Voiceofola: November 2016

SIMPLICITY THINKING

Saturday, November 05, 2016

ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDSET #5 LOVE AND ENTREPRENEUR

Wednesday, November 02, 2016

This is the last post out of the series of five post on entrepreneurial mindset.

The mindsets are endless and inexhaustible but these five ones are in my opinion considerably good to contemplate on for a start.

No subject can be justify in the absence of love, for love should be a motivating factor behind our daily activity. Anything that is not done in love is a threat to humanity. That’s why deem it fit to discuss issue of love as it affect an entrepreneur. Successful entrepreneur should be a loving person taking the risk to solve the problem of humanity and and in the end benefit from such action.

AREAS WHERE THE EXERCISE OF LOVE IS GERMANE TO AN ENTREPRENEUR.

Love For Yourself

When you love yourself, you get inner strength and your need for attention and validation from others will be reduced. As soon as you began to love yourself it becomes easier for you to love other people for it is out of the abundance of your love that you can extend to others.

Most people only spend time with themselves when they are passing through pains, problems and difficulties but when they are happy, they go hanging out with friends, discussing and engaging others but not themselves.

If you really love yourself you should spend more time with yourself when you are happy and go look for somebody else to share your problem with. I bet you are not going to find someone who will be readily available and willing to hangout out with a troubled mind. What they will do first is to help you to solve the problem before thinking of hanging with you. And that is the benefit of sharing your problem with others.

Love yourself and learn to share your challenges with others, it relieves you of your burden and as it is commonly said that “a problem shared is a problem half solved”.

Do not be too critical of your person. Always give yourself the chance to make mistakes, don’t be overly conscious of your lapses or weaknesses. Work gradually to better who you are.

Love Your community

The love to make a difference in your community will propel you to solve their problems, it is through the value you deliver that you profit from. Another way of contributing to the society is through charity work. Give back to the society part of what you take from it. Participate in community development and contribute to the overall progress in your community.

Love Humanity as a whole

Love your fellow humans for being human. Your love for humanity should transcends cultural or religion affiliation. Remember the fact that we were first human before we belong to any cultural or religion group and always put the safety of humanity in mind in every business you engage yourself.

Love Your Family

I don’t think anyone need an advise on this issue, but sometimes people do make the mistake of confusing financial provision for their family as the only true measure of love. You must be there for your family psychologically and not only biologically. Many children are psychological orphans simply because they have workaholic parents who cares mostly for what they eat and wear and care less about their emotional life. Take time to build your home as you build your business. No matter how successful you are in your career you are missing a lot if you don’t have a successful family. Make a commitment of spending quality time with your family.

Love God

Obviously, I can’t speak for the whole world on this issue, My love for God is a personal one. I found out in my experience that I’m comforted in loving God and putting my trust in Him. When you put your trust in God you begin to have the sense of security that there is an unseen eyes that governs the universe and who is working to your advantage. Another benefit of loving God is that you are sensitive of the fact that everything does not depend on you.

Entrepeneurs pill

ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDSET #4: STUDYING AND DISCIPLINED THINKING.

Wednesday, November 02, 2016

The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them. -Mark Twain

Studying is a means of getting acquainted with what is already done. It is a way of absorbing ideas from great minds, It gives you open access to other peoples stories, breakthrough, wisdom, insight, line of thought, solutions and so forth.Studying good books articles and write-ups empowers, liberates and enlightens. and disciplined thinking is a deliberate attempt to subject yourself to productive thoughts.

There are gigabytes of negative information flying around the society on a daily basis, while we have only megabytes of positive information. The bad news is that negative information comes freely but you have to pay for most positive information before you can get them.

Disciplined thinking will help you to focused on good thought which will stimulate your overall productivity in the long run.Disciplined thinking also helps you to grow mentally and spiritually and gives you the advantage to ruminate over what you study and make the best out of it.

THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABUT STUDYING AND DISCIPLINED THINKING

CREATE TIME FOR STUDYING

Except you know the value of studying it is sometimes difficult to subject yourself to studying when there are no teachers to evaluate you. Creating time for studying will help you to be committed to it. You must be deliberate about this. If you don’t have the culture of studying before, it’s time you start cultivating one.

STUDY GOOD BOOKS

How do you know which book is good until you’ve study it? Personally, I hate reading books before I find out what kind of books they were. Aside studying the preface of a book, I study books based on recommendation, I always feel happy when someone ask me to study a book because its going to help me to do some certain things.

Another way of knowing what book is right for you is by reading book reviews on Goodreads. You can also visit the book session of Amazon to read book reviews . Peer reviews are helpful because it gives you an edge as to what to study and what to expect.

What are the things that helps you to recognize good books and what books were helpful to you? Share yours on the comment session below.

STUDY BIOGRAPHIES AND AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

It helps you to know about the stories of others. What was possible for them and what is possible for you is revealed when you study biographies and autobiographies. You are challenge about the achievement of others and therefore developed the confidence to pursue your dream.

BE SELECTIVE ABOUT WHAT YOU STUDY

More than twenty-thousand books is added to the library of congress on a daily basis. (source: wikipedia ). More journals and magazines are been published on a daily basis, we are now bombarded with lots of information here and there from various sources than ever before.

You should not nurture a study goal without been selective about what to study. Focused study is helpful and engender productivity than perusing through all forms of information that arrive at your doorstep.

Ensure that what you study is in line with your goals. That does not deprive you from studying for fun but don’t make it a vocation.

STUDY WITH CRITICAL MIND

Develop the ability to filter out information that aren’t useful to you . Don’t always adopt information rather adapt them to suit your person and your environment.

STUDY LATEST DEVELOPMENT AND BREAKTHROUGH IN YOUR FIELD

If you aren’t up to date about the innovation in your discipline, you will be left behind and push out of business. You’ll be in a better position to make inform decision when you are knowledgeable about the recent development in your field.

UTILIZE OTHER MEANS OF LEARNING

You may not like studying text materials, Its boring and you are not used to it. This is not an excuse not to learn. There are lots of medium to learn such as attending seminars, training programmes listening to audio books, watching recorded programmes and so on. Even if you like studying text material listening to audio books concurrently with other physical tasks such as driving, dry cleaning, etc will be rewarding.

You can visit Youtube to download tons of audio books. There are unbelievable beter medium of learning apart from text material available for free on public domain. The possibilities are endless.

DEVELOP YOUR IMAGINATIVE POWER

“It takes curiosity to find your call to adventure, it takes courage to venture into the unknown, and it takes imagination to create your path.” -Nikola Tesla.

Disciplined thinking helps to develop your imaginative power, learn to exercise your mind just as you exercise your body.

ENJOY THE JOURNEY

“You do not live in your time unless you understand that this is a tremendous adventure and a wild and exciting thing” said Feynman.

Great minds don’t retire from studying and disciplined thinking, to them the very act of working is fun and nothing more.

Entrepeneurs pill

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDSET #3. LEVERAGE

Wednesday, November 02, 2016

“Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world”. -Archimedes

Leverage means profiting maximally from your resources and other people’s resources. It is the medium of spotting and maximizing other people’s underutilized resources by utilizing it to both parties advantage. – It is simply a way of standing on the shoulders of the giants. (“nanos gigantum humeris insidentes”) i.e discovering truth by building on previous discoveries.

Initially I see this as a funny advise when somebody who complains not having money is told to go and start a business. What will he or she use to set up such business? Money of course, whose money? Definitely not his, he must devise a means of leveraging on other people’s money if not he’s going to die penniless.

That’s why leverage is necessary for an entrepreneur . Its not obligatory to start any business with your own money, rather you must be resourceful so that people can commit their resources with you. For instance to get your start-up capital you’ll leverage on the financial institution, on venture capitalist, friends and family, cooperative society, and other available medium.

Leverage is not restricted to financial issues alone, there are many other areas of life you need leverage. Don’t be inundated with the burden of doing everything all by yourself, life is not design that way. You need others to be successful.

AREAS WHERE LEVERAGE IS IMPORTANT

Leverage on other people’s influence
Leverage on other people’s ideas
Leverage on other people’s customers
Leverage on other people’s Network
Leverage on other people’s underutilized infrastructure
Leverage on other people’s intellectual property.
Leverage on existing wealth of knowledge
Leverage on other peoples underutilized resources etc.

Leverage on existing wealth of knowledge

You need to familiarize yourself with the existing practice in any field before launching into it. This will save your time and give you additional advantage of learning from the experience of others rather than making your experience solely the only medium of learning.

There is virtually any discipline that doesn’t have some rich existing body of knowledge you can profit from. Why try to figure out everything by yourself when you can profit from others.

Seek those who are successful in your field and learn from them, they’ve made a lot of mistakes that will save you decades if you were to make similar ones in your business.

Meet them one-on-one, study their books, go to their seminars, ask about them from people that knows them. Do all you can to ensure that you are not starting any business from an obscure position.

Leverage on other peoples underutilized resources

Figure out what other people aren’t doing that can bring additional profit to their business and fill in that Gap. There was a time I decided to leverage on an internet café center where I do a monthly subscription of Eight Thousand Naira due to the nature of the program I was running online.

How do I go about this? I added a mass printing service as an additional profit centre to the business through the money I raised from friends who later got a share of the benefit of the partnership. Doing that gave me free access to browsing freely. The business brought additional customer and maximize the existing space and employees.

There are a lot you can do through leverage. You’ll share the part of the risk and profit from such relationship. It is your duty to figure out how to do it.

There are many business owners outside there who are looking for people who can help them to make the best use of their resources. There are many things you can do to maximize and make profit out of other people’s existing business.

Finally nurse great ideas that can bring great benefit to others. Rich people don’t love to meddle around with little project. And always remember that the Ultimate leverage is to leverage on your strength.

Entrepeneurs pill

The Entrepreneurial Mindset #2: Focus

Wednesday, November 02, 2016

In the previous posts I considered a single minded determination to success as crucial to succeeding as an entrepreneur. This posts is the second part out of the five series on mindset. I shall be considering Focus as an important factor that will keep you on the right track

“Lack of direction, not lack of time is the problem. We all have twenty-four hours day”. Zig Ziglar

What is focus?

I define focus as an undivided attention to a noteworthy pursuit.

Focus is very important in Life. The mind of doing too many things at a time will lead you no where but perpetual failure. If you clearly observe the successful people in our society today. You’ll see that they are known for something. To be successful in life, all you need to do is to choose a vocation and make something out of it.

One common problem in our society today is the monkey-mind syndrome - The inability to stay focus on a particular task for a long time without distraction. People are finding it easier nowadays to distract themselves with opportunities that counteract their major goals.

There are several opportunities in this century that an attempt to explore many of them will hinder your overall productivity. That’s the reason why you must deliberately decide to stay focus and strive towards mastery in your chosen vocation. Stop trying to do everything, be everything, - instead, become something to everybody and you’ll have the resources to bring at your command experts to execute any activity you wish to perform.

Though it might be painful to let go of many things in life, but its more rewarding at the end if you can. Always exercise the power of focus in your daily activities. Exert yourself to focus only on few essential things and let go of those things that fritter away your energy but contribute only little to your overall success.

Having decided to do everything to succeed no matter what it takes and being focus on things that matters to your calling or field of discipline. Next posts I’ll be considering another very interesting mindset to success which is Leverage- Standing on the shoulder of giants.

Call to Action: Do you have a well written thought-out plans for everything you want to achieve tomorrow and this week? How will this plan contribute to your overall strategy for this year? If you haven’t done that now is the time to do so.

Entrepeneurs pill

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDSET #1: A SINGLE-MINDED RESOLUTION TO SUCCEED

Wednesday, November 02, 2016

This will be the first post out of the series of five post that i will be devoting to discuss the subject on the mindset of an entrepreneur- what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur.

I consider an unwavering resolution to success as one of the most important component of an entrepreneurial mindset.

When talking about mindset, I’m talking about the totality of the ideas and belief you live by. All of your principles are based on your mindset. If you don’t believe you can succeed, you will not discipline yourself to stay on the path of success. In your education, career as well as business, your unwavering determination to succeed is a si·ne qua non to succeed.

Having envision a goal about what is possible, your mind goes to work to create strategy to achieve it. It is a common knowledge that goals in itself aren’t enough. You need a well thought out plans, resources (financial and human capital), time, patient and discipline to achieve it.

No matter how thoughtful your plans might be in the course of setting out to pursue your goals, there are many concealed circumstances that might crop up to hinder you from achieving them. You need sufficient resources to assist you in confronting these circumstances, that’s why your firm determination to succeed and other mindsets that shall be consider later under this series will be an indispensable wherewithal on your way.

The first requirement to succeed in anything is to determine to succeed at it.

Sounds simple, you said. But not always easy for goals that will span through decades. While an unwavering resolution to succeed is one of the most important thing to consider is because, you’ll face various challenges in life, prepared and unprepared for, seen and unseen and sometimes it may be reasonable for you to give up your goals but your determination not to give up will be essential to carry you through when you are confronted with the predicament of life.

I’m not talking about passion, desire or enthusiasm - These emotions might fade away in face of some difficult problems. It is your unwavering resolution to succeed which i believe is not just a mere emotion but a decision that will sustain you. All you need do is to remind yourself, “I told me that I will not give up” and wait for your passion, desire and enthusiasm to come alive again to carry you through.

Always tell yourself that you are not going to give up until you succeed.

Most men are concerned about “do you succeed” and few if any cares to know the story you went through if there were no breakthrough.

What are those things you wish you could had done if……….? If this or that did not happen, if this or that is available, if you were born into this or that family? Discard everything now and tell yourself “what of if I’m just starting for the first time, what will I do differently?”

Note that all of our life experiences are meant to teach us something, to learn from them is a matter of choice.

Entrepeneurs pill

The Begining an Entrepreneurial Journey

Wednesday, November 02, 2016

You may not realize that certain questions are set before you at this moment. Those you succeeded at answering up to this point are responsible for who you are - Failing to tackle those questions may hinder you from getting to the next level in life.

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it:” -KJV Gen 1:27-28a

You are already enrolled in the school of entrepreneur. It has little or nothing to do with formal education, it’s all about mind education and everything you make out of yourself.

Your journey into entrepreneurship is foreordained, Though only few embrace this fact. Interestingly, all who came to quick understanding of this are operating at greater capacity, enriching and subjugating the earth .

Eachone operate at the level he or she understood by what it meant to subdue the earth.

Welcome to the School of Entrepreneur where the challenges of life are your teachers. You are the student and your own supervisor. You set your rules or live by the rules of others. The decision is yours but remember you bear the result of your actions.

In this school, You’ll be confronted with several questions at various stage of your life. These are not popular questions that is common to formal schooling. These questions are not only design to test your level of preparation but also to prepare you further in your journey. You don’t need to pay a dime to enroll for this, you don’t even have to be educated to face the challenges of life. The questions that life brings to you are peculiarly yours and springs through out your lifetime.

You are here for a limited journey, how you approach the issues of life determines what you make out of it. You must change yourself for you to accomplish your desired purpose.

What are the questions you need to ask and answer in your life? How disciplined are you? What is your disposition to life, Pessimistic or optimistic? Have you discover your purpose for living or yet to discover one? How do you spend your time? Are you finding it difficult to keep a good relationship? How do you manage your money? What about your spiritual, intellectual, emotional and physical life? Do you evaluate yourself on a daily or weekly basis? Do you take time to study how people succeed in your chosen discipline?

You see friend, the questions are endless, The more quality questions you are able to ask yourself and provide solutions, the better you are on your entrepreneurial endeavor.

Stay Prepare to confront the challenges of your life with courage and tenacity. Discipline yourself to earn the habit that will guarantee your ultimate freedom.

I am dedicating this page to evoking entrepreneurs and reinforcing them with the resources required to accomplish a rewarding life.

How do you go about simplifying your life?

Follow the 20/80 principle rules.

AREAS WHERE THE EXERCISE OF LOVE IS GERMANE TO AN ENTREPRENEUR.

Love For Yourself

Love Your community

Love Humanity as a whole

Love Your Family

Love God

THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABUT STUDYING AND DISCIPLINED THINKING

CREATE TIME FOR STUDYING

STUDY GOOD BOOKS

STUDY BIOGRAPHIES AND AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

BE SELECTIVE ABOUT WHAT YOU STUDY

STUDY WITH CRITICAL MIND

STUDY LATEST DEVELOPMENT AND BREAKTHROUGH IN YOUR FIELD

UTILIZE OTHER MEANS OF LEARNING

DEVELOP YOUR IMAGINATIVE POWER

ENJOY THE JOURNEY

AREAS WHERE LEVERAGE IS IMPORTANT

Leverage on existing wealth of knowledge

Leverage on other peoples underutilized resources

What is focus?

Always tell yourself that you are not going to give up until you succeed.

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