RISING ABOVE LIFE'S DEFEATS WITH A SMILE

SUCCESS HAS BEEN KNOCKING ON YOUR DOOR PACKAGED IN WHAT LOOKS LIKE PROBLEMS

Lessons from the Chinese Bamboo tree!

To be successful is not an accident but a planned phase of anyone’s life. Let us use the Chinese Bamboo tree as an example. This remarkable tree is different from most trees in that it doesn’t grow in the usual fashion. While most trees grow steadily over a period of years, the Chinese bamboo tree doesn’t break through the ground for the first four years. Then, in the fifth year, an amazing thing happens – the tree begins to grow at an astonishing rate. In fact, in a period of just five weeks, a Chinese bamboo tree can grow to a height of 90 feet (the height of a six storey building). It’s almost as if you can actually see the tree growing before your very eyes. http://donmillereducation.com/journal/the-chinese-bamboo-tree/     

The question is when does the bamboo tree grow to the height of 90 feet? Is it in five weeks or five years? The answer is obvious; it takes five years because before the bamboo breaks through the ground, it grows and builds its root system deep enough to be able to sustain the full height and weight of the full grown bamboo tree when it shoots out of the ground. Let’s back up a little in this illustration and establish a truth, in a bamboo seed there is a 90 feet bamboo tree already encoded. Are you with me? Therefore, the bamboo seed does not try to become a bamboo tree; it is already a bamboo tree. When the bamboo seed is planted in the soil and the right conditions are present, the seed becomes what it already is, that is the bamboo tree. Are you following? Comparatively, in every maize seed there is a maize plant. Every human being is born with a seed of success. However, humans have a choice whether to become successful or not. Does that make sense? Stay with me on this.

Now, I know that everyone wants to be successful, but like the Chinese bamboo tree in our example, success requires preparation. Before any farmer plants their crop, they prepare the field. Some wise gentleman said it is better to anticipate an opportunity in the future and prepare for it than to have an opportunity come and pass you by because you are not ready. Are you anticipating becoming say a lawyer? All you can do is to go and study law because surely an opportunity for a vacancy for a lawyer will come but what will you do without a law degree? Nothing, but only “wish, would have, could have or should have”. But who does that help? Life puts us through preparation periods, however, many times we ignore the lessons and simply choose to complain or cry about the effects of our so called troubles and for that reason the opportunity for which the lessons were meant for you to learn and grow your roots deep, would pass you by. You may even accuse the devil, but the truth is that you were not just ready (period). In life, whatever you are going through right now no matter how difficult it may be, please think and ask the question, what is the lesson I need to learn in this situation? Look at the sum total of all the things you have gone through in your life both good and bad. Tell me if right now there isn’t any one bad situation you can’t thank God for because of the bigger blessing that came out of it in your life. For some of you, because you were forced to leave the cruelty of an aunty, uncle or cousin from wherever you originally stayed, what might have come out of it could be that you found the love of your life, opportunity or dream job in the town or place you thought you were forced to run and seek refuge from. Do you see how difficulties push us to our destiny? In this article I am not saying you should wait for difficult situations to push you to your destiny, all I am saying is that you should take action consciously towards your desired success. To be successful, you have to begin to see yourself successful, mentally, emotionally and begin to make the necessary changes in your life that are congruent with your desired success even before your current circumstances begin to look like success. In God’s eyes, you have the seed of success already embedded in you. Create the right conditions in the soil of your soul, so that the seed of success can shoot out into your life as success itself.  I know that someone might be asking, but how can I see myself successful when I have never achieved any amount of success in my life before? Well, let me give you an idea, think about someone in your life right now that you know has achieved a certain level of success or wealth that you admire and list down the things, virtues you admire about that person. In writing the things you admire about that person, what you are doing in that moment is actually describing yourself, your true essence. That’s your desire, that’s what you really are made off and want to ultimately become but you are not aware. Don’t confuse admiration with envy please! If you are not aware of success, it will not come. What you think you admire in that person out there is actually inside of you trying to express itself with a strong feeling. How else do you think you are able to identify those virtues in others if that is not already in you? Why do you think you feel something about helping the vulnerable groups and only the lack of money or resources stops you? It’s because it’s part of the blue print of your true self that wants to help. Believe me, you can do something about yourself and achieve your desired level of success that can enable you make the difference in other people’s lives and be fulfilled. 

Life may have thrown you in the darkest wilderness in this world looking after sheep like the story of young David in the Christian Bible and it seems like no one cares about you. Remember, it was in the wilderness where David acquired the skills of war and fought lions and bears defending the sheep as part of his training, unknowingly. These are the skills that David needed to kill Goliath, a significant event that propelled him to ultimately become King of the nation of Israel. Your tough life's moments right now are the propellers you need to your crown of greatness  

SETBACKS ARE A SETUP FOR YOUR GREATEST COMEBACK

With you in mind

WE ARE ALL BORN BUSINESS ORIENTED IN OUR ‘DNA’

I know you are now say, who? Me? Are you really talking about me? A business man or woman! Hell No! Yes I am talking about you. I know you might even be fuming inside at me, is this guy trying to ruin my day? Oh No my friend. Just think for a moment, you are buying things every day but don’t you think there is something you are also selling that is bringing in the cash you are using for your expenses?

Am I speaking in Parables?

What are parables or proverbs anyway? Even our Lord Jesus Christ spoke in parables, why? In our African Society, old and young men in history used to gather in designated places called 'Insaka' in my language, these specially built or designated places for gatherings where different kinds of discussion sessions on issues of life and maybe development took place. During such discussion forums, whenever the old men of the day wanted to drive a point which they felt the young men were too young to handle, they always spoke in parables, which is a form of symbolic language only familiar to a certain age group or class. By the way don’t try that old parable scheme with the young ones of today, they will just Google the key word and catch you off guard. The parable paradigm of old times could be attributed to the reasons why the young generation of yester-years probably (note: bearing in mind that I haven’t conducted a statistical analysis with my favorite SPSS program) stayed away from what was deemed illicit behavior in those days until they were old enough to be given the keys of life. But today, the young will see things on the Internet even before you think they are old enough to receive the wisdom and by the time you are unleashing the so called wisdom at the appointed time, they are laughing behind your back.

The question is why do we use parables or proverbs? This is my opinion; parables are used to make the wise even wiser and the foolish even more foolish. Whenever, you want to hide the truth from fools, just use parables to portray a truth.   When Jesus Christ was asked why he continually spoke in parables, he said it was because the Pharisees or the men of God of the old testament times, sort of Ministries Internationals of the time could easily decode the truth and get saved. Therefore, Jesus used parables so that the truth could be hidden from the Pharisees. Of course we don’t need the Old Testament Pharisee type of men of God in the New Testament Kingdom principle hanging on to an Old Testament temple made of brick which has visibly some partitions of the so called holy place and the most holy place and so on etc. Last time I checked, God does not dwell in temples made with the hands of man Heb_9:24, 1Co_3:16,17

My fellow soldiers in life, I do not intend to use parables loosely without clarifying what I am trying to put across to you. I know and do realize that everything I write will be analyzed by your logical or conscious mind. I am fully aware how the conscious mind works. The only problem is that your conscious mind just like everyone else’s, has a very limited scope of reference and to be precise, your conscious mind has only one point of reference which is your past experiences and knowledge. That is the reason why some people are dealing with you based on what you did to them yesterday, last week, last year and so on and they are very forceful about it like “Remember what you did to me last so and so”. The mind always has a tendency to want to keep you safe from what is perceived dangerous based on what you have experienced previously. And new information is usually the victim of your conscious protective mechanism and easily deletes new information that call for change, as it comes. I hope you can give what we are sharing a chance to see if it can try to help you see things in another light. That is the reason why sometimes you fail to take certain actions that the mind considers as risks. Think about that business idea you keep putting off for later, that song that has been bubbling in your heart waiting to be produced all because of the fear of the unknown that can happen.  The common business excuses I hear are like; the Chinese have taken the business or the Rwandees have taken all the business. But wait a minute; are you talking about our friends? With all due respect, you saw them when they came, you saw them when they began to go to Soweto to buy tomato without feeling any shame and sell it to you and you bought ( and by saying this, it’s not my intention to demean our friends because I am aware that most of them had comfortable lives and probably doing better in their native country, but it’s their resolve to rise from the ashes and become an entity to be reckoned with in a foreign country that is admirable). The money they raised they expanded their business. The difference is that they took action to change their circumstances while the majority of us are still complaining about how bad things are in Zambia. A typical Zambian I know, when they get a little out of the ordinary amounts of money, all they do is buy the most expensive asset like a car just to frustrate the neighborhood (just a joke but sometimes it does happen) without any clear thought of how to add value to earn more money.  All that most foreigners had were dreams and determination (of course probably not all of them). You don’t need money to have a dream but you need to have a dream to pursue and resources will follow. Money flows where there is a purpose. ‘You don’t have to be great to get started but you have to get started in order to be great’ does that make sense? In all your dreams you already have at least one resource and that is you. Therefore, the notion that there isn’t wealth in Zambia for anyone willing to create value does not hold water or probably maheu.  

Therefore, as you read this material your brain will be trying to refer to your repository of existing knowledge based on your past experiences, and whatever information is considered foreign or strange, that knowledge will be rejected and filtered out. If your life has been filled with unfortunate events like past failures or failed relationships, the mind will use these same reference points in order not to allow you to take any action today to do something different. More like a computer which keeps blipping error messages whenever it does not have a program to execute a new instruction whose associated program cannot be found in its logic. I beg that you read this with an open mind please. Are you following so far? I know that somebody might be saying but we don’t know where the wealth is and how to get it, the rules or laws on how to tap into the so called hidden wealth? First of all let me be blunt with you like a lawyer would say, Ignorance of the law is not an excuse to commit a crime. The fact that you don’t know how to generate wealth does not make you appetite for food go away. The fact that you have a snake in your house and all you do is complaining about it does not make the snake go away. Sometimes your ignorance may be genuine but before the courts of law that excuse does not fly an inch. Just think about this, here is a good responsible father who hunts an Impala in the protected wild life areas for food for his family because they genuinely need the meal (by law this is called poaching). The wild life agency unfortunately pounces on him and arrests him for poaching what is classified by law as ‘government trophy’ and he is taken before the courts of law for justice. Supposing the poacher tries to play his own smart lawyer in the courts and tries to defend himself by saying to the court, your worship I am being accused of killing an Impala but I also demand to be availed the Impala’s family complaint that I have murdered their child or that their child is missing.  The good man may genuinely believe that wild animals are a gift from God as food for mankind. Guess what! He may not have read the text in the law (probably because he can’t read) that mankind, the world over has since adopted the wild animals as its legal protector. Despite the plea of ignorance, the courts are still obliged to register him for free accommodation under the prison service. By the way, if you are ever in higher courts of laws please use a lawyer they know how to interpret the law, don’t try to be smart.  

Before I get carried away, let me return to my theme ‘Business men and women by default’. But why don’t we know that we are born business people from our early years in life? If you already know that you were born a business person, that’s good, but the majority of the people may obviously plead ignorant. Now before you start blaming yourself, wait and hear what I want to say. It’s not your fault that you don’t know, I also didn’t know but it has been our education system and the role models that we have had that have had an influence throughout our lives. Let’s try this, remember when you were at primary school?(I am hoping you went to primary school) Was you teacher a business person or entrepreneur? Probably like my case the answer is no. what then did you model yourself after in your teacher? Probably becoming a good teacher or worker, and hope to become more educated than the teacher. Let us try secondary school or even College and University education, were the people in front of the chalk board; teachers or lecturers (note: by the way only chalk boards existed in my time) entrepreneurs? I guess not, unless they were doing some part time tuition classes as well. Therefore, throughout our school system we have been trained to be workers in fact good workers who should look for employment after completing the school system and stay in the job until you are retired with the so called full retirement benefits. What our school system has been missing is that we have not been trained to get out of employment and the truth is that outside of employment, we do not have the tools to deal with life and in the process people get stressed out. Why? They do not know how to deal with life without a job that provided a guaranteed income every month. Think about yourself if you are one of the many loyal workers like me, who are you without a job? If you remove a job from your life, what will you become? If you see Zero in your life without a job, that should be a signal to start thinking outside the box.  Even with the Millions or thousands of bucks many retire with, people are unable to add value to it. It becomes a diminishing resource. You can’t blame them, they have been workers all their life and adding value to an income has not been part of the life’s syllabus. Is this making sense? OK let us look at people in formal employment, everyone working whether in the civil service or private company is doing business. How? They are selling a commodity called time. Now the general rule of business (call it common sense if you will) is that when you sell products in large quantities to a big buyer, you will surely sell the products at a reduced cost price. In other words you sell the commodity at wholesale price. This type of contract of sale also ensures your continued mutually beneficial business relationship. What I am saying is that the, working time any worker provides is sold at wholesale price because the organization or company you work for has a cost structure that can only pay so much to maintain operational sustainability. Therefore, that is the reason you get the salary you receive every month. The company you work for is correct; they have prescribed what your duties will be and how much they are willing to pay for the services provide. You can never be rich selling your time because you only have so much time to sell every day, 8 hours to be specific. If you have been hoping to get rich through selling your time, you have been living an illusion and it’s time to work up from the slumber.  I can assure you that you will always be going on strike trying to force the company to make you rich by increasing your pay until they fire you. You only become rich by multiplying your time through developing multiple sources of income. How do you multiply your time? A simple example is investing in a shop (this is just an illustration). Don’t tell me there isn’t any profit in retail business because the last time I checked, our foreign friends are dancing quite a bit in the retail business. That would mean you are working and you also run a shop. Within the eight hours, you are earning your salary at work and your shop is raising an income in the same amount of time space. That is called multiplying your time. Am I saying people must stop work? No, your job has provided you with an opportunity of an income on which you can begin to learn to add value to part of your income that is why the company will even give you a sum of amount at retirement hoping that through your working life you have learnt how to add value to your income (by the way this is what is missing in company policies, i.e. helping employees to prepare for retirement). Your job provides you with an environment where you can identify skills, products and services that the economy requires and hopefully you can capitalize and make a killing out of such, while you are still in employment or when you are out of employment. Your employment is like a school of empowerment where you learn business procedures. Therefore, allow yourself to see opportunities in your current environment, may be you have been sleep walking for too long and you have lost the ability to see what others are seeing. If others are making it, you can also do it. But fear has stood in your way for too long and you have begun to believe it’s a normal way of life. No it isn’t!  Ask yourself, how much talk time do you use per month and what do you use it for? Let us say you buy K10 ($2) of airtime and you really want to give somebody a piece of your mind because you believe they have betrayed you. You use your phone and make a call to your victim and unleash the venom on them. What has happened here is that, you have used K10  ($2) to abuse or react to your perceived enemy. In essence you have just paid for your own insults and probably lost a friend at the same time. You may reconcile with your friend but you will not recover the money.  Supposing you asked your spouse to start selling talk time and simple mathematics has revealed that you use close to K500 ($100) on talk time. Wouldn’t it be empowering to start buying from your newly started in-house dealer? This is just a thought because the entire economy is based on revenue and expenditure and I am simply trying to show you on which side of the economic equation you may be playing more. 

Quote of the day

Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.

~ Sir Winston Churchill 

With you in Mind

IF YOU CAN DREAM IT, YOU CAN BUILD IT

 

Drop the wrong thought and you lose the problem it creates.

             ~Vernon Howard

As the year 2018 builds up steam into its second semester think about this, Many People go through life thinking about why they are not making it big or succeeding in Life. They believe all they see is failure and obstacles knocking on the doorsteps of their life. They believe life has special classes of blessed or fortunate people and another class of cursed people. They have chosen to believe that everything will always go wrong and will always happen only to them at the wrong time. Does this line sound familiar to anybody? I used to think like that and I reaped the benefits of the consequences of such retrogressive thinking. One thing has become clear to me that ‘As man thinketh so is he’ adage. No one can ever rise above their own thoughts. Our thoughts form who we are in life. Even the friends we are surrounded with think like we do. The Christian Bible actually say “can two walk together, except they be agreed” Amos 3:3. Sometimes you really need to change the type of friends you have in order to rise above what you currently are.  The thoughts we think are the seeds we sow for our personal growth or personal downfall. If one thinks low they will go low and if one thinks high they will go high. The thoughts we think about ourselves form part of our self-image. if you think highly of yourself you will walk with a high self-image and will not wait for others people’s praise in order to feel important. Therefore, one can never ever become prosperous or rich by thinking riches are not destined for them. Therefore, one must be careful with the thoughts they entertain in their mind which is part of our brain system. Like one wise thinker said our brain is our human software swimming in biochemical substance in the head. It will take your thoughts as input, process the thoughts and produce the actual results of that input. If you are thinking big business, the output will definitely be big business manifesting in one’s life. The thoughts we keep develop our language. Those who think about problems always talk about problems. The words we speak have life and death embedded in them; you are either building or killing yourself with your own words, therefore, stop blaming others for your problems. Your own mouth has been doing all the damage…
As for my fellow world citizens in the so called developing countries, let us stop playing the victim. I have come to believe that where one was born does not determine one’s destiny. It’s time for us to begin to think about great ideas. We are all God’s highest form of creation and greatness is already wired in our DNA

Start today and begin to think big (to borrow Zig Zigglar’s phrase ‘aim for the top, the bottom is overcrowded’). If you believe it you will make it

Today’s quote is adapted from MyDailyInsights.com:
The only limits in our life are those we impose on ourselves.
~ Bob Proctor

Stay a champion of your life!!!!!!

Bright Mulenga

Anti Aging and Computer Technology

Can Computer Technology be a solution for any Anti Aging Remedies? Is there a fear of death? Or are we Aging too fast these days? Every time you consider a catelogue of man’s problem, one problem always shows up on the list AGING. Man does not want to grow Old. Everyone wants to live forever. Has man been looking to a computer for answers? Well, there is talk about ‘Nano Technology’. This is the need to develop the smallest computer with a relevant program to be able to go through the human blood stream and deal with some problems such as incurable diseases or change the genetic code or execute and Anti Aging program. Can we really stop anyone from the natural cycle of growing up? Can a Computer help mankind as an Anti Aging remedy or should we stick to Medical Therapies. Follow the link below and see what is happening…..

For your Anti Aging Solutions - http://www.worldhealth.net/

Formulas in Microsoft Word? Fact or Fiction

A Quote from ‘Bill Gates’? “The beauty about Notebook (Laptop) Computers, is that No Matter how much Data you save on them, they never get bigger” do you believe that
Lets get on the journey to simplify yet another task in Microsoft Word.

• Did you know that you can create a table of figures in Ms Word and enter a formula in the table to calculate any function!!! Such as Sum, Multiplication or even division. Just like an Excel spreadsheet.

By the way to create a table in a word document, you can follow the following simple steps (Ms Word 2003)

• Open Microsoft word document, start with a blank one
• Go to the Menu Bar, the menu bar is at the top of your document window below the title bar where you find words ‘File’, ‘Edit’, ‘Format’,Tools’ etc. Click on ‘Table’
• Point onto Insert and on the submenu that appears click Table
  
• A Dialog box appears where you are requested to specify the number of columns and rows. Indicate 4 in each one of the options. For now leave the rest of the options in their defaults
  
• Click Ok to create the table

Read the Complete resourse on this Subject by clicking the link 'Inserting Formulas in a Tables' on the right pane of the blog.... Enjoy yourselves
Bright

Take a Tour into The World of Computer Applications with Bright M, Simply...

Working in the IT Field has been a very exciting time for me! I have interacted with people of different caltural and professional backgrounds. The common Factor in all my interactions has been that everyone wants to be able to use the computer to the best of what it can offer. However, the funny thing is that, they all behaved differently before the PC. Some where so afraid to make mistakes, some where constantly asking the question if they will ever get better at using the PC. Some always threw complicated words at me to illustrate what they had already done, such as Advanced Spreadsheets, Intermediate Level, Graduate level and so on. No matter the name of the course, one thing is clear it is just a syllabus designed to get more money out of the unsuspecting prospects. The bottom line is! Get the Skill

I dont boast that I know everything,

but I have always tried to make it plain simple ooooo, plain simple people.

1. Principle No.1 Tell yourself the computer is very simple to use and you can learn to use it better (if the computer is very complicated, then the one who designed it must be a fool, cause how can one make something that is designed to help people so complicated?)
2. Princple No.2 Do Not be afraid to use the computer because anything you do on the computer is reversible
3. Principle No.3 Do not pay attention to rhetoric of Advanced or Intermediate levels talk by selfish tutors, because if you do it will cause your brain to let you believe that it is not easy. Remember the designer used his brain to create the computer. therefore, it is not beyond comprehension
4. Principle No.4 You do not need to have special attributes or intellectual capabilities for you to learn how to use the computer, all you need is to be available
5. Lets stop there for now and do an exercise

EXCERCISE 1.My target in this exercise are those who have very basic knowledge in using a computer and its application packages (Microsoft Office 2003, Ms Word in particular).

1. Supposing you want the computer to create let us say 58 pages at once in a Microsoft Word Document without you type anything or create any pages. But you want to use a function that can do that for you! What do you do? Solution Use the RAND() fuction (Formulars can also be used in a word document. Remember that). How?
2. Open Microsft Word document. You will see a cursor blinking to tell you the start of the document
3. Click and Change the font to 72 points (before you type anything on the document)Now type straight onto your word document the following formula starting with the equal (=)(the same way it is done in Excel spreadsheet) like =RAND(1,100) (with no spaces in the formular please) In the formular the number 100 is not a magic number, you can use any number, it only illustrates how many times text will be repeated. The cursor should be at the end of the closing bracket and
4. Press the ENTER key on the keyboard
5. You should now see text repeating itself on about 50 plus pages. What you have done is create pages.
6. Try it now and let me know the results.
7. I believe it is simple. Every week, We will be dealing with one aspect of computer applications. The so called "Advanced" The next post is to illustrate further how you can do formulars in a word table.

The above exercise was based on Ms Office 2003. However, it works just fine even in Office 2010. Let me hear from you. Let us build skills together. I would like to see an expert out of you bye!!

Bright Mulenga-0966725830 Zambia National Blood Transfusion Service, UTH, Lusaka.
e-mail me @:brightmulenga@gmail.com for information and a further Chart, visit me for the next post. Dont forget to checkout our African Proverbs

ICT for Development

It is a fact without question that the modern age is a computer driven one. Therefore, it is not for anyone to decide weather to use or not to use technology as a daily essential in the third world nations. The truth in the face of everyone is that we are all affected by technology. Nearly all the banking services have been automated, therefore, who can escape the technological Trap. Soon people in the third world nations would require computers in their homes to do what peviously they had to take a trip in order to accomplish. Things like shopping, education and so on. However, the rate at which technological services are progressing does not match the advancement in computer leteracy of the vulnerable groups in Africa. Most rural schools are yet to get a really good glance at a modern Desk top Computer far less a Laptop or Notebook computer. They may have seen a computer on paper but not enough to distinguish the different common parts of the equipment in reality when one is physically present. The level and quality of Computer knowledge being imparted is sometimes half baked. The Lecturer calls the System Unit as a CPU (Central Processing Unit). Well the argument being advanced is that of simplifying the knowledge. If that is the case why not call the entire house a Toilet in order to describe what a house is. Africa needs to bridge up the Technology gap A.S.A.P. What can Africa do in order to ensure that everyone has equal access or opportunity to the ICT Gadgets?...///(send your comments)

Bright Mulenga