How Prevent Your Business From Killing You

While we pursue our dreams, let's not forget to protect our lives.

Pay attention to what you are going to read if you are a freelance business person and deal with diverse customers. You have your own work and all the customers are on your neck, this can run you down as a person. You have to know how to stay alive, enjoy your work and prosper. If you let your clients kill you with overwork, the moment you are gone they will find another person to do their jobs for them, be wise.

Recently one of Ghana’s number one statesmen died from heart attack and the doctors called it a beautiful name, cardiac arrest. I remember how I was shocked and sadden by the news and then I recalled how a friend of mine had pointed his fellow mechanic’s shop to me and told me the founder died from the pressure that the work generated.

I love these quotes

Choose a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life. – Confucius

It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it. – Lou Holtz

Do your work with your whole heart and you will succeed – there is so little competition. – Elbert Hubbard

All things are difficult before they are easy. – Thomas Fuller

The harder I work, the luckier I get – Samuel Goldwyn

Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don’t recognize them. – Ann Landers

The secret of getting ahead, is getting started. – Mark Twain

It is not in the stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves. – William Shakespeare

When we no longer can change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. – Viktor E. Frankl

There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there. – Indira Gandhi

Study the past, if you would divine the future. – Confucius

A career is wonderful, but you can’t curl up with it on a cold night. – Marilyn Monroe

Food, love, career and mothers, the four major guilt groups. – Cathy Guisewite

Believe you can and you are halfway there. – Theodore Roosevelt

Change your thoughts and you change your world. – Norman Vincent Peale

“I am a hustler, baby; I’ll sell water to a well!” - Jay-Z

Great quotes, got them from Dr. Marla Gottschalk. Thanks Doc!

What it means to be on your own

Been on your own can be difficult because nobody forces
you to do anything; it is very easy to lazy out the day.

I write this article in relation to the work you do; being on your own and managing your own business. The business might not be an enterprise but a freelance here and there job that you offer.

Most people have taken this path because they like the independence that that goes with it, or they can find job or they see themselves as misfits.

This is a path that has its rewards in the long term. Most at times you are not going to rise up immediately just because you have decided to do your own work. This implies that you shall be working in the backgrounds for a long time; it has its own peculiar difficulties.

What I have seen with successful people

Success Equation

I have noticed one thing lately, we are all the same but we differ in certain areas and when we work on this difference, it sets us apart making some great and some small.

When you see a successful person and maybe you don’t have that much success, you might be tempted to throw yours away and copy. This is what has resulted in less achievement because you may use your mediocre talent to work. Maybe you are not good at singing but you copy so you don’t do well. While your first class talent could be playing guitar his is singing, so he beats you every day. I have seen these first class performers do well in spite of their mistakes. It is more like finishing a race with a broken hand. It is better that you do what you are best at and prosper at it.

Prospering at what you do mean you have to do what you are best at and pay the prize for it through consistency and giving yourself time to succeed.

They give themselves time

One common thing I have realized is that successful people have spent lots of time before they arrived at their present level. This implies that if you will succeed, you need patience. Businesses grow like the way a human being grows physically. You can’t take the time of growth outside any venture. No matter how rich and handsome you are, you have to follow the natural order of growth.

The process of growth implies that, you are waiting for some organs to come and join to make you complete. While you wait, other components get ready and join and when you are all set, you have grown.

Constant repetition

Successful people do the same thing over and over. They do it for many years repeatedly. They are not jack of all trades; they stay at it all the time. It is like a permanent marriage to them. If you don’t stop doing what you are doing now, in time you will be rewarded.

Constant repetition grows your skills and makes you better.  It is like building a house, you don’t stop until you finish; you keep adding one block after block. What you don’t have today for your venture, tomorrow you will have. Don’t quit on that house.

Repetition is adding one block after block till your building is complete. If you stop along the line to do something else, it means you have quit on that house and you have wasted your time. Stay on that one thing and keep adding to it.

Thanks for reading. 

9 wisest moves you can make

What you do overrides how you look; this is Albert Einstein

One of the smartest things you can do in these present times is to practice man management and branding. I am seeing many talented and hardworking people scatter their works without any plan. They flow with their lives as it comes but that kind of attitude cannot bring any benefit. In nature, it is only when you harness the natural resources, putting them together in one place are you able to create something a benefit. For instance, when we construct a dam and direct water towards it we are able to get electricity out of it. 

Therefore, what I am presenting here is a way to manage yourself and your activities to yield the ultimate harvest.

Go public with that idea in 2014, no retreat no surrender!

I have had the opportunity of watching the young hip pop chaps in the music industry. Most of them are making it big and living well but that doesn’t mean they are the best ones out there! There are people who are not out who are far better than them. However, our hip pop chaps have hit on the right idea of going public with what they have got.

They first gather money and go to the studio and do their demo. Those who have money would do the master and go to see some of these DJs and give them some money along with the CDs and ask them to play the song for them. It is very hard to get a producer these days and it has always been like that. So this guys sing only one song and they make the DJs play it till it rings in the hearts of listeners. This become the tipping point for them because listeners would start requesting for the performances in programmes. They like festive periods like this impending Christmas.

A perfect ritual for your life; how to be fulfilled in life

I have put my dreams on hold for some years now and recently they have arisen to torment me. Their time is come to be borne and I have no choice but to birth them. Have you witnessed this situation when you have something that you can do now, but you feel it is quite tedious so you swept it under the carpet of your mind? Suddenly they wake up and won’t give you peace. Now these dreams that are awaken now have expiry dates and when they are about to die in your life, you will know no peace. It’s just like at some point in life you don’t care about marriage, then marriage becomes a concern; then you start thinking about children and you fight till you have one. We have psychological biological clock within us.

How to be Self-employed and not go hungry

Self-employment is a roller coaster, but you can succeed

This is the part two of my recent article what I learned from my father. My father trusted people he worked for and it didn’t favor him though it is not the case for most people. That story prompted me to write that article and this one to make it complete. Working for yourself is not for everybody; there are leaders and there are also followers. 

WHAT I LEARNED FROM MY FATHER; How to get a job that would not harm you (Part 1)

Bright Otoo

 When I was young I loved my father a lot. When he hugged you, you could feel the warmth. The memory I have of him is a very humble and quiet person. At the time when I was about 6 years he worked at the Accra Brewery. I understand he used to be popular with people there because he was the party person that am not; he knew how to dance and sing. The Difference between us is that I am an antisocial person (am changing) who loves privacy; he was more sanguine than me.

Can you see your back?

1

I am pretty good at drawing with a pencil. At some point in my drawing, I stand back and take a view. Looking from afar off is a bit different to being close to it. After dressing to go for a meeting, I usually look in the mirror because my eyes cannot see my face by itself. When I want to see my back during my hair cuts I use a mirror; I have so many blindsides!