The Whole Shebang...Mental Malaria

          A lot has happened since I last posted a blog! I turned 23, I made up with some enemies, I made new friends, I slipped and fell and I picked myself back up. In fact I have been so preoccupied with my own internal and external battles for much of the past month or so to do much about BMIC but something has really crystallized for me today so I have been able to finally put down my thoughts on ‘paper’. I was writing everything down at a really furious pace until I just ran out of things to say – I got a mild case of “writers block” that robbed me of my ability to blog. I have sat down over and over staring at my computer screen not really knowing what to say. Even now I feel as though I am waking from a dream; a dream that was filled with much more of what I used to be and much less of what I am trying so hard to become. The question that I have been battling with is simply this; how do I motivate and inspire others when I am running out of steam, when things are not going right, when The System is succeeding against me in this endless struggle called life. After much melancholic deliberation one thing became crystal clear – I am up against insurmountable odds and at present I am inadequately resourced to fight the battle much less win the war. But forge on we must because once the ball has been set rolling things must be seen through to the end no matter what.

            One of my neighbors in my hostel is a member of BMIC, and for the past 4 weeks I have been rather ashamed whenever he asks me if the blog is up yet. I would immediately assure him that it was imminent, as I would assure myself and alas it would all be for naught. Nobody requested that I form BMIC on Facebook, register it or begin a blog. I took on this responsibility myself therefore I have only myself to report to, blame or congratulate. Truth is there is a certain pervading sense of pride I have in my work when it succeeds on the one hand and disappointment when I can’t meet my personal deadlines, or when deals keep falling through, or when bright business prospects just simply fade in the face of constant failure. My Godfather called me not too long ago asking about business and I found myself ranting about how terrible things were going so he listened, laughed and said that it is only when you are rewarded for your efforts that you feel motivated to continue; no matter how much you love what you do or are good at it. And perhaps it is this lack of any tangible extrinsic reward that has sapped me so much, and in the face of such a bleak reality I must concentrate on the intrinsic rewards I get from what I do to – and sometimes my personal satisfaction from writing seems trivial and unsatisfactory, a feeling akin to eating a lot of Fufu with little soup and having no meat to complete the experience.


            I feel as though my mind has been suffering from Mental Malaria: a situation where one’s mental, emotional and physical reserves are almost completely depleted. I dug incredibly deep, far more than I have ever done in my short life so far but it is just not enough. Sometimes I feel as though I have taken a load heavier than I can carry – but how else are my ‘mental muscles’ going to be stronger if I don’t keep surpassing the comfort of those responsibilities that I can do easily. That I am up against incredible odds is a fact, that I don’t have adequate resources is a given but if I want to achieve my goals I must face these odds and locate the necessary resources, be they internal or external. The only other option is utter failure and I decided a long time ago that failure is not an option so now I must bear my load with grace and resolve. We all have our very own loads to carry, but the question is never how heavy the load is but rather how well you carry it. So I will continue to eat my raw fufu chaperoned by puny soup and entertain a temporary proclivity for vegetarianism, for now. It shall be joyless, it shall be unsatisfactory but it is necessary in the meantime because there is always hope for the future, a future filled with the whole shebang; an incredible assortment of exotic meats. The cure for this Mental Malaria is self-evident, I need to take some Mental Chloroquin, and that my friends is a bitter pill indeed! 

The Otherwise Wasted Reserves....On Motivation

Whenever I go on a jog it is always easier at the very beginning but after about 15 minutes it becomes difficult as the lactic acid begins to build up in the muscles that are active. And then its downhill from there; every single step, every breath, even the cadence of tapping feet on the ground and swinging arms demand more and more effort. Each strained breath and drenched attire attest to the effort being employed to move the body closer and closer to the finish line, the final lap – the end of the road. Sometimes I have to run against a hindering breeze that feels like invisible strands slowing me down or sometimes I have the wind behind me pushing, urging me forward like a yacht with a gale filling up its sails. But through all this one fact remains, an hour into the jog I have used up all my energy and consequently I am tired, smelly, aching, my throat feels parched and sometimes I am even blinded by the sweat constantly dripping into my eyes because my arms are too tired to even mop them up quick enough. This is when I feel like quitting; stopping for a breath, or a sip of water – my heart is racing furiously and my ankles may be reluctantly obedient but my knees are on the verge of mutiny. Almost without fail this happens approximately an hour my jogging session (my target is 2 hours at 2 or 3 miles per hour) – and I am always faced with the same quandary, should I go on, should I rest a while or should I just stop? This is when I have to dig deep into my Reserves, that 95% of my mind that is just being not utilized and wasting away until such a moment when it becomes critical to the achievement of the goal at hand.

Any experienced athlete, especially long distance runners will tell you that once you begin to run you must never stop until you reach the end of the race, or you achieve your target. They will also tell you not to either run too fast or to slow but to maintain an even pace from the beginning to the end, whether going up a hill, down a ravine, against the wind or riding in front of a breeze. They will also tell you to regulate your breathing and to endeavor to take long deep breaths instead of short shallow breaths that are tempting and almost unavoidable but with training can be overcome. When I begun to jog a few months ago I couldn’t do any of these things and it has been an incredible [and ongoing] struggle to become disciplined enough to jog constantly and correctly. In the very beginning I could not even jog for 10 minutes straight without stopping 4 times; I used to take water breaks constantly, I used to wheeze, run out of breath, cough and generally do more walking than jogging. But I dug deep into my normally wasted reserves – that part of the mind that is just kept tucked away until a mother’s baby is trapped underneath a car and she is suddenly strong enough to lift the heavy car to save her child, or a fellow soldier is shot and wounded and needs a brave soul to run into danger to the rescue. Human beings are constantly outstripping their perceived limits to achieve impossibilities especially in the face of insurmountable odds. For me its every time I defy 5 years of heavy smoking and jog for 2 hours non-stop; its every time I take 10 – 15 hours of my week to write and correct this blog (YES! It sometimes takes that long to craft these 3 paragraphs or so); its every time I wake up and stare depression and unhappiness in the face and smile regardless; its every time a business deal goes awry, I am cheated, circumvented, unpaid, disappointed or things just don’t work out and I still press on with essential lessons and more experience; its every time I work out when I wake up, and every time I refuse to regress and smoke another cigarette.

For though my victories may be small, my realization is that digging into my Reserves for these minor things on a constant basis has begun to transform me into a more motivated and disciplined individual than I have ever been. I can still remember clearly the first day I jogged for a full 2 hours and almost 5 miles; that night I couldn’t sleep because my knees and ankles felt like lead weights and my whole body was undergoing fierce agony. To top it off, my morning was even worse! But I dug into my reserves, even deeper than before and got some Deep Heat medication liberally soothing all the ‘trouble spots’, bandaged my knees and wore double socks and went running again. I did this for a week by the end of which all the pain was gone, and I could push myself for 2 and a half hours, sometimes three hours even and I didn’t have to do so with trepidation because it was becoming easier and easier to reach deep into and utilize my innate Reserves. I spent my whole summer jogging, pushing up, crunching, lifting weights and there were times that I slacked, I injured myself a few times and even now I just don’t have enough time to work out as much and also take care of all my responsibilities. But I can say one thing for myself – I have learnt one of the most important lessons in my short life so far: I can do anything if I put my mind to it. If does not matter how impossible it seems, how difficult it will be, how much effort, time, energy and sacrifice that will be required but so long as I can dig deep within myself, within those reserves that God put in each and every one of us, I CAN AND WILL ACHIEVE ANY GOAL! If you don’t use your reserves, then they will just waste away and you will just not fully achieve your true potential. Dig deep into your reserves and Success will be inevitable.

Cheers and God richly bless you all!

            

The Lucky Percent’s 10,000 Hours...The Truth About Talent!

THE BIZMIC himself is back! It has been a while since I laid bare some of my roaming thoughts and opinions because I have been battling against a great many business priorities as well as personal and emotional issues. Yes, even the motivational and inspiring Bizmic is sometimes unmotivated, uninspired or simply has little time to write. But then BMIC must live on; and I must be disciplined and focused to educate, motivate and inspire others with my gift; my writing; My Talent! My question for you today is are you also one of the so called ‘lucky ones’ who are talented in something like art, sports, music, dancing, cooking, inventing, or in a particular area such as mathematics or comedy. Are you one amongst the fortunate few, the extremely blessed, the exceptions to the rule – The Lucky Percent? Is your gift as simple as being ‘beautiful’ or ‘handsome’, being remarkably intelligent, or easily learning languages? Have you identified your innate talent or are you a one of the vast majority I call the Other Percent: unremarkable and seemingly normal in every way. During my ‘intermission’ from writing I have dedicated a lot of thought to why I write and always seem to be musing over philosophical subjects, reading, writing and pursuing profit-making business ventures. I was beginning to think that I am simply one of those lucky people who are naturally talented at writing, and also one of the lucky few with an uncanny ability to monetize my time and energy. It appears that I am just plain lucky, that I was simply born this way, right? I begun to harbor a rather elitist view that I was an esteemed member of The Fortunate Few and thus I was better off than most other people and would naturally succeed no matter what. Thanks to a YouTube Video a friend posted on my Facebook page I have done some further research and come to the conclusion that Talent is not necessarily equal to Success.

Being talented at something is not a guarantee that one will excel in that area. According to bestselling author, Malcolm Gladwell in an interview promoting his recent book, “The Outliers”, talent is not simply about being naturally good at doing something but rather gaining proficiency at that task over constant and ‘deliberate practice’. He stresses the “10,000 Hour Rule” which he uses to illustrate the point that to be truly great at doing something you need 10,000 hours of practice, which is also equal to about 4 hours of practice everyday for 10 years. Gladwell asserts that achieving greatness requires enormous amounts of time spent practicing; he used the musical talents of the greatest and most successful rock band in history, The Beatles, as well as the programming talent of the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, as examples. The Beatles performed live in a strip club in Hamburg, Germany over 1,200 times, doing 8 hour daily sessions from 1960 to 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time and Gladwell deduces that this incredible amount of time performing was critical to shaping their talent, “so by the time they returned to England from Hamburg, Germany, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.” Bill Gates gained access to a computer in his high school in 1968 at the tender age of 13 – he then spent way more than 10,000 hours programming it and any other computer he could lay his hands on. Gladwell interviews Gates, who says that unique access to a computer at a time when they were not commonplace helped him to succeed. Without that access and subsequent constant practice, Gladwell states that Gates would still be “a highly intelligent, driven, charming person and a successful professional”, but that he might not be worth US$50 billion or so he is worth today.

These and many other examples reveal the real truth about talent: Talent consists of a profound Love for something that is transformed into a Desire to succeed in turn inducing Constant and Deliberate Practice. I mean what if Bill Gates had not spent copious amounts of time programming, or The Beatles gave up playing long 8-hour stints at the German strip club, or I didn’t spend thousands upon thousands of hours reading everything I got my hands on. Would Gates be the wealthy computer genius he is today; would The Beatles be the greatest rock band; would my vocabulary be as polished and erudite as it is? People always ask me why I read so much and my response is always that love reading and I desire to improve my vocabulary and sentence construction and I am not quite at 10,000 hours of writing yet but I’m getting there, day by day, blog by blog. I have been involved in one kind of formal business or another for more than 3 years now and I gain more proficiency and experience in my various businesses as I spend more time deliberately practicing proposal writing, drafting of contracts, deal negotiations, understanding financial information and implementing ideas to create value so in another 7 years of continuing on this path I can guarantee that I will be a Business Guru who is wealthy and quite successful. It appears that the whole point of going to school from Kindergarten through to University, Internships, Apprenticeships and the like is just to equip a young inexperienced individual with their 10,000 hours of practice. It is important to note that it is only something that you love and are willing to work hard at, patiently and with resilience that you will become extremely skilled at doing – in other words your talent is equal to what you desire to constantly and deliberately practice. Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney said in reference to his job that, “You can’t get to places like this without working really hard, loving what you do...and having enormous amounts of energy, patience and resilience”. Note that he was with Disney for almost 30 years before becoming CEO. To reiterate, you may be lucky to have your talent but you will succeed only if you hone that talent with constant and deliberate practice because it takes a long time and massive amounts of effort and toil to succeed at anything so get to work amassing your 10,000 hours at the end of which you are warmly welcome to the much vaunted ranks of The Lucky Percent.

Cheers and may God bless you all!

Underestimated Virtues & Overestimated Faults!

This article was written by L. John Jones, and though he tends to be full of himself his thoughts are really interesting so I edited it and put in a Sun Tzu quote. Enjoy!

Sometime during my teenage years I decided that my personal motto would be "to have my friends always underestimate my virtues and my enemies to always overestimate my faults". I didn't coin this phrase myself but I borrowed it from Mario Puzo’s famous character, Don Corleone, in his novel, ‘The Godfather’. I have come to believe that this is the greatest advantage that a human being can have over others, be they friend or foe: that their true worth should be underestimated and their inevitable blemishes overestimated. Instead of correcting the mistaken assessment, Do Nothing; sometimes I will even go as far as to even stoke the fires and encourage an erroneous approximation of myself. If a friend does not appreciate the full measure of my virtues or an enemy has over estimated my faults, they are at a serious disadvantage to me, so I always try to remind myself to keep things as they are. It is however very difficult not to assert oneself in such situations because most human beings naturally desire to have their full worth appreciated by others. Perhaps I am a bit fortunate in this because I am one of those people that enjoys shocking people constantly; excelling in doing things that they did not think were possible for me to do. Consequently I have decided that it is necessary for me to ensure that both my allies and adversaries never have an accurate measure of what I am fully capable of, what my true intentions, actual goals and inner motivations really are; always be prepared for the unexpected, the awe inspiring and the baffling when it has to do with me (...okay it appears he’s blowing a horn here...ignore this hubris filled narrator when the horn blows – KAA).

At first it appears that allowing people to hold a wrong assessment of you is not just ill advised and irresponsible but reduces your prospects with them; or does it? Underestimated virtues and overestimated faults have been the cause of a great many disappointments and innumerable huge surprises and account for the victories or losses of a myriad battles. They remain an inextricable part of fiction and non-fiction tales as well as movie plot twists. They are a recurring theme in epic anime saga’s that have bleached their mark on our psyche and inspire true-life tales of impossible triumphs. If you assess my virtues and faults inaccurately I have a great advantage over you because you will always be unprepared when I prove that I am more virtuous or less faulty than you thought. This fits in perfectly with what ‘our’ favorite Chinese philosopher has to say, “All [warfare] is based on deception, hence when able to attack, we must seem unable, when using our forces, we must seem inactive, when we are near we must seem far away and [vice versa]”. This is the hallmark of excellence, the ability to deceive people without lying to them but rather allowing (or encouraging) them to lie to themselves about you. It involves using the other persons preconceptions, biases, attitudes, upbringing, observable traits and the like against them in such a way that is simply reaffirming what they expect of you, instead of what you can really do – until the point where it is advantageous for you to play your hand!

To fully explain this concept would be impossible in a three-paragraph blog so I encourage you to deliberate more on this. Essentially this is how magicians create illusions and seasoned poker players always seem to win – they play on your perceptions and misdirect you from the truth about what they are actually doing (or holding) so that your assessment of what is going on is completely wrong. It is important for every Business Mind to appreciate the power of ‘intentional misdirection’ in order to maintain a critical advantage over any competition. Never ever make the mistake of putting all your cards on the table, rather put up your most useless cards first and wait until the advantageous moment to reveal your ace in the hole. But before you can create illusions on your virtues and faults you must first know yourself completely – you must be completely honest about your capabilities and limitations to yourself before you can try to make others assess them inaccurately. When you are completely aware of what you are truly capable of then can you truly become a master strategist who excels at befuddling other people's expectations of you. There is nothing I love to hear more than statements like, “I know you Jones, you can’t do it”, “I have you all figured out Jones” or something along those lines – I laugh with joy inside because I know that there is only one entity that knows me through and through. Anybody else who thinks they have ‘read’ me accurately is only being misled and Yes, preparing to be SHOCKED!

WHO IS AN ENTREPRENEUR?.......Part 2

This is the second part of the article written by Samuel Okore Mintah, the Operations Officer of BMIC. What a marvelous piece - Enjoy!

I initially stated that the journey of every entrepreneur starts with an idea that begins in the mind. But the idea has to be fully developed and nurtured to the extent that it becomes a Burning Desire. It is this burning desire that invigorates the entrepreneur to go every extent no matter the inevitable impediments to attain his or her goal. This burning desire reinforces the mind to focus on a goal and propel the entrepreneur by reinforcing them for the long arduous journey to their desired destination. Having a burning desire will only take an entrepreneur halfway on the journey required to turn an idea into reality: unless the whole mindset of the entrepreneur is consumed by this desire. A consuming desire is stated by Noel Bempong “as the energy, fuel or power that is capable of launching one into action to bring the goal in mind to reality”. This means that consuming desire is what encourages, strengthens and motivates the entrepreneur to endure and act even in the face of adversity. Without this consuming desire, the entrepreneur is bound to stop pursuing his goal when unavoidable obstacles surface, but with this consuming desire any impediment is seen by the entrepreneur as a minor obstruction or even an opportunity in disguise. Apart from external impediments like a lack of funds or required experience, there are internal obstacles that emanate from within the entrepreneur’s own self in the form of low self-esteem, doubts, fear, procrastination etc. Acting at all times and in the face of all these obstacles is the underpinning manifestation of consuming desire that will get you to your destination. Action is the bridge between our dreams and reality, so ACT NOW because without action there is no progress.

They say what you see is what you get but this is not necessarily true in the world of business because what occupies your thoughts most of the time is what tends to manifest in reality. I prefer to say ‘how you think it is how you get it’. How you visualize an idea in your mind’s eye determines the probable reality that [with enough work] will materialize. Therefore as an entrepreneur, the positioning of your thoughts after every experience is what will make or break you. For example after your business suffers an unexpected setback, you have two options; you can admit failing abysmally and give up; or you can decide to see the setback as an opportunity to re-examine what caused the problem and consequently correct mistakes and root out inefficiencies. The second option allows you to approach the same project again but from a different direction which will yield the desired results, but the first option prevents you from trying again. So the difference between the businessman who succeeds and the one who fails lies in their mental outlook to life. Those with a consistently positive mental attitude tend to succeed even after many hiccups whiles those with a negative outlook to life inevitably give up. Human thoughts are powerful enough to transform into a reality exactly as has been envisioned. This means that Success or Failure is already decided in the mind before it manifests into observable reality.

A true entrepreneur never gives up because in the dictionary for entrepreneurial skills the word ‘quit’ does not exist. Perseverance [or persistence] is the word that defines every entrepreneur’s success. Though giving up may seem the best thing to do, your success is inevitable if you refuse to cave in. They say the darkest time of the night is the moment just before the break of dawn; this means that in every endeavour the point where going on seems impossible is when you must realise that victory is just a step away. Persistence is a mental attitude cultivated from self-discipline that will get you to your final destination no matter the odds you face. It is easy to dream but to be determined enough to achieve those dreams is the hardest of all the traits that an entrepreneur must cultivate but with self-discipline and hard work nothing can stand in the way of a person who desires to be an entrepreneurial success.

Acres of diamonds exist right beneath our feet therefore it is up to us the young entrepreneurs to identify these burgeoning opportunities so we can develop them for the benefit of the masses. Though lack of funds and experience may cause us to doubt our capabilities it should be understood that though many have tried and failed those who succeeded were the ones that never gave up. No matter the obstacles that may exist nothing can prevent you from dreaming. Dream and imagine where you want to be and work hard and sacrifice to make them realities. Imagination is the ‘workshop of the mind’ where ideas are assembled together to form big dreams; true entrepreneurs are those individuals that persevere in their efforts and use their failures as stepping-stones to propel them to their final destination - SUCCESS.