The Welfare of Your Computer

The welfare of your computer

 

A computer has no welfare regimen on its own except as wrought by its operator, and the ailments of these tools are as a result of how we manage them. So, blame not your system, but your handling of it, for whatever lapses it is outputting. The computer is not responsible for its own welfare.

Only Attitude and Work Rate Will Get You Favoured

Only attitude and work rate will get you favoured

 

You won’t gain any mileage from an intelligent person by scheming and pushing. Only the right attitude and sincere work rate will get you favoured, not one done with eye service because that is also scheming.

Your Parent Organisation and You

Your parent organisation and you

 

If your brand is stronger, your voice is louder and you are more visible than your parent organisation, you are not wise. They will soon gain from losing you.

How to Maximise your Potentials

What is Potential?

Dictionary Definitions:

Capacity to develop the capacity or ability for future development or achievement.– Microsoft® Encarta® Dictionary

Natural abilities or qualities that may possibly develop and make someone or something very successful or useful.– Longman Dictionary

The inherent capacity for coming into being.– WordWeb Dictionary

Personal Thoughts on Potential

Potentials are the gifts, the talents, the endowments, the riches, the resources as well as the blessings inherent in a human that are yet to be expressed in his/her actions, interactions and works. Once these find expression, they cease to be called potential and then become skills and abilities.– Babatunde Oladele

The fear of not 'starting rightly' is what keeps many a great man and woman from fulfilling their potential. It is what also robs us of ideas and solutions that could have made the world a better place for you and me. I will say, start; if you fail, start again and improve yourself (and your process) along the way. The tortoise makes no progress unless it juts out its head. After all, the Bible says, "the end of a thing is better than the beginning thereof." – Babatunde Oladele

Life is a marathon, but some live it as if it's a 100metre dash; that is why you see some people with so much potential in their youth looking so ordinary in midlife. They have burned out. – Babatunde Oladele

A potential is what you can become. – Babatunde Oladele

The Importance of Self Development

Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound. - James Allen.

The desire to become great and a celebrity is common to all human right from the time they become conscious of self. Dale Carnegie, in his best-selling classic, describes this as the “deepest urge in human nature.”

While the majority of humankind nurse this, usually unexpressed, craving to become larger than life and be revered by fellow men, only a few individuals really choose to advance beyond desiring to pay the price required to build a great life.

The price for greatness is a disciplined and sustained investment in oneself, otherwise called personal development. Jim Rohn, a renowned business philosopher and self-development guru, once quotes his former employer and mentor to have advised him thus: “if you want to be wealthy and happy... learn to work harder on yourself than on your job.” While this may sound absurd, it is good counsel. The general practice is that most people expend their time and energy the other way round; working more and often on the job - in order to earn so much - while devoting little or no attention to improving themselves.

As normal as this may look, it is a misnomer. While it is important to be dedicated to your work and put in a good shift above the average mark, it is equally essential not to neglect the regular cultivation of your mind. Every individual who has a sense of self should have a self-development programme he or she is observing to unleash his/her potential, sharpen latent skills and bring out the champion within.

Not all of us are destined for the stage. Therefore, drawing out the champion within you does not necessarily mean that you will become a maestro with millions of followers. Your own niche may be to a few dozens of people, it doesn’t make you lesser than someone with a global fan base. The important thing is to develop yourself such that you are both useful and relevant to your world.

A personal development programme is nothing complex or far-fetched. It can be as simple as following a schedule of conscious reading, listening, speaking, and/or writing, as well as putting to practice what you are learning in the process of those exercises. It is important you are aware about your objectives for embarking on these exercises so that you can be able to track the results. You should also have a schedule for what you do, rather than merely follow your whims by doing them when you feel like it.

To Your Success!

Utilising Communication Skills for Personal Development (Part 13)

Reading for Emotional Development

The first way to utilize reading for emotional development is in the building of a good self-esteem. The amount of information and depth of knowledge you have will directly influence both how you see yourself as well as how others regard you. A man who does not read will be bereft of knowledge. He will have nothing to say when people who are better informed are talking about a subject of discourse, and will have to settle for what others tell him. This does not help the ego in any way. So by cultivating a reading habit, you will not just be enhancing your intellect, but you will also be giving your self-esteem a boost as well.

Another way reading can be deployed for emotional development is in the formulation of personal polices and philosophies of life. The more you know, the better you become and the more you are able to put under check you erratic feelings and desires and coordinate them to make the most of yourself.

Utilising Communication Skills for Personal Development (Part 12)

Reading for Personal Development

Reading is perhaps the most influential of the communication skills in the development of the individual. Reading, like listening, is a receptive communication skill. It is done by consciously inputting information into one’s consciousness through the eyes and the brain. The more of it you do, the better, improved, enhanced, and versatile you will become.

There is no way we can talk about reading in isolation of books. Books are the main objects in a reading exercise, and a very important one too. Explaining the role of the book in attaining development of any kind, Dr. Alex Ekwueme, cited by Adesanoye (1995:2), says:

In as much as education is the backbone of… development, and the book is the principal element in the educational process, the book deserves a place of honour in our…(personal) priorities. The book is a passport to the world, an indispensable vehicle of science, a storehouse and conveyor of culture and information, and a vital ingredient for development. The importance of books in the development of man and in the fulfilment of his potential can never, therefore, be overstressed.

It is a popular saying that “readers are leaders”. Therefore, anyone who desires to build a life of prominence must cultivate the habit of reading. Someone, somewhere has documented in a book all you need to succeed in life or solve a particular problem. The onus, therefore, lies on you to seek the relevant publications that address your issues, read and apply their principles. To underscore this position, Rohn (2005b) says:

All of the books that we will ever need to make us as rich, as healthy, as happy, as powerful, as sophisticated and as successful as we want to be have already been written.

People from all walks of life, people with some of the most incredible life experiences, people that have gone from pennies to fortune and from failure to success have taken the time to write down their experience so that we can be inspired by it [sic], and instructed by it [sic], and so that we can amend our philosophy by it [sic]. Their contributions enable us to reset our sail based upon their experiences. They have handed us the gift of their insights so that we can arrange our plans, if need be, in order to avoid their errors. We can rearrange our lives based on their wise advice.

However, it is unfortunate that most people do not read except they are compelled to, usually for academic reasons. The reading culture, especially in this part of the world, is at the lowest ebb. People place more importance on other activities rather than reading. It is in this part of the world that we have many literate illiterates. These are people who can amply be described by the aphorism that says “he who does not read has no advantage over him who cannot read”. Illiteracy consists not only in the inability to read and write alone, rather, a person who can read and write but who do not put these skills to use is as illiterate as the one who cannot.

Commenting on the phenomenon of bad reading culture, Rohn (2005b) says:

The issue is not that books are too expensive! If a person concludes that the price of the book is too great, wait until he must pay the price for not buying it.  Wait until he receives the bill for continued and prolonged ignorance.

There is very little difference between someone who cannot read and someone who will not read.  The result of either is ignorance.  Those who are serious seekers of personal development must remove the self-imposed limitations they have placed on their reading skills and their reading habit.

Proffering a solution to reverse the trend of deficient reading culture among people across the world, Carson (1991:203) a world renowned neurosurgeon and author says:

The biggest reason most people have trouble reading is that they do not do enough of it- and they do not do it fast enough…

What is true of many things in life is definitely true of reading: the more you do it, the easier it gets. And the easier it gets, the more efficiently you can extract relevant data from the printed page – not just breadth of information but also depth.

With this background on the essence of reading, let us now go on to see how we can utilize this skill for different forms of personal development.