Tag: Life (page 1 of 4)

Reinvention: How to Live Multiple Lives in 1 Lifetime

Reinvention is how you live multiple lives in one.

Let me explain how. April 12 was my birthday. The birthday came with beautiful prayers, wishes, and messages.

And it felt so good to be appreciated.

The birthday anniversary also reminded me of how fast life moves, with responsibilities and relationships growing stronger or weaker with time.

Time is Constant for Everybody, yet Different for Anybody

When you are in your 20s, you seem to have abundant time.

It’s the same 24 hours for everyone, but you have more energy to stay awake. And so many interests, passions and causes compete for your ‘seemingly infinite’ time.

Whether it’s launching a business or growing your business. Whether it’s finding a new job or maintaining your current job.

Starting an NGO. Or being part of an NGO. Watching a personal development video. Or re-watching a Netflix series.

The options are limitless.

Then suddenly, your time now seems to get shorter with every birthday celebration.

Reinvention: The True Concept of Time

Reinvention: The True Concept of Time

There used to be days when I woke up by 5 a.m., went to work, called friends, read voraciously, wrote over a thousand words, took an online course, slept by 1 a.m., and still felt energetic the next day.

Now, there are days when I struggle to read, return a missed call or finish a 90-minute movie as I try to relax.

Even though you want time to go at your pace, this is when patience comes into play.

The Patience Paradox

In this present age of cybercrimes and the increasing display of wealth, it is easy to sway from the right path.

Let me explain this with a few real-life scenarios:

Example 1: You just started your business. You sell cakes. Or probably clothes.

Your cakes are sweet and amazing. Your clothes are top-quality and fitted.

But the customer patronage is low. The sales are not coming as you expect.

Then you ask yourself, why do I have Few customers?

The keyword is PATIENCE.

Example 2: You wrote your first book. Or built your first app.

You spend a lot of energy and time on it. Excitement overwhelms you. You are hyped up.

You finally launch the book. Your app is live on the mobile app stores.

You get a lot of congratulations, but the users are few.

It’s nothing compared to the resources spent.

Then you ask yourself, why is my book not a bestseller? Why are people not talking about my app with their friends and family?

My friend, the keyword is PATIENCE.

Example 3: You organise an event.

You design flyers and publicise them on social media.

The venue is set.

You even bought light refreshments for your guests. You tell your friends, family and even enemies.

Most of them promise to come. You are already imagining a fully packed event.

Then the D-day comes. Only a handful of people attended.

And some of them only came because they heard there would be small chops.

Then you ask yourself, am I missing something here?

The keyword is PATIENCE.

In these situations, you have two options.

You can either wait for your friends to make money and then buy your products.

Or you can search for clients who are willing to pay for your services.

Both choices will still take time. It will still require PATIENCE.

Does this mean, you should stop trying? Of course not.

Patience is one of the most underrated virtues. It takes patience to stop making rash or stupid decisions when climbing the ladder of success.

It takes patience to analyse a situation and make the right decision.

Reinvention: The Patience Paradox

Reinvention: The Patience Paradox

You can always speed up the process through direct mentorship, deliberate practice and careful observation of the greats.

But you should not skip the process altogether.

Trust the process. Enjoy every moment you spend today in improving yourself and your craft.

Patience is the bridge between lifetimes, and this is when it leads to growth.

Growth – The Misinterpreted Compounder

When we were younger, growth was often defined as the irreversible increase in age and size.

But now that you are older, this concept changes, especially for life itself.

Growth is now the increase in character, competence and convictions.

The attitude you exhibit. The passion and dedication you infuse in your work and craft.

And the values and principles that govern your daily decisions.

As I read some messages on my birthday, I rediscovered that growth is not just counting the number of birthdays you have witnessed so far on Earth.

But it’s also in the quality of your relationships – people above, below and on your level.

Growth is reflected in your influence over people and in the values you try to teach and learn daily.

Reinvention: What Growth also Means

Reinvention: What Growth also Means

The destination may change. The career prospects may not be what you planned it to be.

But one thing is still sure,

God’s Grace. Dedication. Diligence. Perseverance. Execution. Creativity.

The principles that worked for successful people will still work for you and me too.

Growth is the soil where your multiple lives bloom.

The Rule of Reinvention

In my “past lives”, I have been a laptop seller, graphic designer, biology undergraduate and even a client experience officer.

Elon Musk worked on online maps, business directories, and financial services before he became CEO of Tesla. Dangote imported and distributed commodities before he started manufacturing. Jesus Christ was a carpenter, healer and teacher before he became the saviour.

Most people replay the same year 10 times and call it a decade.

They work, sleep, scroll, repeat. They do not evolve, only age. That’s not life.  That’s existing.

Living multiple lives in one lifetime requires intentional evolution, not just passive endurance.

Leonardo da Vinci didn’t just paint the Mona Lisa; he was an inventor, scientist, and architect. Each pursuit was a “life” he lived within one lifetime. Oprah shifted from news anchor to media mogul to philanthropist. Each phase was a distinct “life.”

The key to reinventing yourself is to learn skills and keep compounding them. Every new skill is a new life. So, try to learn and apply one life-changing skill per year.

Coding, storytelling, public speaking, negotiation, photography — each opens a new version of you.

My book, Fast Track, can help you learn skills and place you on the path of reinvention in a shorter time.

Embrace skill stacking. Don’t see learning as ending with formal education or your current job. Actively seek out and dedicate time (even just 30 minutes a day) to learning a skill completely unrelated to your main hustle.

Use Patience to build competence, let time allow it to mature, and watch how this new skill adds another “layer” or potential “life” to your existence.

Treat your Life as a Netflix Series

Think of your life not as a single career path or role, but as a Netflix series.

Just as how a Netflix series rarely stops at a single season, you should not limit yourself to one version. Develop all aspects of yourself.

Each reinvention of yourself is a new season.

Your season 1 can be “the Hustler”. Season 2 can be “the Learner”. Your season 3 can be “the Baller”

You don’t cancel the show after one season. You keep producing, rewriting, shocking the audience. The plot twist is your responsibility.

Living multiple lives means actively working and balancing these different storylines in your series over time.

Some seasons might be excellent while others are just okay, and you might add entirely new storylines throughout your lifetime. Time allows each episode to improve, Patience helps you get better seasons (life challenges), and Growth is the overall increase in your series’ value (your richness of experience and character).

Don’t let your years pass by and track only birthdays.

Create intentional ceremonies or markers when you’re entering a new “life” phase.

What about the day you started your first business? Or started a new job? Did you mark the day you moved to a new city with just faith and your laptop?

Create the Right Timeline

Create the Right Timeline

In the End, Reinvention is for Your Own Good

When you cultivate different aspects of yourself – different skills, different roles, different knowledge bases – you build incredible resilience.

If one area of your life faces a setback (like a job loss, a business downturn), you have other developed parts of yourself to lean on, draw strength from, or even pivot towards.

You’re not a “one-season wonder.” You’ve lived multiple lives and learned different ways of thinking and problem-solving.

This adaptability, nurtured by patience through various growth cycles over Time, makes you better equipped to handle the inevitable uncertainties life throws your way.

You bounce back faster and see opportunity where others see only crisis.

This is how you will live multiple times in a Single Lifetime.

Reinvent Yourself Often

Reinvent Yourself Often

Friendships: The Ultimate Life Hack for Mental Health Challenges

Friendships are the ultimate life hacks to solve stress, anxiety, and even addiction.

One of the greatest thinkers of our time – Simon Sinek said the above statement and it blew my mind.

Why was friendship the ultimate hack? How does it solve mental health challenges?

Simon explains how in a conversation with Trevor Noah. I am sharing his thoughts with you here:

The Sacrifice of Friendship for Success

When we say we have sacrificed something for our career. We should not be afraid to put a name to who that sacrifice was. Because often time, it was the people in our lives that we call friends.

Your friends will be there for you. Your work won’t.

Friendships

Friendships

Are you a Good Friend?

You usually make friends from school, work, church and other gatherings.

And then you let the location and time influence these friendships. This means you are unable to keep and maintain your friendships when you are not close to them. Please don’t leave your friendship to coincidence.

But to be a good friend, you have to ask yourself these questions.

Have you sacrificed a meeting to hang out with a friend? Do you call your friends on their birthday and sing them happy birthday? Or do you just put a thing on social media saying happy birthday because you saw everybody else put it on social media.

When a friend is depressed, do you go over to their house, sit, watch movies, eat ice cream all day and be depressed with them?

Have you told your friend – I love you? Not love you or love ya? But I love you. The way you know these things matter is how it made you feel when these things were done to you.

How to Keep and Maintain Friendships

Trevor Noah narrates a story:

“I was on a trip to Greece a few years ago. If you’ve ever been to any of these places where people are on boats and having a great time in the water, it hypnotizes you. Then I turned to one of the Greek guys I was with, and I said Nick,

If I was trying to get a boat, what boat should I get?

I’ll never forget this… His friend jumped in, and he said:

Trevor Noah, let me tell you something – the best boat is your friend’s boat.

It was a joke that had so many layers because if you own a boat there’s a lot of stress.  You don’t want to own a boat unless you really love boats. But the thing I found profound was this.

Everybody who has a boat needs friends to be on that boat with them. And if everybody works to get the boat no one has time to have friends to come on the boat with them. Every boat I know is full of friends who are on that boat.”

Trevor Noah’s message is simple. Work on your friendship so you enjoy your best moments better together.

The Power of Asking for Help

We don’t build trust by offering help. You build trust by asking for it.

If someone is your friend especially if they have been there for you, don’t be selfish to deny them the honor of allowing your friends to be there for you. The reverse should happen too.

This is when you know a friend is a friend.

Friendship vs. Success: Prioritizing People Over Work

Finding the balance between friendship and success is a bit difficult in today’s times.

In our society, it is possible to show up as a family person. You can show up as a CEO. Showing up as a president is also possible.

Yet society does not deem it nice or important to show up as a friend. The society does not prioritize friendships.

You must have noticed it is more remarkable to have an amazing experience with someone than by yourself. When you say, “look what I did” versus “do you remember that time we did that”. The latter is a better feeling than the former.

How Ignoring Friendships affects Romantic Relationships

There is a big and underrated lesson here.

Abandoning or ignoring friendships has affected romantic relationships. Because people have now shifted all the expectations, the support, the love gotten from a community of friends to one person. We have abandoned those outside places and asking our partners to be everything all the time always.

This is an unreasonable and unfair standard to put on someone. Or to be put on you as well.

What does it all mean?

I like how Trevor Noah concludes their conversation with this adage:

A person is a person only because of the people. I guess King Solomon already knew this because he said it twice:

“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”

“Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up.”

That’s all. I hope this helps

Wishing you the best of friendships.

.

This email was an excerpt from a conversation between Simon Sinek and Trevor Noah. You can watch the full conversation here 

Buckle Up: Everything is Just a Skill Issue

Till now I still dread the term – Buckle up because I have always been a creative at heart.

I loved the thought of creating something from scratch, putting it up for display, people come to buy what I create and I don’t have to worry about money.

Naturally, as a child I learnt to draw cartoon characters and write essays and short stories. As I got older, I studied things like graphic design, content writing and photography.

Although I learned a lot from these things, they never really helped me financially.

More specifically, I wanted to do my own thing but was unable to monetize my creativity.

It’s not because I was not skilled enough, it’s because I didn’t stack other skills that would allow me to make money and experience freedom. I was just a man-child who wanted to watch anime and read books for a living while expecting that my money problems solved themselves miraculously.

I will talk about my full story in a subsequent article, but for now, just know that this approach did not work out.

I had to swallow a pride and get a job.

But there is a profound lesson I learned which is still valuable today:

Lesson: Anything and everything can be learned.

Buckle Up: Everything is a Skill Issue

Buckle Up: Everything is a Skill Issue

Everything is a skill Issue

Buckle up is often used as an interjection or exclamation to infer that an event is about to be exciting, unexpected, dangerous or even troubling. In real time, it simply meant – Things are about to get serious.

As time goes on, I am realizing that a person’s life changes when they realize everything is a skill.

The goal you currently strive for is just a couple of skills you must learn and build.

Discipline is a skill.

Patience is a skill.

Being funny is a skill.

Socializing is a skill.

Making Money is a skill.

Saving money is a skill.

Being good at anything is a skill.

Everything now depends on your skillset.

What are Skills?

A skill is your ability to do something well.

I love how wild_stoic puts it – “Skills are not magical words that you either do or don’t have. They are things that you build through repetition.” This makes it simple to understand because repetition leads to Mastery.

And mastery leads to the fulfillment of your goal.

How to Turn Anything to a Skill You Can Master

This framework is in 3 steps:

Step 1: Break it into Chunks and Daily Tasks:

Chunking is a phenomenon where a task is split into smaller units for easy doing.

To begin chunking, ask yourself:

  1. What is the smallest single element of this skill that I can master?
  2. What other chunks link to that chunk?

Practice one chunk by itself until you’ve mastered it. Then connect more chunks, one by one, exactly as you would combine letters to form a word. Then combine those chunks into still bigger chunks. And so on.

Go a step further by creating a daily action.

Which daily task would you need to complete in order to make noticeable, progressive progress in your selected skill?

Step 2: Execute with 30 for 30 or with Deep Work.

I learned this execution step from Sahil Bloom (He is a great guy you can check out as well):

a. 30-for-30: Do the daily task for 30 minutes per day for 30 straight days. 30 days is meaningful enough as a commitment that you can’t be half-in, but 30 minutes is short enough that you can convince yourself to take it on. 900 minutes of effort in a single month is enough to create tangible progress that will keep you pushing forward. This is my favored approach for getting started on any new area of progress.

b. Deep Work: Deep work means carving out 1-2 blocks of time per day when you will enter a deeply focused state to make progress against your area of choice. These blocks are generally 1-2 hours for most people and should be completed without distraction. This is the favored strategy for big professional goals.

Sahil also recommends that you start with 30-for-30 and then transition to Deep Work after a few months if you feel motivated and energized to go harder.

Step 3:  Teach Others What You are Learning.

The ultimate test of your knowledge is your capacity to transfer it to another.

You can use the Feynman Technique to buckle up when seeing everything as a skill issue. The Feynman Technique is a simple and popular way of teaching others while developing mastery over your newly acquired skill.  There are four steps to his method.

  1. Teach your skill in its simplest form.
  2. Identify gaps in your explanation. Go back to the source material to better understand it.
  3. Organize and simplify your information.
  4. Transmit and Transfer till the other person understands it.

But remember, do before you teach or share with others.

It Only Gets Better From Here On

When you see things from this angle, I strongly believe you can do anything you want if you practice it enough. You no longer have an excuse not to do anything.

Infact, you can do everything.

I hope this makes sense. Again, buckle up and see everything as a skill issue.