks are so common that we no more see them as risks. Whenever you drive to your workplace, there is always a risk – no matter how low – of an auto accident. But how many people think of this risk? Very few. There are some other risks we often fear. We think about those risks constantly. In fact, these thoughts lead to full blown worry. Many times, your fear is probably misplaced because some risks are actually exaggerated but affect a very small percentage of people. There are some risks however, that are more dangerous but that we place little attention to.

In My Sister’s Keeper , by Jodi Picoult, Anna Fitzgerald seeks medical emancipation from her parents. In a court scene, it became necessary for Anna to become a witness and be questioned in front of the judge. The last thing Anna wanted was to be a witness. In fact, she had asked her lawyer about it before the trial just to be sure she would have no involvement in that sense.

You have worked for long hours, you have shed blood and tears. And you have made your first big achievement. You are happy. In fact, you want to host a party to celebrate it. It is a good development. It is a development that anybody yearning for their first break wants desperately. But you must be careful about this new achievement. Because even though you are happy you made your first achievement, it is still the beginning of the journey. It is a little milestone compared to your big dreams.

After spending 20 years working at your job, you have a level of confidence that comes with solving many problems in your field and helping many people out. You believe you have seen it all. But wait a bit. What if that is just your perception rather than the reality. Experience is good in any job but if careless, it can lure you into a pit of overconfidence. And one way to be realistic is to admit that it is almost impossible for anybody to see it all no matter what they do. You may have even gotten a lot of praise from your co-workers or your employers but you must always be careful and vigilant. You must always know that experience in itself is not what solves problem.

How many times have you been told to set incredible goals? How many times have you been told to set daunting goals that you are currently unable to achieve? It is a good piece of advice but it is incomplete. To achieve your goals in practice, you have to adopt a better strategy. When we set goals, we must always know that our goals will face reality. Any goal that fails to consider the meeting point between it and reality may face its unachievable end. The most important reason to set any goal is to achieve it.

On a sunny day, on Thursday the 7th of September, 2017, John left his work with one aim: to quench the thirst that had made his throat desert dry. He walked up to the nearest restaurant he could find. When he sat down, a waitress came to meet him for what he would like to take. He was too tired to talk but he could see that bottle like a fully-grown woman with wide hips. He pointed at the bottle that had a red band at its middle.

When Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in 2007, he said: “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” “Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone,” he said. He said the iPhone will be a 3-in-1 device that combines its iPod music and video player, a phone and a ‘breakthrough internet communications device.’ It was a big promise. Even though Blackberry and Nokia were wildly popular at the time, Steve Jobs had no plan to underpromise. You should banish any plan to make an underpromise too.

Entitlement mentality is usually attributed to spoilt brats and selfish people. But who isn’t selfish? There are many bad sides to having an entitlement mindset but there is a good side to it which is important to human living. It may be good to feel entitled. If you really deserve what you feel entitled to. People are always fast to castigate individuals who feel they are entitled to a benefit. Who are they to ask for more? Why are they inconsiderate of others? Why can’t they shut up and be grateful for what they already have?

Mr. Joe is an easy going man. He is tall, dark and handsome. He had beautiful dreams for the future and although he is still yet to manage to make his dreams reality, he is still very hopeful that one day, he would throw his fist into the air having conquered the world. When Joe was a young man, he had a proposed future. He would rise from the middle class that his parents have been hopelessly stuck for years. He would do business, he would become a business guru, he would build a beautiful mansion, he would buy exotic cars and travel to exotic locations in the world. And marry a beautiful wife. And now that he is married with two young kids, his wife is not a woman you would call ugly. Joe had achieved one of his goals but he still has many things to worry about. At least that was among the least of his worries.

Sleep is an activity that is common to all human beings. At least most of the human population sleep at least once in a day. But have we ever asked the question ‘why do we sleep?’ After all, when you sleep, you are doing nothing right? Not exactly. Sleep as a topic went without discussion or investigation for many centuries. So much that most of the findings made from the study of sleep have come in the past twenty-five to thirty years. If you have never asked the question, now is the time to ask why we sleep and why we have to. Why can’t we all go on and on without sleep? Since there is enough work to do? One other question to ask about sleep is ‘how many hours should we sleep?’ Due to challenging situations in many work places and the pressure to perform, many have felt the need to reduce the amount of sleep they get each night.  They think of cutting their daily sleep by two hours and salivate at the amount of work they can get done in two hours. But there is a better s...

The life expectancy in Nigeria, a country of one hundred and seventy (170) million inhabitants, is 53.4 years for men and 55.6 years for women. This means that a man who dies at 53 or a woman who dies at 56 has not died young, he or she has died at the expected age for Nigerians. It is a mind-boggling figure. It is even more mind-boggling when you realise that the country with the lowest life expectancy in Europe, Moldova, has a life expectancy of 71. Worldwide, the average life expectancy at birth was 71.5 years over the period 2010 – 2015 according to the United Nations World Population prospects 2015 Revision. Nigeria is 17 years below the average. Nigeria is also at an abysmal 177th (six places to the last) among the nations in the world on the life expectancy list with an average life expectancy of 54.5 years.

           After years of hard work , you built a reputable business with diligent employees. You have probably realized that business can only thrive when they are efficient with their resources such as human capital, time, and money.             Most business still prefer to prepare their payroll internally. But is it the most effective way of preparing payroll for a business? Development in outsourcing payroll makes a case that preparing payroll internally may not be the best move for your business if you plan to ruin a highly efficient business.             There are many problems that may arise when payroll is prepared internally for a business. A staff is given the job of preparing a payroll which is a tenacious task for an establishment with a large member of staffs. This can lead to errors about remunerations for ...

Close to the top of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is the self-esteem needs. This is usually the fulfilment needs we have as a result of our career or many achievements. Few people are able to meet this need and it seems those are the lucky ones who happen to stumble upon worthwhile achievements. But are they just lucky? What if their actions made meeting these needs inevitable? In life, some people wait for things to happen to them. They hope and pray for good things. Some of them even know what to do to make extraordinary achievements. But they always fail at the action. Because some of these things are difficult to do and guarantee nothing. These people are pushed around by the wind of life to wherever the wind blows. To these people, things are always too difficult. They even point at several people around them who had failed, and some of them woefully. They use this as evidence that things are generally hard and the world is unfair.

In the beginning, or in the ancient ancient days, there was little education. There were few technologies, there were caves, not mansions, there was no electricity, no solid transportation network, and generally low standard of living. It was the time that people referred to as pre-civilization, or the much more common term, Stone Age.