I cannot believe it has just been 1 year since I last wrote this. It feels like a decade has passed, I might have cheated time in a way… I cannot believe it has just been a year.
November 8, 2017 really feels like 1000 years ago.
Ok, let’s see.
So, many years ago I was born on the 8th day of November, hence; November 8 changed forever: it became the day I celebrate my birthday. And it also became a marker for me.
Every year, on November 8, I reflect on my life, my mission and the bigger, collective vision and ask myself honest questions around how it is going and where I am headed from here.
This is my checkpoint. I write one every year (since 2014)
The year had been largely a good one. A key learning for me was that you can start anything you want and get more things done as long as you are ready to start small. Start really small.
So, we have to start small and maybe that will be the key to moving those mountains I have been pushing for a few years now.
If you are working really hard on a really challenging mission like revolutionising the entertainment industry, inspiring and training a new generation of business people and technologists, working on providing education to the under served, working on bringing Nigerian businesses online or really big ones like trying to extend human life (extending it well beyond 120 years). It will probably be slow and steady.
My plan is simple…
People are setup to fail and live out mediocre lives by default. I have been called by God to change that. We cannot change it all overnight, one day, one person at a time and maybe we can get a chance.
How is it all going?
The greatest and best thing that happened last year was getting married.
Marriage changes you in a lot of ways, and if you marry for the right reasons (purposefully), marriage can amplify the things you do so much that you begin to wonder why you did not take the leap earlier.
My wife is a blessing.
I continued working on the projects: Wealthy Network, Business community, CloudPitcher and Gistcaster, but they have changed dramatically.
Let me explain.
Last year, around September, a friend reached out that he had a revelation about me, he saw me and that with me was a national assignment. Disclaimer: if God has not sent you to me, don’t even try it. I rarely entertain such messages, but this was a genuine message from a genuine friend and it fit into the puzzle I was figuring out at that time.
Boom. It made sense to me. While I have always worked hard and tried to help people as much as I can, the revelation helped us to set some scope and context of the assignment.
National Assignment.
The reality began to dawn on me over the course of the year, I needed to make adjustments. I needed to become more serious and deliberate.
Today, as I embark upon the next chapter of my life, I have done my best to enlarge my mindset and capacity. Anything is possible.
You do not send a boy on a national assignment, and so, for several months, this thing I heard on Game on Thrones many years ago started ringing in my head:
“…but I think you have the strength in you to do the things that must be done. Kill the boy, Jon Snow. Winter is almost upon us. Kill the boy and let the man be born.” – Maester Aemon to Jon (Game of Thrones, S05 E05)
Unless I muster my strength and look at the mountains in the face and begin to work, I will FAIL… and the sad part is that this failure will not be because I could not achieve ALL I wanted, rather; it would be because I refused to man up.
So, this new year… I am “man-ing” up.
You do not entrust a national assignment to a boy. Only a man can execute this things.
The transition for me is that I have to reach out to more people and prioritize people over projects for now. I have written extensively on this blog about people, projects and profits.
I need more people in my life – millions of people.
Together, we can embark on projects… then we can share the profit. Everybody wins.
That is why I could no longer work on Gistcaster, I had to let go finally and forget about it. Gistcaster is finally dead; I do not have the will to develop personal projects for now. It is community building for me right now.
CloudPitcher pays the bills through IT and business consultancy projects we execute, but the real attention has to be on building the community and running the National Assignment.
The community will get renamed again, Wealthy Network will not work for what we want, so we are going to rename it very soon.
This year birthed a lot of good things for us: Mighty BoostCamp, Super Achievement Seminar, FBB Workshop, Marketing and Sales Workshop, and the breakout hit: Your Daily Starter did not even exist last year when I wrote my checkpoint, yet they will now serve as the backbone of our outreach.
Sometimes, things will not work the way you want them to; but you have to keep playing along. Most times, it still turns out fine.
Looking ahead
I want to finish 2018 with a community that is 100, 000 members strong, so that by the time I am writing the next checkpoint (2019), we should be at 1 Million people strong.
Time is going, we need to generate better results now.
There will be a lot of outreach in my new year that begins today. We are planning to take a business, leadership and innovation programme across higher institutions in Nigeria. Create a teenager focused online-offline platform and do things like Business Builders Hangout and Build Hackathons across Nigerians cities.
We are also going to really make noise around IIS Global (that is what I re-branded my digital skills and tech startup training platform into)
That is how we can reach out to more people.
We will do all that and still continue to build our small portfolio of businesses. I am not in the speaking business and we usually fund our outreaches directly with our own money… so, I have to keep working hard to fund the assignment. Yes, we are open and happy to receive any form of sponsorship, assistance and investments.
Its a national assignment, but you have to start small, you have to start in a very simple manner. In fact, you cannot design and create a complex system that works. You MUST start simple and allow complexities to develop over time.
So, 2018 was amazing and now, we have more experience to do a better job going forward.
I am extremely grateful to God for my year, HE took me much further than I thought possible within 12 months. Life clarity increased and now, I can express our statement of purpose this way:
A call to shape Society, influence national economies and BUILD formidable institutions that will take Africa to the next level.
I just remain cool, calm and pressing forward with greater determination.
My super power might be that I mean things I say and never never give up!
I am Ade – kankun – mola – nrewaju, son of Olanrewaju Morebise
Happy Birthday to me! The Inveterate Schemer!
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