*
‘’When you discover your gift, you find your area of authority in life.’’ – Myles Munroe
Myles Munroe said, ‘’Wealth does not come from your job; it comes from your personal gifting”. As an entrepreneurship coach, I have come to realize that the easiest way to help unemployed youths is to help them find their area of gifting and passion. I have come to realize that the best of us is always within. Youths must take out time to diagnostically navigate within themselves to discover their area of gifting and core competencies. You can monetize that thing that you are gifted for and so passionate about. Instead of navigating around to look for jobs that most times don’t even exist, navigate within yourself and discover your gift and passion.
I have come to discover over the years that we will only shine in the area of our gifting. I dare say that salary is the bribe we are paid to forget our gifts and dreams! In order to live a fulfilled and impactful life, we need to work harder on our gift than our job. We need to discover our gift, develop it, and sell it. We can retire from our jobs, but we cannot retire from our gift. We can get fired from our job, but we cannot be fired from our gift! As long as you have a gift and hobby, you have something to sell. Your gift is your ‘natural’ business.
Our individual gift is an indicator of our purpose and until we discover and nurture it, we will continue to travel another man’s journey. The educational system has prepared us to get addicted to looking for casual jobs that we sometimes end up becoming casualties! Thus, the fate of a nation lies in the youths discovering themselves and nurturing their gifts. We must educate the youth to discover their latent gifts and potentials instead of wasting their precious time and ‘destiny’ looking for jobs that only exist in the figment of their imaginations. The job you are looking for is not out there; it is right within your gifting!
I normally tell graduates during some of my training sessions that they are not unemployed because they can’t find a job; they are unemployed because they have not started using their gifts. Unemployment has little or nothing to do with job vacancies; it is a function of whether we are putting our gifts to use or rendering them dormant. I have at several fora, reached out to people in government that we need to re-define the meaning of unemployment in order to solve the nagging menace. Unemployment is not the inability to find a job, but rather the inability to discover and use one’s gift productively and maximally. It is a gross waste of human resource and latent potentials when gifted and talented individuals spend a chunk of their life looking for jobs.
Salary is becoming increasingly unsustainable and undependable. The only income that is sustainable is the one you earn from putting your gifts to use and not the one from your job. Any life that is designed around salary makes the victim live in a vicious circle! Apart from the sober truth that the proceeds from salary is unsustainable, you could actually get fired from your job! Find your gift and you'll always have work to do. The key to personal success is the discovering of your personal gifting.
Education is not the solution to unemployment, the discovery of your gift is. Any education that does not teach us to discover, nurture and develop our gifting and uniqueness is a waste! We need to redesign our educational sector in such a way that it allows for the nurturing of individual gifts. Education cannot solve the problem of unemployment, entrepreneurship will. In fact, education without entrepreneurship training aggravates unemployment. When it comes to job creation, it is not the government’s responsibility, it is the entrepreneur’s. Government is only needed to create the conducive environment. It is entrepreneurs that generate jobs, not government.
As a mentor on some national and international entrepreneurship platforms, one of my core areas of expertise is in helping people evolve and metamorphose their gifts and hobbies into money-spinning ventures. I have designed a fantastic model that I now call the 5 P’s to creating your own job! It is the Passion-Purpose-People-Product-Profit model. This model helps people in discovering their passion, developing a purpose around it, finding people of like-minds to create value by designing a product and finally making sustainable profit out of it. In the course of helping people and organizations to implement this model, I have come to realize some mental blocks that are keeping people in poverty despite their urge to break away from the poverty lane! I have three categories of these mental blocks and I really want to implore the reader on the need to sincerely and diagnostically put yourself to where you belong!
The first mental block is ignorance! I have often said that there is no man that is truly poor; we are all rich in something. While the ‘rich’ are rich in ideas and self-awareness, the poor are rich in ignorance! Many are simply poor because they are ignorant of their special gifts, and how it is linked to their wealth and financial freedom. Many people continuously live miserably on their meagre salary just because they are ignorant of the goldmine within them. The easiest route to recovery is discovery! Inability to discover your gift and the problems you can solve through it is the simple reason why you are gallivanting from one job to the other. Discover and develop your gifts and the whole world will come looking for you!
The second mental block is the inability to evaluate one’s worth. When you realize how much you're worth, you’ll stop giving people discounts! Nobody will pay you more than you value yourself. I normally advocate for my mentees to always carry out what I call “WORTH-ANALYSIS”. You deserve to know the worth of your gift; this will seriously help you in the process of pricing the value you are adding to people. Many people are simply poor because they undervalue themselves!
The third mental block is actually the most elusive of the three. This third category of people are not ignorant neither are they oblivious of their worth but their ‘Big problem’ is that they give too much of themselves away for free! They have not come to realize the core principles of a sustainable life, which are the principles of ‘exchange’ and ‘trade-offs’. Many people are living in a manner that is unsustainable. When you give too much of yourself away for free, you deplete your ability to earn a sustainable income. The principle of wealth is simply exchanging ‘values’ for money. We are being paid simply because of the values we are adding to others. You deserve to be paid as long as you are adding values to others. Stop offering yourself for free, and except you are doing a volunteer work or humanitarian service, make sure you get paid whenever you add value to others! I repeat, make sure you get paid for adding value!
I have a bitter truth to spill out to people and the truth is: if you have earned salary for ten years and you are not looking forward to using your gift and experience to create job for others, then you are one of the reasons why other people are unemployed! Walt Disney’s love for sketching and drawing created one of the most vast entertainment company now known as the Walt Disney Company. KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) was born out of someone’s hobby of cooking! Presently, KFC has over 43,500 restaurants in more than 135 countries and territories in the world. The Walt Disney Company has over 195,000 employees operating in 45 countries in the world as a result of one man’s unique gift of storytelling that began with Walt himself. Imagine if Disney and Colonel Sanders (the man behind the KFC) never put their unique gift to use, many people in the world today will remain unemployed. Imagine the level of unemployment that would have ravaged the world if Sanders and Disney died as a salary earner or a pensioner!
I want to offer one of my greatest professional advice to government all over the world. If you really want to help youths, don’t give them job! Help them discover their gifts and talents. That is why talent hunt shows have solve more problems for the youths more than what the government is doing! In fact, the main reason for the explosive rise and geometric explosion of the entertainment industry all over the world is simply because it is the only industry that is investing so much in talent hunt shows. Until a nation becomes a hub for talent hunt, it will always under-develop its youths! Myles Munroe said, ‘’To know the right places for people, we must know their area of gifting”.
I want to reach out to everyone out there to make your gift and hobby your profession. Whether as a full-fledged passion or a retirement plan, monetizing your gift and hobby is the most sustainable way of living. Look inward and repackage what you love doing to make money. Making money from your gift and hobby is excitation, but making money from your job alone is exhaustion. Discover and monetize your gift!
I am reaching out to the youths out there to stop hanging their fate on government. Look inwards and discover your gifts and talents. You are full of possibilities; stop attaching your destiny to the uncertainties of job search and salary baits. Discover your gift and ‘unleash’ it for maximum impact. Unlock your inner creativity, unlock your passion, and fire up your gift.
#schoolenterprisechallenge#NnamsoEsu#GovernmentTechnicalCollege
