BEFORE YOU GIVE UP

“Have a champion’s mindset. Put everything you have into it; any less and you will fail. Bounce back from knocks”.

Travis Kalanick (Founder Uber)

I love traveling, in fact I think it’s high time I added traveling to my long list of hobbies. My love for visiting new places, meeting new people, experiencing new ways of life in other people’s culture is unprecedented.

Just as I was reminiscing over one of my trips to the south east of Nigeria, I tried to link some of the experiences on the roads together to come up with something I believe we can all learn from as it relates to life challenges. 

While traveling from one place to another, we often need to buy stuffs on the road e.g. Bread, Bottle water, soft drinks amongst other things. Those guys selling those things honestly seriously inspires me. 

Now let’s take a life scenario for instance.
These guys who I like to call the road side entrepreneurs sell their products on the portion of the road where there are speed breakers or the portion of the road that are bad.

On several occasion, I have seen these guys chase a cars “HOTLY”. Note I said “HOTLY” because they run tirelessly after a car moving at a speed of 40km/h or more at times. One day, while I was traveling, our bus parked at one of these points as passengers were taking their time to buy things they liked. Where I was quietly sited beside the car window, I observed the ways these road side entrepreneur were selling their stuffs. 

I recollect specifically a young man who will most likely be in his mid-twenties selling bread. He packed the breads in his hands in their usual style. As the buses go one after the other, this young man will run after the buses trying to sell his bread. Some people are fond of doing window shopping on the high way. So this guy will run after the buses thinking people will like to buy the bread he sells. But to my surprise, people will not buy after like a twenty to thirty meters race. Obviously this guy had just successfully wasted the energy he spent chasing the bus in vain. 

For like thirty minutes thereabout that we spent at that spot, this scenario played itself out over and over again. I, however observed one thing about the bread seller. Irrespective of the fact that he has tirelessly tried to sell the bread in vain, he still enthusiastically and consistently continued to chase the new buses passing the high way. Sometimes he made sales and at other times no sales. Whenever there is a failed attempt at making sales, the pain he feels is always written all over him, but those expression don’t last two minutes because he understands that other potential customers are always around the corner. Now let’s relate this experience to our personal life’s, irrespective of our fields. 

How many times have you failed at doing something? 

Do you experience as many failures as the road side entrepreneur per day?

So you want to give up?

So you can see you are even far weaker than that guy you look down on as a road side hawker!

If the road side entrepreneur who often experience failure many times per day while trying to sell his goods, will still not give up until he has sold all his goods, why should you and I consider giving up soon at anything we do!

Remember winners are those guys who don’t quit, but continue to chase enthusiastically till they have their dream come true. 

That bread seller on the high way you see every day, don’t be surprised if you hear me saying we all have a lot to learn from him when it comes to endurance and persistence.

Never give up so cheaply!

Brace up, try over and over and over again!

I am AGBOOLA BIYI MICHEAL a BLESSING to my GENERATION, and an ASSET to NIGERIA.