BLOOM AND GROW

Every day, we receive updates on the number of new cases and deaths due to the Covid-19 disease. However, I want us to remember that those numbers are real people with families, hobbies, and places they once loved. Chimamanda Adiche once pointed to the fact that we must let numbers co-exist with human stories. My advice for managing during these times:  1. Blind optimism is probably bullshit at the moment. Rather, confront the facts but never lose hope. I’d say, find the best way to live at the moment and hope for the best. With the stay at home order, our living systems have been disrupted and giving up hope seems likely for most people. However, I urge you to find that activity that brings you joy and engage in it while the lockdown lasts. 2. Remember to play after every storm. I believe that this should be a mantra for how we live our lives. The quote is from a young boy (Mattie Stepanek) who died from complications due to muscle dystrophy. We must all be reminded ...

Hey guys,  Just to highlight two stories about not giving up.  Cheryl Strayed, in 1994,  decided to hike for 1,100 miles across the Pacific North West Trail in the United States. It’s about 80 miles from Lagos to Ibadan and that means that Cheryl trekked from Lagos to Ibadan more than 10 times. In those 3 or so months trekking in the wild, she came face to face with wild animals and had to survive life-threatening weather conditions. She was not in the best shape to embark on such a journey but she decided to embark on it anyway. She didn’t stop when her boots gave way;  when she had run out of drinking water and money or after so many dangerous encounters.   In the end, she wrote a book called Wild to narrate what she had experienced, and that same story became the thing that launched her career as a writer. Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found became a New-York Times bestseller and was later adapted for screenplay.   The second story is fiction a...

Folake Odediran: Chair, Sanofi Nigeria, Ghana. Image: Twitter I attended the YP Lagos group mentoring event in 2019 but if not for the book I am currently reading (Anatomy of the Spirit by Caroline Myss) which touches on the subject of closing unfinished business amongst other things, this blog post would not have happened. I learned from Caroline that a lot of us are depleted of our energies because we have a lot of tasks we have mentally committed to, but we keep procrastinating.   I wanted to write this blog post immediately after the event but here we are 10 months later. Better late than never. I was one of the six people mentored by Ms. Folake Odediran, The country chair for Sanofi, Nigeria and Ghana at the event and these are the things I learned. You learn how to cut down trees by cutting them down. That is, you learn by doing. Time is not your problem. Your problem is what you do with time. Have a good profile on Linkedin. In life, what you want will ...