If you must succeed…

Until a man is willing to confront himself with the truth of his reality, making progress in any direction is a fantasy. In the words of the Nigerian music legend, Ebenezer Obey, if a person slept and saw himself coming into a lot of wealth in his dream, he had better, on waking up, roll up his sleeves, lace up his boots and get to work if the dream must become a reality. Why? Nobody spends the money he made in his dream in the market of daily reality!

Life is not about what you desire to do. It is about what you must become before you can do what you dream of. Dreams are free. Nobody collects tolls from a dreamer. The real challenge about dreams and visions is that once you have them, the responsibility for their fulfillment rests squarely on your shoulders. Not the government. Not your parents. Not your friends. Not your mentors. Just you and the One who inspired the dream in the first place. People will definitely be enlisted at some point to help you on the journey, but you must initiate the journey yourself.

No mentor, no matter how good, can help you to arrive at a destination you never set before he started mentoring you. When people ask me to mentor them, my first question to them is, “What exactly do you want to achieve?” Until they understand where they want to go in life, I don’t commit to them.  This is because people without a destination in view can never commit to the process. An uncommitted person is shifty and cannot follow a schedule. And it is worse if they can speak “spiritualese”! When I hear things like, “I am just trusting God to lead me” or “I am waiting on the Lord,” I know it is more often than not, a copout for complacency. It is like a man who prays for food and is presented with a plate of a sumptuous meal before him, yet he is praying for help to put the food in his mouth, even when he is starving! Truth be told, while many people claim to be waiting on God even after He has inspired an idea or vision in them, God is actually waiting on them! Bogged by the fear of failure, they throw the responsibility for outcomes at God’s doorstep.

In my early days as a Christian, I was taught that the “wilderness” experience for a Christian is a time of deprivation, hard labour and suffering. However, when I read the Bible myself, I found out the exact opposite. The children of Israel in the wilderness were spoilt silly. They lacked nothing. God provided them food, sheltered them with the pillar of cloud from the heat of the sun and warmed them with a pillar of fire through the cold of the night. They were fed with manna, which the psalmist called “angels’ food.” Whatever they wanted, all they needed to do was grumble and murmur. Even when God and their leader Moses were displeased, the people got what they wanted, even if the consequences turned out to be dire. They were not sick. Their shoes and clothes didn’t grow old on them. They were motivated by the promise of a land flowing with milk and honey which would hold better prospects than the “delicacies” that accompanied slavery in Egypt. For 40 years, they were supernaturally sustained.

What they did not know was that dependency, entitlement and the miraculous, even if they produce success, were never designed to sustain it. When they got to the verge of the Promised Land, God asked their males to get circumcised as a precondition to entering the land. That was tough. But it was part of the preparation. As I have always maintained, what you are looking for is also looking for you. However, you must grow to its level to get it, otherwise, it might pass you by without you recognising it. They came into the land at harvest time. From the day they ate of the harvest from the land, manna stopped falling. They now had to cultivate the land if they wanted to eat. They had to take responsibility for their outcomes. Whoever wanted to drink milk would have to raise cows and whoever thirsted for honey would have to raise bees, even if he sometimes got stung doing it. God simply promised them a blessing on their outcomes. Angels would not till the land for them and angels wouldn’t have to share the angelic diet with them any longer. Canaan is spelt W.O.R.K!

Your freedom in any system begins from the day you recognise that nobody, not even your biological parents, owes you anything. When you recognise that you are the one who owes creation something, you will live with gratitude for every favour you get and a desire to serve others with your potentials. The true price of liberty is responsibility. To the man who can take responsibility under God for working out in reality, what God showed him in a dream, miracles become a lifestyle, not a series of sporadic interventions. Your mind must be ready. Your hustle will only succeed when it is backed by a hunger that is willing to put its nose to the grind of work before it can be satiated.

Do not be deceived. There is no free lunch, even in Freetown. If you think the price of winning is too high, life will eventually present you with two bills, the bill of regret and the bill of poverty.

We were created to be sustained by harvests. Today’s harvest reflects the quality of yesterday’s seeds. You are living in a harvest right now, of a seed you personally sowed or which someone sowed on your behalf. Life was never structured to be fair beyond its capacity to deliver a harvest to everyone.

Whatever you want in your tomorrow, sow the seed today. You develop your habits and your habits develop your outcomes. You cannot climb the ladder of success with your hand in your pocket. Wake up from your deep-slumber-inducing dependency on manna. The train has left that station. Government is important but it is not your Maker.

Nigeria is tough. The hardship is so palpable you can almost touch it. We know. But so are several parts of the world. It is in seasons like this that champions show the muscles of their secret preparation.

Crisis is a wake-up alert that shows you the limitations of your current strategy. Creativity and productivity never thrive on ease and comfort. Chaos is a challenge to creative genius, for the simple reason that crisis is the harvest field of solution providers. Complacent consumers are the cannon fodders of productive enterprise.

Crisis produces two types of people: victims and beneficiaries.

You choose your compartment. No wonder the Chinese spell “crisis” and “opportunity” alike.

If you lay the right foundation, every ceiling has the potential of becoming the platform for erecting a new floor.

Stop grumbling like everyone else. Dust yourself up and DO something that solves one of the several problems created by the crisis you see.

You will thank me later.

Remember, the sky is not your limit, God is!