A COOL GUY- PART THREE

 Part of Chapter two

Chijioke is a cool guy to be emulated. He is a University graduate, from an average family whose parents sacrificed a lot of comfort to see him through school. He graduated from the university as an Architect and served the nation as a Youth corper in Minna state, Nigeria. During his stay in Minna, he was assigned to teach in a secondary school but he did more than that. He attached himself to the school club and used the opportunity to train the students in character development and conflict resolution skills. He so brought himself down and close to the students that they saw him as their parley and confidant. A case in point is the counseling he gave a boy who was always aggressive and quarrelsome that he began to mellow down and control his impulses. He broke cliques and mended fences among the students. Needless to say, the school missed Chijioke when he finished his service year. The principal wished he could, at least, occasionally visit the school to help give direction to the young lads who were engulfed in their internal and external teen age turmoil.

On getting back to his family base in Benin, Chijioke sought for a job like other teeming youths but could not find any. He then went into a nearby computer school to brush up his computer skills on blogging and internet marketing. He had bought a good fairly used computer with the savings he made from his youth corps days. Needless to say, he excelled in internet marketing and blogging and today he is a trainer in that line of business.

Chijioke survived the harsh economic climate because he was focused and disciplined. He wasn’t a genius in the strict academic sense of it. But he knew how to identify a need and go ahead to provide a solution. That is a fundamental requisite in being an entrepreneur or surviving in any climate, smooth or rough. Anyone who can read between the lines, identify a vacuum and actually have the courage to fill the gap would not be in need of a job. This is because there will always be vacuums, unfulfilled holes in the spectrum of social needs and services in any given society.

You can be like Chijioke, who is a victim of the same adverse social circumstances and yet made himself a hot cake anywhere he had the priviledge to serve. While molding yourself and plans, your mind set must insist that in all chains of life endeavours, there are vacuums waiting to be filled by someone. In the Agricultural sector, transportation is still a major challenge that someone has to face squarely; packaging to preserve is a major challenge needing someone to work on, and our fast paced world demands faster cooking modes of using ready to use bean flours, crayfish and so on. The transportation ports have food vendors but I am yet to see tea and coffee makers to tend to the breakfast needs of early travelers; there are food vendors and hawkers around but some very busy offices like banks still need those who will bring the foods to their door step at relatively cheaper prices than what the eateries offer. And so on. And it will be helpful to use the team advantage.

Chapter three

The Team Advantage

A team is a collection of like minds that have a common goal to pursue. Jude in the previous chapter join a group of young guys like him who want to make it at all costs. They are there for one another in a positive way and they know that Together Each Achieves More.

 Cool guys know the benefits of synergy.  Synergy dictates that the resultant effect of two or three persons is greater in multiple fold, than whatever individual efforts can ever hope to achieve because talents and strengths are different and unique.

 I will not forget in a hurry a wedding I attended a few months back that the venue was arranged by a team of youths. The hall was decorated with a mixture of natural lily flowers interspersed with some rose petals. The ceiling had sprayed paintings of couple in love being enveloped by a cloud on which hangs a dove signifying peace and the Spirit of God. The tables were round in colour, covered with silk covers of gold, cream and violet covers, almost too beautifully to eat on and with a bouquet of flowers in a silver pot on the center of it. The music was cool and soul warming in a way that the guest could not but be moved to be in love; and the middle ail had a sequence of flower decorated archway made exclusively for the couple to come through.  Everyone wanted to know who created that heaven on earth and the team proudly shred their complimentary cards. On interrogation, they said that they aare a group of friends who studied different courses but had no paid job. They decided to bring their talents and whatever else they could to the table; the artist among them drew the beauty in the ceiling and arrabged the flowers, the music lover among them planned the music, the Engineer in their midst arranged the stairway and the stage for the couple to look like a king’s throne and the electrical guy and the artist arranged the lighting in a way that exuded beuty and warmth. No one wanted to leave the scene that day. And it couldn’t have been produced so perfectly by one person. Needless to say that the team had no need of being employed by anyone. They are in money and they are good!

 Apart from teaming up to create jobs, teams can also be formed to form a pressure group that will generate a louder voice. As you get busy with survival in a positive way, you must still be focused on the strategy of being an agent of positive change in the polity and you won’t do it alone. Just like Jude in the previous chapter did, you take cognizance of the law of synergy: form or join a youth club that preaches values, advocacy and advancement. You don’t want to belong to a backward thinking, destructive cult that the likes of Daryl in the previous chapter belonged to; their horizon is a dead end. Take a decision not to be compromised by any politician or avaricious leader who wants to use your clout to douse any challenge or confrontation because once you are compromised, you lose the moral right and power to preach equity and justice. Learn how to build relationships and a team with the tools outlined under Emotional Intelligence skills in chapter twelve and with the use of the social media, be determined to be heard. Sustained pressure from the youths is a veritable tool for positive change anywhere in the world.

We talked about three sets of youth in the previous chapter, but interspersed in these three categories of youths are many who have perverted thoughts on critical moral issues such as the right or wrong latitude about sex and sexuality issues and the institution of marriage and family.  Institutions like marriage which used to endure hard times by virtue of its sacredness now hang loosely on human feelings and unbridled freedom. Leadership of the home has over the centuries, been interpreted to mean subjugation of the ‘weaker’ sex, a condition that is now being challenged by women as they get educated and become more self confident. So marriage, for many, now evokes fear for both male and female youths. Security of the family and extended family roots are fast crumbling as globalization and individualism occasioned by ‘civilisation’ eat deep into our sense of fraternity, closeness and the gift of touch.

But families are our natural teams given to man to enrich our lives and we need the team to live wholesomely. We need our roots! And to discard this treasure is to create room for loneliness and sadness into one’s life. Families and extended family ties come in handy in every stage of one’s existence. Undoubtedly, we now disperse ourselves to different locations in search of greener pastures and other personal concerns and some old traditional mode of life are really incompatible with our lives in progression. And so, many people shut themselves off from their ties, only allow a few neighbors and church members around them and think that social amenities like club belongingness is enough to see them through life. Of course, many have managed that way but their lives could have been richer had they maintained their links with home.

Life should be flexible like a spring and a spring that cuts itself from its root or base can never have the latitude, the luxury of swinging back and forth and the richness of fluidity which beatifies an elastic spring. The spring cut from its source is but a piece of metal fixated to wherever it dumps itself and withers from there- a poor comparable life indeed.

When Jude lost his savings to gambling, he almost lost his mind because the peers who lured him into the dicey game all abandoned. Yes, his Youth Arise community sympathized with him but they couldn’t replace his money to erase the shame that was making him hide from his parents. But trust good parents: they noticed something was wrong even before his inability to resume school and probed for answers. They reprimanded him for such dangerous adventure and them encouraged him to put it behind him and forge ahead. They couldn’t replace the money but they gave him a soft landing by housing and feeding him and his mother actually threw herself into helping to sell his artworks. After one year of absence from school he continued his schooling and handwork with of course more experience about life and peer group.

 Some want to argue that increased scarce resources weaken the bond and the care that we render to extended family members, but that is an erroneous view. Why? Our ancestors were mostly poor and yet, saw it as selfish to eat the little they had alone. Our forebears knew that the joy is in the sharing, not in what is shared and life is never as rich as when history, delicacies and experiences are shared. Giving and caring to all persons within one’s circle of influence were seen more as responsibilities than favours and so carried more weight then, than in this generation. And parents invested more time and resources in making sure that their offspring were in constant touch with their roots and regularly intermingled with cousins and all relatives. I remember that my brother and I were sent home to our state by my father for secondary education in the seventies, despite the fact that we passed the entrance exams to very good schools here in Lagos where we live. Thereafter, my brother left for the US in 1980 but was still very much conversant with the happenings at home even more than most of his contemporaries still living in the country. How many of our youths do care to serve at home and keep in touch with extended family members as a matter of necessity?

The modern media like telephones and Skype help to keep us connected but only to an extent: they can but only connect our voices and pictures- they do not have blood in them to exhibit the warmth that the human person needs nor do they have the sensitivity to know what our gestures really mean.

Truth be told: the parents of yesteryears invested much more time and personal resources in grooming their children and preserving the family institution despite their scarce material resources. Most young families with little children then, ‘married ‘their ambition to excel in their careers with the need to create qualitative time for their little kids and so mutually agreed that the mother take up a lighter job that will create time for the nurturance of their children especially in the critical pre-pubertal formative years while the man struggles to win the greater chunk of the bread. But both parents must be involved in home building and parenting.  With the continuous feeling of nostalgia, I remember how my father would always create time to tell us folk stories and sing us folk songs that are embedded in teachings on life, values and culture whenever there was power outage. He was able to teach us with that, that every unpleasant situation can be turned into a pleasurable and a useful one. He was a civil servant who rose through the ranks to a middle level officer, but he always planned ahead for our annual vacation to the village to make sure that we kept in touch and were at home with our roots. He would kill a goat to share to all the kindred members and my mum would buy a bag of rice along with some condiments to share to her ‘mates’ in the kindred. They, in turn, gave her some farm produce like cocoyam, locust beans and palm oil to go back to base with. And on getting to Lagos after the vacation, friends and neighbours who did not travel for the Christmas got some share in the gifts we came back with. The quantities were not that important, getting a bite of the cake was what mattered.  Now, envy, suspicion and rivalry rule more than tolerance and sharing. And our Nollywood movies are not helping matters with their content which mostly project negativity, witchcraft, and wickedness as if our people at home have no goodness in them.

 Everyone is crying out in our country, as in many parts of the world, at the decadence in moral values, the depth of amenities and cultural change with regards to values and perceptions on major life issues. The cry is almost deafening yet the life of individuals and the craze for wealth continues to draw people- particularly youths- from home, family values and fraternal bonds. The societal stratification give the down trodden the false impression that life is unfair to them even where they have greater time to savour family bond and qualitative relationships. Those who have real homes- where you feel safe even in the dark- bemoan their condition and envy those with glass ceiling in their houses, little knowing that those glistering houses are not as warm (figuratively speaking) as their own homes.

A cool guy can exhibit leadership skills by making conscious effort to keep the bond with cousins and kindred members alive. He can dash down to the village or some uncle’s home for the weekend just to be with his cousins. He can visit an aged or sick relation and spend a couple of days just to give a helping hand. Such gestures are in themselves, investments that can come in handy when the lad needs some help. Fraternity is part of our lives’ treasure. Never let the things you want make you forget the things you have. Yes, material comfort is necessary for good living and everyone should work hard and smartly to improve their life status but that comfort can taste sour if there is no time for human warmth and heart-to-heart connection among the members of that household. The external glimmer of properties and the pageantry of high social life serve well to mask the loneliness of being at the top and the depravity of the warmth of down to earth relationships.