The Audacity of God's Grace: 10 Strategies To Living Your Best Life Now (21 page)

“Our behavioral or lifestyle choices will either defeat or promote us in life.”

There are times that the devil cannot even stop us from maximizing our potentials in life. The only person to stop us is us; our lifestyle choices, and behaviors. Many lifestyle principles that Jesus prescribed was for our health and well-being—communal, emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual as well. Part of our ability to enjoy our best life now lies in having good health. This is why it is said that: “Health is wealth.” If you don’t have a healthy life, you cannot enjoy life. For some people, the poor habit they may need to change could be smoking. Cigarettes cause cancer. Smoking is the number one cause of deaths due to lung cancer, emphysema, and other serious diseases. People who smoke are also susceptible to having other cardiac problems, and second-hand smoke from cigarettes is a serious danger to your children, family, and friends too.

For some others, the poor lifestyle problem they may need to overcome in order to live their best life now maybe to stop being promiscuous. If you are continuing to be promiscuous, chances are that you will be infected by sexually transmitted diseases such as
Human Immunodeficiency Virus (
HIV) which leads to
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
(AIDS); and you will not be able to fully enjoy your best life now. For others, they may need to avoid junk foods, use the gym and burn some fats and avoid obesity and heart disease and other complications etc. These are healthy lifestyle choices that can help you to enjoy your life and be able to take care of your loved ones and live your best life now. Your lifestyle choices will also affect your entrepreneurial success.

Think About It

For your mind liberation and automation for success exercise, for this chapter, you are tasked to identify your life goal—number five, the very last goal for this exercise. I encourage you to identify one long term life goal—something big you will like to achieve before Jesus returns or before you die, whichever comes first. Make this goal something that, if you were to live on earth the second time, something you will continue to see its impact in the life of generations to come. This is what we call impact goal. For this exercise I want you to understand that where there is no specific target, there will be no measure for success. People without clear goals in life becomes a disaster to society—to friends, family members, church members, work colleagues, and even to themselves.

Now, if you have identified this long term impact goal of your passion, have you considered what may become obstacle to your actualizing it? Now if you have reasons to believe that there are obstacles to why you cannot achieve this major defining life goal or dream, I want you to understand that in God, impossibility is nothing. God created you in his image. Part of God’s image; a key characteristic of God is that his word has creative power. Now, because you have God’s DNA in you, your confessed or spoken words are like a written contract—an agreement to your destiny. If you want to know what your life is going to look like 10 to 30 years from now, just listen to what you are saying about yourself today. Therefore, for this last life goal in this exercise, I want you to bless your future today and agree by faith that God will direct you as you live in his will. Too many people specialize in calling defeat into their future; don’t let that person be you.

Write down below, what initiatives you believe will help you achieve the one most important impact goal you identified that you need to believe the grace of God to accomplish before you die or before Jesus returns and begin to automate your mind into success to do them. Again, I will ask that you list or write them down as well as how you plan to go about them and begin to make declarations about them. If you want, put todays date by the side of it, and sign your signature. Remember that these goals and or initiatives must be SMART which is an acronym for:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Attainable

• Realistic and

• Timely.

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STRATEGY NUMBER 6
DON’T SETTLE FOR DEFEAT:
GO FOR VICTORY

“If you sow a thought you will reap an action, if you sow an action you reap a habit, if you sow a habit you reap a character, and when you sow a character, you reap a destiny. Character is a victory, not a gift.

—Anonymous

ENTREPRENEUR DO NOT FALL FROM THE SPACE

My mother and father were entrepreneurs. They never depended on people to provide them with things, instead they provided people with life opportunities and what such people may need to live at their best: cash, food, clothing, shelter, and for the most part, free education and free healthcare. God blessed my parents because they sowed in the lives of many people in their humble way and were givers. My parents created a lot of job opportunities and did a lot to enhance our community’s well-being and people’s capital development in their contemporaries. One outstanding thing about my parents was that they loved God and had a very progressive thinking system. They were very open to new ideas and they believed strongly in hard work and in the grace of God as they brought us up with Christian principles.

Take Advantage of Those Opportunities Around

When I was a 5
th
grader (primary five in the British educational system that Nigeria ran), I sized my very first opportunity that officially provided me with my very first personal income. I saw that in my community—Osaa Ukwu, majority of the population was farmers and many planted Plantains and not much planted bananas. In that community, we had four open markets. In the Igbo language, a market is called “Ahia.” We had four major Ahia in my community namely: Ahia Eke, Ahia Ore, Ahia Afor, and Ahia Nkwo. On a given market day, you will see young girls, boys, and some women in their childbearing age and mothers, carrying their goods on their tray pans, others on bicycles. Most of the younger ladies and mothers have learnt the art of carrying their plantains in their tray pans without having to hold it with their hands. On these market days, some of the young ladies will tie their wrapper above their breast lines wearing slippers and some even go on bare footed while they allow their tray pans to sit freely on their heads as they sing or chant a local song while going to the market to sale their goods. Some mothers will come to the market or send their daughters to sale their food stuff, rice, pepper, fish, coco yams, vegetables, stock fish or okporoko, achi, egusi, ukpoturu, beans and rice, tomatoes, garri, or other fresh produce from the farms etc.

You Can Sale Something and Make Money Too

The men mostly cultivated and sold yams and planted cola called “Orji.” Most men also planted a special palm tree and produced palm wine. In the Igbo culture, it was and still is a taboo for a woman to climb the Orji tree or a particular palm tree called “Ngwor” or to be a palm wine tapper. Amidst all these sellers and traders in our local community markets in Osaa and other neighboring markets like those of Ahia Afor Ukwu in Itungwa or Ahia Nkwo Nwaelechi in Ahiaba or Ahia Ugere in the old Obioma Ngwa Local government headquarters in Mgboko Halt, you can easily count the number of people who sold bananas, whereas, plantain and yams were sold almost everywhere. There was notably one woman in our community from a place we called Umuokereke—Nkemjika’s mother, who predominantly controlled the banana business in the whole of the village those days. In fact, this woman successfully built a business with bananas that there was hardly a time you needed banana that she can hardly not have them available for sale.

Aba, a great city with the famous Ariaria international market and the commercial nerve center of Abia State, and one of the major metropolises in Eastern Nigeria that has been nicknamed “the Japan of Africa” because of the residents’ resilient entrepreneurial spirit and their determination to supply Nigeria with high quality local made products ranging from: machines to shoes, clothes, detergents, soft drinks, woman hand bags, oil and gas etc. were less than fifteen miles away from my community. For majority of the people, if you cannot buy banana in the village or from Nkemjika’s mother from Umuokereke who controlled the business, you just have to go to Aba, whereas, plantain were sold everywhere in the village. Plantain is one of the common names for herbaceous plants of the genus Musa. The fruit they produce is generally roosted or used for cooking, in contrast to the soft, sweet banana (which is sometimes referred to as the dessert banana). In many markets, there appears to be a clear distinction between sweet banana and cooking plantain, but so many other unpopular varieties exist within the cross species that the differences are not always clear. Scientifically, there is no formal botanical distinction between bananas and plantains, and the use of either term is based purely on how the fruits are used or consumed.

Never Underestimate Your Ability

One day, in my fifth grade (elementary 5) I went to my maternal home at Umuagu Umu-Nwankwo village where many people including my grandmother owned plantains and Banana fruit trees—a cash crop. I requested as “okene” (okene is a term used among Ngwa people of Igbo tribe in Eastern Nigeria to dignify anybody in their maternal home) that I wanted to have one seedling of the banana fruit tree to be planted in my native community—Osaa-Ukwu. This was how I was given this cash crop by my grandmother—popularly called “Daa Nnediya” who is in her nineties now. Daa Nnediya honored the request of her 4
th
grandson and gave me the seedling to take home. Before this time, we do not have banana fruit trees of that particular specie in our compound and have always purchased the bananas we ate from elsewhere. Upon returning to our home, my late mother was very excited to see that one of my maternal uncles who brought me home came with the banana seedling tree. I quickly told mom my story and how I got my cash crop. Right there, I made “my business plan” known to my mother. I told mother that I intend to make money and have planned to plant the banana tree to generate some income for myself.

Know Who You Are and Your Net Capital

Anybody that knows Igbos will understand that most of us share something very similar with the Jews. In fact, the story of the Igbo people is that they originally are one of the dispersed or displaced Jewish people who found a place to call home in Nigeria. It is as if that when God was creating Igbos as a tribe; he included a gene that perhaps makes majority of Igbo people to like commerce and industry. Igbos, just like the Jews naturally like wealth creation and are mostly merchants. We travel extensively and usually own small businesses in any state or country of our residence.

Because my late mother was a visionary entrepreneur, immediately after I said that I wanted to plant my banana fruit tree to make money for myself; my mother nodded, and said hmmmn… I see, and smiled one kind of smile that differentiated her from many women that I know. My mother and I had a unique relationship. In my parents days, having a large family was the norm in Nigeria. In fact, there were men who married up to four wives and raised many children from them. My grandfather married two wives. One of my uncles had two wives and raised more than 18 children by them. In our case, my father only managed to marry my mother as my mother mounted serious pressure on him not to take a second wife when my father was considering following the example that his father who married two wives set for him. My mother and father raised seven children together before my immediate younger brother—Ibegbulam Nwankwo died which left my parents with two girls and four boys. Because of my immediate younger brothers’ death, my health problems as a child, and my dad absences from home majorly because of his civil service career, my mother and I developed a powerful bond that made her to be very particular about me—to protect me, and as the one who now is the last child out of the six, she hardly allowed me to do many household chores which sometimes made my older siblings jealous. I was always pampered and over protected.

Apart from these, my mother told me the story of how I nearly died during a cesarean child delivery. Again, I was very sick as a child because I drank poison. I was taken to numerous specialized hospitals in the Eastern Nigeria by my father and mother in an effort to save my life. Because of my health problems I lost between two to three years of my primary education and was behind my mates in school.

You Have to Have the Guts

In my family, every sibling of mine owned or planted some sort of a fruit tree, but none had thought about planting bananas of that particular specie that I brought from my maternal home for commercial interest. So you can sense the pride of a mother who loved to do business and now, has a child in fifth grade and who was now beginning to discuss a business plan with her mother and with confidence that the venture will become successful. Up until today, I still have never been able to figure out how I have the guts and what gave me the audacity to do what I did and why I did so. I asked my mother: who will help me to plant my banana seedling fruit tree? Because it was in the evening that I had returned from Umuagu Umu-Nwankwo, my maternal home, my mother calmly assured her ambitious fifth grader that the following day, one of my bigger brothers who can dig the ground well was going to help me plant the banana fruit tree. The following day came, and my mother instructed one of my big brothers—I believe Sir Chuks, my eldest brother to help and together, they planted the cash crop that gave me the first opportunity to earn money for myself.

In our family, properties were respected, no matter who owns what. One thing about banana trees is that when they are planted in soils that are fertile, they grow very quickly and provide you with “compound interest.” What I mean by compound interest is that, the banana tree will multiply over time by giving birth to other newer ones. What I did over the years was to transplant the newer banana fruit trees from their original place to multiple places in our compound and maximized my income through them. As a matter of fact, I made money steadily from my bananas until I left the community when I entered the university in Western Nigeria. I stopped my banana business when I could no longer monitor the business from Western Nigeria because those days, there were no mobile phone access in Nigeria; and I couldn’t track what was going on with my bananas anymore.

Entrepreneurs Start Early

Before I gained admission to pursue my first degree university education in Theology while in Nigeria, I was introduced to Home Health Education Service where a very great longtime friend of mine—a brother indeed, Mr. Obioma Dike who now resides in Maryland United States with his wife and children has been a representative in Eastern Nigeria. This old time close-friend of mine who was also one of my dormitory room mates in my first year in the university when I lived in Babcock University dormitory and who will also serve as my best man for my wedding years later has always been a very compassionate and sincere-trustworthy friend. As a science student in high school and later a Jambite, (a Jambite is a term that Nigerians use to describe those who are in the process of undertaking or going into a university to pursue or obtain a first degree program), my father and my mother understood the very fabrics of education and therefore, loved western education and wanted the best, formal education could offer to enable their children live at their best. Therefore, as a Jambite, my parents wanted me to study medicine at all cost because they wanted one of their sons to become a medical doctor in order to take over the family healthcare business. My older siblings were in other fields. One of my sisters was also studying medicine, but because in the Igbo culture, when a woman is married, she does not have much influence over the family’s estate, landed property, real estate or family business like the man. My father and mother wanted a man from the family to study medicine and that person happened to be me.

Follow Your Passion and Dream Your Own Dreams

At first to be sincere, I was very excited, and I agreed. In fact, in high school they were already calling me “Doctor” and because doctors were considered to be rich people, driving good cars and living in descent homes and since it was the right thing to do at that level, I loved the whole idea and that title—Dr, because it meant I was going to have money and prestige—I was very convinced. To get me well prepared, my father will buy every Chemistry, Physics, or Biology textbook and workbook—the one we called handout, where I learnt about the molecules, autotrophs, atoms, periodic tables, and all the atomic scale charts etc. My father paid for extramural classes and does everything within his power to support me and make me a “medical doctor.” While attending these extramural classes in the mornings, I signed up for barbing apprenticeship in the evenings and that was how I learnt the trade of barbing which I am still very proficient at today, at Obinno barbering Saloon along Aba-Owerri Road, Umungasi Aba. My master was one Mr. Obinna. It was in this barbering saloon while learning the trade of barbing that I first met Mr. Ikechi Dike. At first, he questioned why I had chosen to learn barbing instead of pursuing a university education. I took my time to explain what the situation and options were for me and the plans ahead, and he challenged me to make sure that I further my formal education. Fortunately, Mr. Ikechi Dike was the uncle, Obioma Dike my friend has always told me was his big brother who lives in the United States. As a generous man, after our conversation, Mr. Ikechi Dike sent me on errand; to buy a bottle of Multina drink for him. When I returned, he asked me to keep the change.

Believe in Yourself and Defeat the Odds

About this time, the Nigerian government, schools, and economy was being mishandled beginning from General Ibrahim Babangida—popularly referred to as the evil genius in Nigeria, to another dictator—the late Nigerian military head of state, Sani Abacha, who was General Ibrahim Babangida’s chief of Army staff and will later be promoted to Minister of Defense. Babangida came to power in 1985 through a coup that toppled Mohammed Buhari’s regime, promising to end corruption and human rights abuses, but his regime stands accused of some of the worst abuses in Nigeria’s history, and the floodgate that promoted corruption in the corridors of power, civil service, and fraudulent activities coded as 419. A report by economist Pius Okigbo on how the Babangida regime spent windfall profits after the first Gulf War would have shed more light on the excesses of General Ibrahim Babangida but was never published. When his former chief of Army staff, Sani Abacha took power, Nigeria regressed further from where General Babangida left the country from all sectors. Fear grounded everyone. There was no freedom of speech. The press was controlled by the government.