Deep Thoughts: Use your common sense, not someone else’s!

[bctt tweet=”Seek advice but use you own common sense – Yiddish Proverb ” username=”shalomtruthsmag”]

Listen to every advice and as you listen, shape yours out of it and yours is common sense, definitely the one you should follow.

For the past one week, I have found myself listening to a lot of advice and wise words. Some I asked for, others just came. God bless each of these people in my life for letting me climb on their giant shoulders. So I thought I should share. Here is what I have learned thus far:

• Define your individuality: There comes a time in your life when you have to say “no” “mind your business” or ” it’s private”. Let me explain further as I actually requested for this piece of advice. You know that situation when you are caught between lying or being disrespectful by keeping silent? And talking is not the right thing either. Or that situation where it’s easy to mouth off your core values but you have to compromise because of friends and family? I was in such a fix and almost every time I did it all wrong. Here is an example, integrity is one of the virtues I for one want to keep. So when a friend tells me something in confidence, I am expected to keep it. But if someone I am close for example my mom asks me about the same thing, I find it difficult to say I can’t tell her because it feels like I would be disrespecting her. But this has put me in trouble either with my conscience or with the other person. Finally, I sort advice from an older person and he said I have to let people know that I am now my own person and I can choose what I will say or do. That is, define my individuality. The person that everyone sees is unique to only me. If I have set my standards and core values, no matter how close I am to the person, I have to show them that this is me. It does not come cheap. Especially in a respect conscious culture, you have to be consistent at it until everyone finally realizes you are you. In his own words he said, some people would keep pushing until you push back. In keeping my own advice, when I am faced with such a quandary again, I push back but not forcefully, politely and with diplomacy and don’t ask me how….just let the spirit lead.
• Occasionally use your contemporaries as a benchmark: Twenty children do not play together for Twenty years. But while we are not playing together, we should each measure how far we have gone with how far our mates have gone. Mind you, it’s not a competition but what I got from this advice is that I should not let myself sink into a comfort zone while running my own race but I should once in a while look up to see how far I have run and if there is a need for extra speed. It’s not great if you are a Reverend in the village bamboo church after twenty years while your contemporaries are either bishops, CEOs or Presidents and Governors.
• Stay in touch with your friends: This one everyone should know. (This is me being presumptuous.) Yet, when I heard it this week, I gave it a lot of thought. When pursuing excellence and high performance in life, it’s very easy to isolate yourself from the people around. This is because time becomes very precious.  Here is an illustration, an entrepreneur and an employee sitting to chat, the employee knows that if he chats from now till tomorrow he will still get paid at the end of the month as far as he does the work assigned to him. The entrepreneur has no such luxury so he would want to use every little time to make worthy achievements. Yet still achieving success with no one to share it with will suck. Remember the adage, if you want to go fast, run alone but if you want to go far, run together. Taking this advice to heart, I plan on sending ‘Hi’ to my contacts at least once a month.
• Make friends with those above and beneath you: Let’s do a quick q&a. How many friends do you have? How many are older than you? How many are younger? Well, I don’t need the answer but just know the ratio should either be a 2:1:1 or 1:1:2  for older, mates and younger respectively (totally constructed from the top of my head with no scientific proof). My mates would most likely think like me and see things like I do so there is no new learning. With an older friend, there is always a shoulder to climb on to see even farther than my mates. Also, When one teaches someone what they have learned, it sticks. So asides the goodwill and the need to pass the baton to the younger generation, younger friends will help make what I learn stay fresh in my head. Oh! And nothing beats being friends with a child that makes you enjoy childhood all over again.
• Rome was not built in a day, start where you are: These are powerful words and for high achievers like us, these words have to stay at the forefront of our minds. It requires no further clarification. Just start where you are!
• Focus on the low hanging fruit: Focus is one word that is sweet to say but difficult to do. Listening to this advice, I have learned that it is okay to have multiple great and awesome ideas and plans. First is to write them down and then draw up a scale of preference on which is the easiest to achieve that would generate value. That is the low-hanging fruit and it’s easier to pluck it and enjoy it. In the advisor’s words, if you want water and someone offers it to you, it is easier to take it and satisfy your thirst than to start thinking about how you would look like a beggar and then look for ways to find water yourself which could involve you digging your own well and fetching it. Life is simple, I want water and someone happens to want to make life easier, why not, I will take it.
• Run your small business like the conglomerate it should become: This is my own advice I gave someone and it was after I said it I realized its importance. Most entrepreneurs having the mindsets of starting small keep their vision small hence they only do small things. If you ask these people what do they do, they will tell you in a pitiable way that they do business with a tone that says there is not such a large future for it or that since life is the way it is with no jobs and all, they are doing what they can to survive. They have forgotten that the big corporations out there also started as a small business. So this is my thought. If selling roasted plantain is my business, I should set a timeline for yourself, a makeshift office in your room even if it is virtual, an account book, a weekly report of sales, expenses, and progress and monthly strategy sessions on possible growth where I can throw suggestions at my friends. This is such a hassle right? But don’t forget in treating a small business as the big corporation it is going to be one day, I am the boss and the employee. The employee definitely wants to impress the boss and trust me as a boss you wouldn’t want to fire yourself. I definitely wouldn’t. Therefore in running a business like the conglomerate it should become, who said selling roasted plantain won’t grow to the point that it would become a premium snack for international markets with high demands.

Hope you also learned a lot as I sure did. Don’t forget the Yiddish proverb, at the end of the day you still need to use your own common sense.

Till next week…

Jaa mata