Looking back, being an outsider was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. I had to think creatively to gain the respect of those who I considered to be the insiders. To do this I had to look inside me. There was something inside me that could command the respect of the world outside me. This was the beginning of creativity fuelled by a great drive. This drive has helped me to defy a lot of odds in my life. It birthed the entrepreneur in me at a very young age. I have sold fire wood, sold mangoes at the side of the street, sold leather bags, sold old newspapers and bottles among other things. Today, I am grateful for these experiences. They shaped me and made me what I am today.

You have a choice if you identify with the outsider feeling. First you can decide to close up and deprive the world of the best of you. You can decide to silently feel sorry for yourself and wrap it up in pride. This pride expresses itself in you always pretending to be in control, not opening up to anyone, always wanting to prove a point and always living in suspicion. It is a deceptive state of living because you feel you are strong when in actual fact you are weak.

On the other hand you can choose a totally different path by looking to a future you can change and being grateful for the past that you cannot change. Look for an ember. Once you find that ember, if you fan it enough, the light will shine in the darkness and the darkness will not be able to comprehend it. This was the beginning of what has become my pattern. Living grateful.

I am grateful for the teacher who constantly failed me in English because I was not expressive enough. She forced me to write from my heart and not from my head.

I am grateful for not having the money like my friends had when I was small. It forced me to the drawing board to work out a grand design for my life with my maker. I am living and loving that life today.

I am grateful for my relationship that ended after 3 years. Through it I met the Queen who has been my wife for the last 21 years.

I am grateful for all those who rejected my early proposals when I first started out. It sent me to the drawing board and I had to learn how to write winning proposals.

I am grateful for the people I considered my friends who betrayed and hurt me many years ago. It has taught me that there is life after betrayal.

I am grateful for my earlier failures in life. They formed the foundation for my success today.

I am grateful for my losses. I became so poor that even the poor called me poor. It built the hunger for knowledge that I have and it also created in me a passion to help people.

Do you have people you need to thank? Please use this opportunity to thank them. Thank the haters, thank the skeptics. Thank the rejecters. Without them we will not be where we are today,

Have a very thankful weekend!

That one good reason becomes their motivating factor. It is what keeps them up at night and it is what helps them to develop what I call the No immunization – a total deadness to rejection.The no immunization is what enhances a person’s ability to be rejected. The first experience most of us will encounter in our journey is the experience of rejection. Abraham Lincoln lost so many elections before finally being accepted.One man that inspires me a lot is a man who bid for a GSM license in Nigeria and paid a non refundable amount of 20 million dollars. He lost the bid and lost the money. Now that is the place where many people derail. This amazing enigma did not. He waited patiently and a few years later another opportunity came up and he bid for it again and this time he got it.

The man is called Mike Adenuga and Forbes puts his net worth at 4.6 billion dollars. He is the owner of the second largest Telecommunications network in Nigeria and possibly the largest in the West African region as a whole.Those who avoid stepping out because they do not want to be rejected greatly reduce their chances of ever being accepted. At the age of 65 a man called Colonel Sanders received a social security cheque of 99 dollars. He was totally broke and it looked like at that age there was little he could do to change his situation. However he had a recipe for fried chicken that his friends all loved. He tried to sell this recipe to over a thousand restaurants and each one said no. Eventually he got the yes he had been looking for and Kentucky fried Chicken popularly known as KFC was born. When he was 75 he sold his fried chicken company and made a whooping 15 million dollars.

Have you been rejected before? Did you allow your rejection to define you? Please get over yourself. If rejection can stop you then you do not deserve the success that you claim you desire. Every rejection is a stepping stone to acceptance. The experts of the day rejected the music of the Beetles saying that guitar music was on its way out. They eventually became the greatest band in history. Think of it this way. If everyone accepted your idea immediately then why have they not done it? If it is a truly great idea then surely not everyone will get it.

What do we say of a man who could not speak till he was four years old. He did not read until he was seven and his teacher described him as mentally slow, unsociable and adrift forever in his foolish dreams. He was expelled, refused admission into a polytechnic and even when he finally got into university, his PhD dissertation was turned down on the grounds of being irrelevant and fanciful. This same man, Albert Einstein went on to be the benchmark of genius and a Nobel Prize winner. In fact His great intellectual achievements and originality have made the word “Einstein” synonymous with genius.

I have suffered rejection on public scales. I have been humiliated to points where it looked like there was no return. However, I made a decision many years ago to be driven by a vision of a future greater than my past and grander than my present. I decided to develop myself to a place where my present will no longer be able to hold me down. I decided to make excellence my culture and diligence my habit. I decided to listen to ideas but to make my decisions. I decided to be open but to be focused. I decided to be gentle in spirit but forceful in pursuit of destiny. I decided to live my life to the full with a decision that I will not get to the end and wonder what could have been if I had stepped out in faith.

I discovered that no one else shared my fingerprints or my DNA. I was made to be different. I was made to be unique. I developed a confidence in my uniqueness and developed by No Immunization – a total deadness to rejection. The result is a happy, fulfilled and ever advancing life.If you have ever been rejected before, welcome to my world!

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak. When the time for something comes it no longer matters how we feel about it. That is the place where we just have to get up and do it. Some people did not feel like going to school when they should have gone and it affected the outcome of their lives. Some did not feel like working when they should have done so and it has affected the outcome of their lives.

What time is it in your life right now? What needs to be done in this season of your life? Once you locate what needs to be done, then you need to silence the voice of feeling. Learn to practice this with non life threatening things. Maybe you decided to jog in the morning. When you get up and you don’t feel like jogging, jog anyway. The ramifications are beyond the jogging experience. You are taming the voice of feelings.

I go to bed at 9:30pm and I get up at 2:30am every day. I have done this for years and now it is like clockwork. However it was not always like this. I often did not feel like getting up. However no matter how I felt I knew that my destiny was tied to how much I could conquer sleep and the feeling of wanting to stay in bed. I began to reprogram myself. I would lie on the bed reluctant to get up but I would run through the advantages of my getting up. Staying in bed might provide me a perfect present but getting up and reading and researching and doing what I need to do will guarantee me a better future than my present. These thoughts became pictures in my mind and became my motivation for getting up.

The activities that will lead to you having a future better than your present will never be the pleasant activities that come naturally to you to do. They will be demanding activities that you will naturally not feel like doing. This is one of the differentiating factors between super successful people and the others.

We live by design and not by default and that is why we will continue to be super successful pacesetters and winners. Those who wait for perfect conditions will never get anything done. Those who wait to feel before they act will never amount to much. There is a higher level of existence that supersedes the way we feel.

One place where more than ever I see the triumph of duty over feeling is when I watch movies about presidents – especially US presidents. The job of the presidential security is very simple – take a bullet for your boss even if you did not vote for him and even if you do not like him. Now that takes the taming of feelings to a whole new level.

A time comes in our lives when our advancement will be hinged on our ability to overcome our feelings and do the things that we do not feel like doing but which we ought to do. The converse is also true. We must get to that place where we do not do the things we feel like doing simply because it will not take us far. We will often have to work with and do business with people we don’t like. We will sometimes have to submit to bosses we don’t like. Let’s get over our negative feelings. If we allow ourselves to be driven by how we feel, progress will elude us. We must get to that place in our lives where we choose to become comfortable with some things that we are not comfortable with in order to secure our long term comfort in future. It’s called paying the price. The blunt truth is this: If you are only comfortable doing the things you have always been comfortable doing, your future will be no different from your past.

I am sure there are times that many people like me feel like getting out of the car and slapping some matatu drivers. However, we restrain ourselves because it takes more from us than it adds to us. Maybe it’s time we view more situations in this context. Then we will truly have our feelings properly tucked up where they belong. Then we will truly be in control of our lives.

wale@powertalks.biz twitter@waleakinyemi

Similarly I remember going for a particular meeting where I was not scheduled to speak. When the organizers heard I was in the audience, they made an announcement for me to come forward and asked me to speak for about fifteen minutes. I did. Next thing I know was that the president of the country apparently had heard me speak and then asked for me to come and see him and this led to a whole new chapter for me.

Most people will define these two incidents as manifestations of luck. Today my objective is to show that contrary to what many people believe, luck can be manufactured.

Donald who got the job had been reading about different companies and this particular company was one of them. He was doing it not because anyone asked him to do it but because he just had a passion to inform himself about what was happening in the companies, their problems, what people have said about them, possible solutions to their problems etc. by the time he got to the interview, he already knew so much about the company. In my case by the time I got to the place where I was invited to speak, I had been reading at least 4 books and 4 magazines every month. I had been developing myself and speaking for 16 years.

In these two cases we see that luck was a public celebration of sacrifices in obscurity. The problem is that many people have great dreams but never get lucky simply because they have not built capacity for their dream. They have not developed what I call their luck quotient. When David Rudisha wins gold medals over and over again, is he lucky? He prepared for it. Many people do not think they can ever be lucky and so they do not prepare for their day of luck. Your day of luck is nothing more than your day of manifestation – the day when all your preparation in obscurity meets opportunities.

Now let us twist this argument a little. If I had not prepared myself over a 16 year period first I would not have been called upon to address the audience at that meeting and even If I was then I would have made a complete fool of myself and I would never have been able to get the presidents attention.

That was ten years ago. Have I been luckier since then? Of course. Because I keep dreaming of my day of luck and I keep giving thanks for my lucky life and I prepare for it very rigorously. The day of opportunity is not the day of preparation. If you are not ready for the opportunity then it will mean nothing to you when it comes. In fact you may not even see it.

King David had already established himself as a great musician in obscurity. The day the king had a bout of insomnia and could not sleep and needed a musician, David got lucky. His preparation in obscurity was about to be celebrated in public. Preparation that does not task you seldom leads to a place of great luck. If your task level is the same with everyone around you then you won’t get luckier than them. You cannot rise above the national average level of luck if you do not task yourself beyond the average level of personal exertion.

I belong to a certain class of people who believe in luck. We do not believe in a luck that happens in isolation. We believe in luck that is a reward for faith, vision, hard work and consistency. We have seen that even when we were in school, somehow we appeared to be lucky in the subjects that we really prepared diligently for. As we grew older we discovered that our luck continued when we found our passion and refined our passion by diligent and laborious research and execution. Our luck was not an accident. It was a planned event – the end of a process of faith and patience. We have come to that place in our lives where we know how to manufacture luck in any area of our existence. Even when things do not go our way, we look for the advantage within the disadvantage, the fortune within the misfortune and we end up being lucky again. Somehow we always seem to be victims of serendipity.

I want to invite you to join this class of existence. Luck is not far away from you. If you can see it, and prepare yourself diligently for it, you day of luck is bound to show up.

DO have an extremely luck weekend.

wale@powertalks.biz twitter@waleakinyemi