ADULTING IS THE SOUP AND I’M THE FORK: LESSON THREE

YOU DON’T QUIT

Life will throw and throw and throw and throw. Life will attack you. Sometimes with the good, sometimes with the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, the unforgiving, the enjoyable, the not so enjoyable, the nice, the not so nice et cetera et cetera. And guess what you are allowed to quit, you really are, but you don’t!

In those times when life is doing its thing, you’ll be hit by the why’s and who’s.

Why am I still holding on?

Who am I doing this for?

Why can’t I just let it go?

Who is going to appreciate all this effort?

Until you can answer these vexing questions, it won’t matter if you hold on or not, it’ll be in vain.

And when you have the answers, no chance in hell can life break you. When you understand the purpose for your struggle, it doesn’t matter how hard it gets you know you’re going to make it because whatever gets thrown at you, doesn’t measure up to the strength you have for your purpose. And you live on. You get to fight another day. You get to win. You get to rejoice, you get to celebrate.

The best part of it is that you get to inspire somebody else. Someone who was marred and trampled on. If you can do it, they can too!

You can quit, but you don’t.

WE’RE NOT GROWING, WE’RE DYING.

Birthdays come, birthdays go. So do hours, days, months and years. Each day we live to the end we grow older and as some may say wiser (though I’m having a little debate going on in my head as I pen this down. Just because one is older doesn’t make the wiser or does it? But could a being with uncountable grey hairs be foolish? I mean with all that experience and that huge figure of age?) Let me leave that for you to chew on.

With each new age, we turn over a new leaf. For me its always like a refresh button has been clicked. Renewed positive energy, more goals to the list, there’s always a lot of motivation and musings. What have your feelings on birthdays been? I’m always excited and I believe I’m not alone.

However, what we don’t always see or seldom think about is that in each year, we pass our death day, the hour and the very minute. We grow, towards that day, closer and closer as we age. I’m not writing this to scare us but to open our eyes and to let us lucidly understand that we haven’t much time left. If you have an idea that can positively impact on the world implement it today, if you have a dream begin working towards it, if you can, create time for self relaxation and meditation, meet up with friends, have the chitchat, laugh as much as you can and create peace. Suffice to say, if it were your last, how’d you have lived it? Would you have any regrets? The ‘I wish…’ statements?

I’d like to have that conversation with us someday and I hope we’ll all be “I’m glad I…”:)

Learning…

So lately I’ve been attending this training at Centonomy in westlands. I will not hesitate to say its been the best thing that could happen to me so far (coz hey! I believe better and even bigger things await). It’s been one journey that has totally transformed me. Each module couldn’t get more informative and as we went further into the training the interactions couldn’t be any better, the view was high enough, the water tasted just fine, the air was fresher than I could ever imagine and the wind was as strong to make our sails deeper into the oceans. For the past five weeks I’ve been looking forward to each Saturday because in each training there’s something new that I’d learn that would nudge my brain a little. The things about personal finance that I thought were impalable, just like saving, buying shares, finding and making great investments, time value of money, debts and getting my money to work for me is a lesson I’ll carry for a lifetime! The ingenious skills of how to find our way in the Kenyan market and finally making it as great investors with booming businesses was truly winds in my wings.

The module that infused in me a desire to work even smarter and tread on a path less trodden was career planning for financial growth. From learning to develop mutually beneficial  networks, asses ourselves, write great CVs, seek opportunities and volunteer i couldn’t be a better person without this. A great speaker once said

It’s not the garrulousness of the speaker that matters at the end of the day, but that one sentence, phrase or even word that gives your life a U-turn and eternally engraves itself in you.

Just to share the few things that I took home:
1. No one will ever respect you for being young but for the knowledge you have.
2. When you’re young that is when you should make the most crucial decisions of your life, but its at that same age when we lack the brain capacity to do so.
3. Why is it that when there’s traffic on the roads or in the streets, we’re all running away from it but in our careers we all want to tread on the same crowded paths. Doing the same things and expecting different results is truly the definition of insanity.
4. A shilling or dollar or pound or Euro (whatever currency you’re using) today doesn’t carry the same worth tomorrow.