Guidelines for making the best out of the most productive period of your life.
As you graduate, an exciting time for any young man or woman, this question will mostly permeate your thoughts. You most likely are looking for answers as I was, about 3-4years back when I earned my Bachelors degree in Laws (LLB). What you are about to read now is something I wish I had read then. I mostly followed this path and it turned out well even though I had no existing manual at the time. Let’s call it the Life Playbook.
Let’s delve in. What do you do now that you’re leaving school?
It’s a tricky question that if you don’t answer for yourself, everyone else will. Your parents will tell you what to do, your professors will, your relatives will, an Okada man will. But what should you do?
Most of you will immediately start looking for a job. Nothing wrong with that. You might seek something long term too. But here is where you must think Contrarian. You mustn’t think just like every other person. That is the only way to stand out in life.
Here is how to succeed in your 20s;
1.Try different things and paths;
NEVER underestimate the importance of trying different things while you are young.
Your 20s aren’t for building a career but finding the thing you will build a career on.
In my short 20s, I have been a Student, a Pastor, a father to wonderful adopted kids, a leader, a financial trader , an investor, a businessman, a programmer, an advertising salesman and a lawyer. And I am still a youth according to the World Health Organization (WHO) definition.
2.Be Optimistic about your future;
Lots of young people start out in life without a plan. It’s very common to hear a defeatist mindset from most young people “the country is hard”, “you must know someone to succeed”, “you must have connection to get a job”, etc.
These might be facts in Nigeria today but that’s besides the point. As a young person, your greatest weapon is Optimism. If you aren’t optimistic about yourself, who will? No one.
However note that Optimism doesn’t mean stupidity. Here, you acknowledge that things are bad but you can make them work for your good.
If you believe the worst all the time, it might most likely come true. The greatest disadvantage of this way of thinking is not its truism. It’s the mental cage it creates. Hence you aren’t as motivated to work hard and therefore creates a self Fulfilling prophesy.
3.Believe in something:
You must believe in something(s). It could be either God, hardwork, or something else. In reference to my point above, never be locked into believing hardwork doesn’t pay or whatever opinions are out there. If you don’t believe in something, it makes it all the more harder to succeed. This is because you are defeated before you already started. Something I discovered early was that hard work creates its own luck. This has held true all my life.
Today, I am a vehement believer in working as hard as I can and praying hard to God to bless my handiwork. It has worked marvelously well so far and it is something I recommend you do.
4.Luck is not a strategy;
Luck happens to all of us when we are aren’t aware. It mostly takes us by surprise.
What if I told you there is a way to create your own Luck? The secret is simple. Do something. I am not a scientist but I know the World is governed by Physics. The more you work on something, the more likely you are to encounter a lucky break. It’s a truism that never fails. Hence why you hear statements like “The harder I work, the luckier I get”.
This is something I have personally experienced and has led to the founding of my current successful business. It’s a simple story. While working on an unsuccessful project, I came across another business that had more potential and pivoted to it. Hence finding success. If I hadn’t been working hard on the unsuccessful ones, I would never have found the successful one.
While working at something, it becomes all the more easier to spot and grab lucky breaks. If you weren’t working, you will be blind all along and never catch that break.
5.Plan for success;
They say life is what happens to you when you were busy planning. True but misleading because this thinking advocates not planning at all. I don’t believe that’s a smart plan.
It’s very important to have a long term plan and a short term plan. The long term plan could be a vision of where you want your life to be in the Long term say 5, 10, 15 years intervals. You can be flexible on your short term plans as life dictates but never compromise on your long term vision for your life.
Life by its very nature is tough and will do anything to kick you off course. Not planning is giving yourself up for “anything can happen”.
A young person should never do that.
6.Read books;
There is a strong aversion of young people to books nowadays. That’s dumb move. You are most likely in your 20s now and same is true for a majority of your Class of 2019. This means that your experience and your friends collective experiences is worth little as you have the bulk of your life ahead of you. You mates also have very little too. That’s where books come in.
Books by prominent authors and successful people allow you the opportunity to leapfrog years of experience they spent their entire lives gathering. You can as a 20-something year old, acquire experiences and knowledge of people far older and accomplished than you.
This edge will place your firmly ahead of your peers and serve you through out life as it is serving me, my father before me and every great man and woman before us.
This is a very good deal and you should take it any day of the week.
Another argument for reading books is even simpler – For most of your life so far, you read books to get educated on a particular narrow topic and specialization. Today you have succeeded in that pursuit and will be the Graduating Class of 2019. Awesome!!
Why then do you believe you can succeed in other areas of life without also reading books?
Do yourself and your unborn children a favor. Read books.
Some books I recommend that changed my life and I believe can do the same for you;
i. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.
ii. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
iii. The Richest Man in Babylon
iv. Zero to One by Peter Thiel.
7.Acquire specific/specialized knowledge;
Like the wedding feast at Canaan, I saved the best wine for last. This is the most important point and it’s something I recommend you take to heart.
The only way to be rich is to know something that most people do not know. Take if from someone who was worth Eight figures at 22years and by 24years had created a technology company worth half a million USD.
General knowledge like the one you have acquired (your Bachelors) is not the way to be rich. You have just been trained by the society for it and society has already trained millions before you and will train millions after you. Hence you can be very easily replaced. That’s a bad position to be in.
To be valuable you have to acquire knowledge that society cannot train others for. This might be easier said than done but that is the only way.
You need to have a monopoly of knowledge in a particular area or an intersection of areas.
E.g while there are millions of Accountants today in Nigeria, there are fewer Accountants with ICAN. There are even fewer that have an ICAN and can write computer code and read Law too. As you can see this intersection of Accountant n ICAN n Programming n Law is now more valuable than a mere Accountant and can offer deeper knowledge on more things like Building Accounting software like Quickbooks or advising the National Assembly on creating new Accounting related laws.
Monopoly of specialized knowledge is how you create and retain long term value or else you are just one of the billions of Earth’s inhabitants and millions of Accountants in the world.
That’s a bad deal.
This is not an exhaustive list and the Life Playbook is still getting written as I move along. However, the above are the most valuable I would want to leave with you at this moment. It’s my hope that it will produce fruitful results in your life.