Stand Out

 First and foremost let me apologize to all for not posting anything here for so long. Did I hear you say it is more than the apologies. Yes, I know. I understand how it feels to come here expecting something and not find anything. It add up to a waste of time and sometimes money. I’ll make this one promise now, I’ll have at least three write-ups here every week (on scouts honour).

Now let’s get down to today. To think that between February 9 and now, this boy has been on the move. Well let me gist you. I took the position of the national youth reorientation coordinator for New Nigeria Club despite the fact that my chairman felt it will be too much for me to handle. It started on the 9th of February now it is going on non-stop.

On the 9th of February, I was in Olabisi Onabanjo University, speaking at a programme organized by NSSIE and partly sponsored by NNC and BusinessDay. I met Charles O’tudor there, he had me speak and boy! he was impressed as he spent some 10 minutes of his own time talking about me. New Nigeria Club was heard for the first time in OOU that day and till date they have not recovered. However everybody there seems to be waiting for the N10,000 feeder. You needed to have seen the reaction on their faces when I mentioned that it cost N30,000 to become a member of this presitigious club.

Then off to Abia state I went. This was an NNC thing in conjunction with FECA. We schedule Abia Sstate University for the 12th and so I took off with a colleague on the 11th of February. It was almost six in the evening and the only flight available to the eastern parts of the country was to PH courtesy Chachangi Airline. We took it and finally arrived in ABSU around 9.30am. We were hosted good and the next day we featured Gbenga Sesan who gave Abia Students serious food for thought. It was a success. It was so successful I nearly landed myself in a trap as there is the girl on my trail ever since. I left the same day otherwise I would have been her valentine cruise. Hmm… that will be a topic for another day.

Let me let you in on the “still to come” on our calender. We will be doing Delta State University and Warri town on the 29th of February and 1st of March respectively. After words we will be doing Babcock on the 14th of March. You can be a part of the move or you can support us with your prayers that the Gospel of a New Nigeria that we preach to youth will not fall on deaf ears. That they will embrace it and live with it. Aluta Continua.

God bless Nigeria

What is that cliché that gives you that greatly exaggerated publicity intended to excite public interest in YOU? No matter how wacked your set of skills, no matter how tasty you’ve made that feature-benefit proposition, you still have to market the “heaven on earth” out of your brand — to customers, colleagues, and your virtual network of associates.

For most branding campaigns, the first step is visibility, that usually means a full flight of TV and print ads designed to get billions of “impressions” of your brand in front of the consuming public. If you’re brand You, you’ve got the same need for visibility — but no budget to buy it.

So how do you market brand You?

There’s literally no limit to the ways you can go about enhancing your profile. Try what guys like me call moonlighting! Sign up for an extra project inside your organization, just to introduce yourself to new colleagues and showcase your skills or work on new ones. Or, if you can carve out the time, take on a freelance project that gets you in touch with a totally different group of people. If you can get them singing your praises, they’ll help spread the word about what a remarkable contributor you are.

If those ideas don’t appeal, then try the Educationist approach. Try teaching a class at a community college, in a small group in church, or in your own company. You get credit for being an expert, you increase your standing as a professional, and you increase the likelihood that people will come back to you with more requests and more opportunities to stand out from the crowd.

If you’re a better writer than you are a teacher, then try Authoritative writing. The kind of writing that automatically makes you an authority on the subject. Try contributing a column or an opinion piece to your local newspaper. And when I say local, I mean local. You don’t have to make the front page of the Tribune or Punch to make the grade. Community newspapers, professional newsletters, even inhouse company publications have white space they need to fill. Once you get started, you’ve got a track record and clips that you can use to snatch more chances.

And if you’re a better talker than you are teacher or writer, then take the Speaker platform and use it to your advantage. Try to get yourself on a panel discussion at a conference or sign up to make a presentation at a workshop. Visibility has a funny way of multiplying; the hardest part is getting started. But a couple of good panel presentations can earn you a few jumps in the direction of the big league.

The second important thing to remember about your personal visibility campaign is… [you’ll get the rest in my upcoming book o]

Some are born geniuses, some are not. Whether you were born a genius or not, we all can attain the qualification of we just learn to think as one.  I have put together some key point from the mindsets of geniuses including myself (hehehe) for you.

·         Look at problems in many different ways and find new perspective that no one else has taken (or no one else has publicized). Often reconstruct the problem to become a new one

·         Visualize: Formulate the problem in many different ways including using diagrams. Visualize solutions and quit relying on words and numbers only.

·         Produce: A distinctive characteristic of genius is productivity. Either you produce great works or bad ones…just produce. Reality is either way you’ll be great. Never be afraid to fail or produce mediocre in order to arrive at excellence.

·         Make combinations: Combine and recombine ideas, images and thoughts in different combinations no matter how incongruent or unusual.

·         Form relationships: Make connections between dissimilar subjects. Who would have thought paper would make very good mould when combined with adhesives after a process. It is called paper Mache.

·         Think in opposites. Truly if you hold opposites together then you suspend your thought (logic) your mind moves to a new level. Suspending logic may allow your mind to create a new form.

·         Think metaphorically. Metaphor is a sign of genius. It is believed that the individual who had the capacity to perceive resemblances between two separate areas of existence and link them together was a person of special gifts.

·         Prepare yourself for chance. Whenever we attempt to do something and fail, sometimes we end up with something else. That is just the principle of creative accident. Failure can be a productive process if we don’t focus on it as an unproductive result. If instead, we analyze the process, its components and how you can change them to arrive at other results. Don’t’ ask “why have I failed?” but rather ask “what have I done and what can I do better?”

As much as intelligence can be improved upon, we can become smarter day in – day out, then, though we may not be born geniuses we can be perceived as one…we can become one. Yes! You are a GENIUS.