What is the Difference?

I woke up today...unsatisfied. Why? I feel unfulfilled, yet emasculated, gaged and lost.

I feel like travelling...where? I dont know...

Today I realise the world expects me and you to be at the top without being given anything and a moment after your success, it crowds around you. I am perplexed and exasperated to find out that there is no short-cuts to success. Yes for all the legitimate success seen today, a lot of hardwork has been put into it. We must thus arise and face the daunting challenges facing (me) us.

Today I woke up to very sick and empty because I was trying to find out the difference between a gunman who wakes up and starts shooting innocent people and a terrorist who straps a bomb on his waist and wastes innocent lives. I am perplexed! Who is the terrorist? The gunman or the terrorist oops, are the all gunmen or both terrorists?

Today I saw the same girl again, she looks beautiful and lovely I wish...but I am scared stiff to walk to her lest she turns me down or I walk into something that does not last. I am worried

Today, I chose to write this piece without regard for the garnish...or the polish.

Today I feel I want to travel out of Nigeria and stay for sometime and then come back, but I dont have the money.

Today I searched the internet seeking for fellowships, but up till now I am not satisfied.

Today I feel I should continue writing how I felt.

The whole story doesnt make any sense? Well, that is the idea.

Do You Have What It Takes?

I was asked the other day what personality traits I thought were important to entrepreneurial success. I immediately gave my preprogrammed reply about passion and dedication and hard work. After taking some time later to ponder the question a little deeper (I normally operate in shallow waters), I came up with a more detailed checklist for entrepreneurial success. This is by no means a definitive list, but I'd be willing to bet that if you don't have at least a majority of these traits, your chances of business success will be greatly diminished.
You must be self motivated.
If you don't have the wherewithal to bounce out of bed each day without your spouse drenching you with cold water, chances are you don't have the self motivation or discipline required to be an entrepreneur. Business demands that you take action based solely on your own volition. You have to do a hundred things every day that will not get done unless you make yourself do them.
You can't be afraid of hard work.
If you think working for someone else is hard work, try starting your own business. You will be required to give every ounce of blood, sweat, and tears you can muster and then some. You will have to work long hours and be on call 24/7, at least in the beginning. If the mere thought of hard work makes you tired, maybe you should just keep your cushy day job.
You should have experience in the type of business you plan to start.
If you can't locate your car's engine you have no business buying an oil change franchise. The most successful business owners have prior experience in the industry in which they have set up shop. Consider working in an industry at least part time for a year before jumping in with both feet.
You must be able to climb back on the horse.
I always say: "If business was easy, everybody would do it." Starting a business is hard work and the odds for failure are against you in the first few years. If you want to ride herd on your own business, you must be willing to fall off your horse and get back on a few times without giving up.
You need the support of your family.
When you start a business you may have to spend more time away from the family than you like. The business may also put a strain on you financially. You will have enough obstacles in your way without having to worry if you have the support of your family and those closest to you
You must have a thick skin.
If your feelings are easily hurt, keep your non-threatening day job because business is not for you. Many days in business, rejection waits around every corner and you must be able to handle rejection without taking it personally.
You must interact well with others.
Being an entrepreneur requires interacting with a variety of people, from your own employees to vendors to customers to investors. You must have the ability to effectively manage people without offending them; the ability to accept good advice from mentors and politely discount the bad; the ability to overlook mistakes or quietly rectify them; and the one I have trouble with: the ability to tolerate incompetence without losing your cool (at least not on the outside).
The deeper your pockets the better.
The number one cause of business failure is a lack of money. Before you start your business you should have access to enough capital to see you through until the business can sustain itself.
You must be able to delegate.
Running a business requires the performance of dozens of simultaneous tasks and it's foolish to try to handle them all yourself. You must learn to put your trust in others. If you can't dish out responsibility without worrying over the result, your business growth will be limited.
� 2006 - All Rights Reserved -

Kehinde Kamson: The joy of a small beginning

The journey of a thousand miles, they say, begins with a single step just as it is said that little drops of water make the mighty ocean. These popular sayings played out very well in the story of Mrs. Kehinde Kamson, the simple and unassuming managing director and chief executive officer of Sweet Sensation, who operated her confectionary business from her backyard for eight years before the first outlet was opened and guess where? In a tiny converted security house at the Ilupeju area of Lagos. All she had, two used air conditioners and a few other scrappy equipment. Today, that her tiny room and parlour business has metamorphosed into several outlets in Nigeria.

The beginning
Kehinde has never been a struggling woman, she had a very comfortable beginning with all the good education and discipline she could get. Her background played a strong role in whom she has become today. Born a twin to two educationists, she was well grounded in discipline, hard work and morality. Her father was a well respected clergyman who spent the better part of his life moulding the life of youths as a teacher, the mother, also an educationist had a strong entrepreneurial spirit running in her vein. In fact, she defiled the expectations that she should just sit at home as a house wife to even found a school of her own.
Perhaps, Kehinde took after her mother in entrepreneurship, for years after, the young woman with a good husband and a comfortable home as well as a good job as the head of accounts in an oil servicing firm, gave up that plum job to venture into the uncertain world of entrepreneurship, and catering for that matter. That did not go down well with many of her friends who thought she was out of her mind.
But she knew what she wanted.
Kehinde, a graduate of accounting from the University of Lagos, a chartered accountant and an alumnus of the Lagos Business School, had everything going for her. However, at the time she took the decision to quit her job it was not necessarily because the spirit of enterprise was burning in her, but more because of her love for her family. She wanted to spend more time with her children and her husband.

A new life
Restless like her mother, Kehinde just could not keep her fingers idle. She soon realised that she has a hobby which she hadn’t thought of turning into a business, she loves cooking.
She initially started with cakes, pastries and supplies to fast food joints like Mr. Biggs, UTC, Leventis, Kass Chicken and a few others.
Recalling events of those days, she said, “along the line, I thought of starting something on my own. That thought led to the Ilupeju outlet. It was basically experimental. I wasn’t thinking so big for it at the start. At that time Mr. Biggs was not taking finished pastries because they produced their own. Ours was the first they ever took as a finished product. It took me two years to penetrate Mr. Biggs and I will like to say that seeing myself supplying to Mr. Biggs was actually one of the things that motivated me to set up a major eatery joint. Seeing long queues of people dishing out money, I thought to myself, why am I slaving away supplying things to all these companies, why can’t I set up a big outlet too? That was how the desire came to set up the Victoria Island outlet.”

Growing the business
Being a focused person with a vision of where she was heading, Kehinde did not look back once she started despite the challenges she faced. Hers is a product of a particular type of mind set, skill set and character set.
She, of course did not fail to mention the unreserved support she got from her husband. In fact she describes him as the inspirer and her solid source of support.
Her philosophy of life is never to underestimate what can come out of small beginning. This mind set according to her will make you never to be scared or shy of starting at whatever level you are in presently. “You’ve got to be very patient and persevering because if you are too eager to enter into the ‘big league’, you might get frustrated and get hurt,” she advises.
Kehinde believes that success is knowing one’s purpose in life, as well as a feeling of achievement that persists forever. She also said success is achieved in inches, a story line that lasts forever, that according to her is the story of Sweet Sensation.

Guiding principles
Kehinde depends on God for everything, particularly for guidance, she believes in hard work, she tries to put passion into whatever she does and she is a perfectionist with an unquenchable love for excellence.

Her advice
“I would advise young people to pursue good education. Education helps to broaden your thinking. Good education can help you to develop creativity. There are many opportunities that people don’t pay attention to. There are so many things people could do. Look at what is happening in the comedy industry. Sincerely speaking, our youths have no reason to be idle especially when they are graduates. Yes people are already in the area you would have wanted to go into, but there are still a lot of opportunities untapped in that same area. All you need to do is just add value and customers would come running after you,” she counseled.

Make Money in Abuja

It seems there are only few people cut out to make money in Abuja aight? Nope! You are dead wrong. We all have the chance to make that money.

Someone said imagine making up to $1,500 in a week and I said you are 419. Yes, a full time 419er. But now I know better.

Can you imagine that if someone has the strength to click an advert online, he is actually paying someone like you and me? Imagine making up to $100 Daily for just being online and people click on you ads. Yes that is the power of google adsense.

You may want more information by emailing sunnybits@gmail.com or call 08037419796. I have the midas touch. Turn that internet access in your office into a gold mine or maybe the goose that lay the golden eggs.

I will post more info later

See you in a bit.

Sunny

Make that Money Now

There are several links on this page that links you up with money more than you can ever think...just look around those ads and click.

Visit regularly for more posts like these.

Cheers

Make Real Money Online

It will always seem like a dream, but here is the real deal - You can use google to make money online without shedding a tear. Before now I have always believed that it was not real, until I met this friend of mine during a workshop. He told me how he makes a minimum of a hundred dollars a month for just posting links, people click and he makes cool cash.

I was dazed when he told me how he travels within Nigeria by flight and pays for his studies abroad and bla bla. He told me to keep in touch as we would link me up, but I refused to budge and so he shared that all I should do is post and when people click I will be credited with money that will come to me in real check...you wont believe it.

Check this page for more details...soon

Training and Trade

07 March, 2008 01:00:00 JUDE NDU

The most important business advice he received early in his career was when he was just 20, and only three weeks into his first real job as foreign affairs and business editor of the largest circulation afternoon newspaper in Frankfurt, Germany. He brought his first two editorials to the editor-in-chief, a German, who took one good look at them and threw them back at him. They are not good at all. Drucker, if you don't improve radically within the next three weeks, you had better look for another job'. Remember he had only been on the job three weeks. Drucker later remarked in an interview with a reporter, 'for me, that was the right treatment. He did not try to mentor me. The idea would have been considered laughable at that time. The concept of mentoring was post World War II. In those days before World War II, you were hired to do a job, and if you didn't do it, you were fired there and then. It's very simple, 'either get good -or get out'.
Training, this is the trademark and the trade secret of world-class champions from all walks of life particularly in the field of sports and business. According to George Clason, in his classic book -The Richest Man in Babylon -as a man perfecteth himself in his calling, his craft or vocation, even so doth his ability to earn increases. In those days when I was but a humble scribe carving upon the clay for a few coppers each day, I observed that other workers did more than me and were paid more. There and then I determined that I would be exceeded by none. Nor did it take long for me to realise the reason for their greater success. More interest in my work, more concentration upon my task, more persistence in my effort, and behold, few men, very few could carve more tablet in a day than I. With promptness, my increased knowledge, skill and productivity was rewarded, nor was it necessary for me to go to my boss six times to ask for a raise. A lowly company clerk walking past the president's office may see a man just sitting in a chair, hands behind his head and starring at a blank wall. The clerk who feels pressured every minute of the day with work to do may wonder what the hell the president does to earn the kind of money he takes home. Are companies presidents worth the huge salaries paid them? My answer would be yes.
The leader hasn't simply practised his vocation or profession, he has mastered it. He knows and has learned everything there is to know about his profession and then surrendered to it. He has become one with it. But such mastery requires absolute focus and concentration, a full deployment of yourself. Becoming an industry leader isn't easy, whether in the writing profession, as a business consultant, e.t.c. anyone who claims otherwise is not wise but fooling himself. As a professional leader, competence is important; a true sense of mastery of the job at hand. The path to self mastery is built on an unrelenting practice, practice, practice. Whether it's in sports, music or creative arts, those we call masters are shamelessly enthusiastic about their calling. They are willing to take chances, to play the fool. It is said that the most powerful learning is that which is most like play. The achievement of mastery in any field requires months and years, yes, years of training and hardwork on yourself and on the job. Every great success was preceded by long period of years of concentration. According to Brian Tracy, it will take about five to seven years to master a particular craft. Even witchcraft takes years for a witch to master. O.G Mandino, an award winning author of many books that have sold in their millions of copies, said that people tell him his books are so easy to read. He often replies them that the reason they are so easy to read is because they were so hard to write. He would write and rewrite a single paragraph as many as fifteen times so that it flowed smoothly from one page to another for the reader.
Keep practising and perfecting your skills at every opportunity. Practice, they say, makes perfect. For the purpose of this material, a new approach to practising and perfecting your skills is in the use of visualisation and guided imagery. Clinical and experimental psychologists have proved the human nervous system cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and one that is vividly imagined. This means you can learn and unlearn physical and mental skills by practising them in your mind .The advantage of using imagination are that you'll never practice the wrong motion. The use of visualisation and guided imagery is now standard and universally used in sports and trainings at Olympic camps. Many famous sports athletes used visualisation and meditation even before the concept became popular. We have often heard stories of Olympic athletes who have spent years in vigorous training and preparation for a one day event. They mentally rehearse their performance, envisioning over and over again the details of execution. They create in themselves the strength to compete successfully. Competition is the driving force of survival. The field of evolutionary psychology has taught us that competition between individuals and groups is what naturally selects winners from losers in society. The makeup of the average individual is to survive competitively. The worlds wealthiest are the greatest competitors. Success and survival are all wrapped up in the ability to compete and dominate.
Golf champ, tiger woods is a text book example of what it takes to be great. Because the father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age-18 months, and encouraged him to practice intensely. Woods had put in at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest ever to win the United States amateur golf championship at age 18. What makes tiger woods great? Woods never stopped trying to improve himself. He was always in the 'woods' devoting hours to practice and even remade his swing twice because that is what it takes to get better. Research now shows that natural talent is irrelevant to greatness. The secret is a painful and demanding practice sessions and hardwork. You will only achieve great success through an enormous amount of hardwork over many years. The world's premier investor, warren buffet for instance is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of certain investments. In virtually every field of human endeavour, most people learn very quickly at first, then more slowly, and stop developing altogether. Yet a few do improve for years and go on to succeed greatly. Why? How are certain people able to go on improving? Many great sports performers are legendary for their brutal discipline of practice sessions.
But this discipline is not only limited to sports. It has been used successfully by me in improving my writing skills, public speaking skills, job interviews and in selling my self and ideas to prospects.
The largest room in the world is still the room for self improvement. I was recently reading through The Toyota Way, the company's corporate philosophy which incorporates the spirit of Kaizen -a Japanese term for continuous improvement approach. The Toyota Way, for the records reads "perseverance is power at Toyota and we always work with this in mind. We believe that effort in itself does not guaranty progress. Our achievements over the years have shown us that perseverance, creative spirit and continuous improvement reap rewards". The quality revolution in the United States started in Japan and has since transformed the way business is conducted. After World War II, Japan was devastated and their economy left in ruins. Their very first attempt at recovery led to the production of cheap products, especially for exports to the United States. These early products dumped into the U.S market were of such poor standard that they were labelled "Jap scraps". But during the same period in the 1950s, an American management consultant -W Edward Demings visited Japan to advise them on quality control measures to improve their quality of manufacturing. The Japanese welcomed Deming's ideas and business philosophy with much enthusiasm that he lived the next few years of his life there.Demings originally introduced the concept of continuous improvement that came to be popularised as the Kiazen Principle or method of management.
Do not expect to become a market leader unless you are really more informed. Increasingly the most important class distribution in every economy is not the ownership of land or wealth, but the ownership of information.
The key to making a successful career out of your trade is knowledge and continuous education. Do not expect to become an industry leader unless you are really more informed. Remember, leadership develops daily, not in a day. As I close this chapter, never forget that the quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence regardless of their field of career. Man is born free, but you cannot have true freedom without financial freedom. Freedom may be free but it comes with a price. Knowledge is the price. But knowledge does not come easy; investments have to be made to extract it. The applications of knowledge are at the core of today's technological revolution and have been instrumental in the growth of economies in more advanced societies. KNOWLEDGE RULES THE WORLD