READ. WRITE. GROW.

Risk and reward Risk it all and one day you’ll drive a ford, That’s when people will call you Lord; But success comes at a price- a very steep price, It takes hard work, patience, dedication and sacrifice; To get there you may tell a lot of lies, You will hate and be hated, despise and be despised; You will be abandoned and you will suffer, But one day you will smile as you clean your zufa; Ridin’ in a black limo driven by your chauffer;   You have to sacrifice your time, Even put your life on the line; You will fail, but you gotta get up and try, Failure makes you feel dejected and you wanna cry, But you gotta sit up and push ‘em down Cos one day it’ll all turn to success; When everything you want you now possess, And your fears turn to pigs in the seas – possessed; Work hard Pay now, play later Burn now, shine later Grind now, wine later

Are you happy? This is a question everyone finds some level of difficulty in answering or at least some hesitation. Do you recall the last time or just anytime you felt really good about yourself? You should. I am going to give you something to try: if it works for you, keep doing it, and if it doesn’t then find something else to try. You must have done something the last time you felt good about yourself; a good deed, solved a problem, or even made someone else feel good about themselves- whatever it was that you did, it was an action that you took, and happiness was the reward. How about now? Why did you not keep up with what you did to keep your spirits even higher? You did something and felt happy and satisfied, but you stopped, you did not repeat the action. So today I would love you to recall an event or a scenario that made you proud of yourself. Try to repeat the actions you took, or the words you said, or something else you can immediately do to simulate the scenario...

We are at a time when ‘busyness’ is valued over productivity; people who work all day are thought of as highly productive, but that is not necessarily true. You must have heard of the phrase, “quality over quantity,” or some other variation of it. It is good to work hard but let your achievements complement your efforts. One can live up to a hundred years without really accomplishing much, while another would barely live past thirty and would have made a tremendous impact in the short time they have spent. Look at the life of Jesus as illustrated in the Bible: We know of his birth, then a brief cameo when he was around twelve years of age…and then he disappeared. What he was doing is not known to me, but I’ll take a wild guess and say he was working on making his future brighter- transforming himself to give quality content, or in our days’ terms, he was ‘grinding.’ Jesus’ ministry lasted three years, but the impact those few years had, and are still having can never be exh...

  You must have read or at least heard the story of Greedy Gehazi; he was the servant of the prophet Elisha who was obliged to healing a certain general, Na’aman. There are two lessons I would like us to take from this story.   First, consider how Na’aman had to travel such a long way to meet Elisha. Were there no other healers in his home town or on the way? But Elisha had a special set of skills and an impeccable reputation and ‘clients’ had to be referred to him. We all want to build businesses and get rich as fast as possible, so fast that we overlook the quality of our services. Know what you want to do and do it well- be the best in your field and referrals will overwhelm you. Secondly, greed will kill you, period. The hierarchy at that time would be Elisha– Gehazi -Na’aman: one because Na’aman was not in a territory to use his rank, he needed the services of the prophet, and although Gehazi was a servant, the servant of a prophet was always held in high regard...