Planning That Lifts Beyond Mediocrity

On The Path Of Winners

BY BAYO OGUNMUPE

Planning That Lifts Beyond Mediocrity

WITHOUT a plan in place, your life is mired in poverty. To escape, I urge three steps to financial freedom. One, ascertain your location at each period of your life. You cannot grow in success without first finding out your present position. You need to know where you are to plot and navigate to your expected destination. There are a few ways to access money. Generally, these are through inheritance, income from businesses and gains from salaried work.

  If you don't know where you are going, you won’t know when you get there. Determining your destination before commencing your journey is the best way to plan your life. Without focus you leave your life to chance.

  Two, you must choose your vehicle to travel your life in. The vehicle you choose determines how fast you get to your destination. However, investing in yourself via self-education, being updated and relevant is vital to your security and cash flow. Time is vital in matters of making wealth, because time waits for no one. Time is money and time wasted equals money wasted. Which is why you should acquire discipline in order to avoid being overtaken by Parkinson’s Law. This law has remained true in our lives from time immemorial. This law keeps us poor if not evaded. Parkinson’s Law states that: a man’s expenses will always rise to meet his income and make him stay the same station in life.

  What the law simply means is that no matter the extra income you earn, you will always increase your expenses to fit into your income; which makes it impossible for your gains to reflect on your net worth. Since God wants you to have different vehicles of wealth creation, you should use your strategies to create multiple streams of income in order to become rich.

  Then discover your primary and dominant stream of income. As you operate within your dominant source of income either as a paid employee or as a career business owner. Use your financial intelligence and investment mindset to develop other streams by diversifying yourself.

  You start with your main stream, ending up with at least three other vehicles of wealth creation such as advertising, consultancy, networking and franchising. Consolidate each stream and keep expanding and you become a force to be reckoned with in Nigeria. But mind your worldview, for success without a successor is tantamount to failure. For we now have many selfish believers who are prosperous without inheritors. ‘‘But thou shalt remember the Lord thy God: for it is He that giveth thee power to get wealth, that He may establish His covenant which He sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day,” Deut. 8:18.

  The primary reason for prospering his people is to empower them to establish His Kingdom. Enlightening the world on Jehovah’s kingdom is very expensive, and that is the primary reason why God prospers people. Then, after you are prosperous, what next? The next thing is posterity, leaving a legacy behind you for the succeeding generation of descendants. Your descendants will then fulfill the purpose for which God prospered you. God only prospers you for the purpose of building His Kingdom.

  To leave a befitting legacy is the reason why you should develop the posterity mindset. Posterity thinking isn’t natural to us.

  Our parents, teachers and leaders didn’t know it. They taught us to live for today. They could not give us what they don’t have, which is why we must make conscious effort to personally develop posterity mentality. God empowers people to become wealthy so that His Kingdom can be established. Be a posterity thinker in order to gain Jehovah’s blessing so as to propagate. God’s Kingdom since Jehovah is a generational God, He expects us also to be generational minded. ‘‘A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children. But the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous,” Proverbs 13:22. So let your legacy be at least two generations compliant. Two generations after you must enjoy what your existence established. Otherwise, you have not fulfilled the perfect plan of God through maximizing your opportunities.

  Our champion this week is Andrew Johnson, the 17^th President of the United States (1865-1869) who succeeded President Abraham Lincoln on his assassination in the closing months of the American civil war (1861-1865). His lenience toward the South during Reconstruction embittered the Republicans in Congress, leading to his political downfall. Johnson lacked formal education but his homespun lifestyles were assets, which built him a political base in Tennessee.

  Born in December 1808 in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S., he moved with his parents to Tennessee in 1826. Johnson organized a party that elected him first as alderman and then mayor of Greeneville. During his eight years in city administration, he found a natural home in the states’ rights Democratic Party of President Andrew Jackson. He emerged their raucous spokesman. He was elected member of the US House of Representatives for 10 years as their representative (1843-53). He then served as governor of Tennessee (1853-57).

  Elected U.S. senator in 1856, he adhered to the dominant Democratic views favouring lower tariffs and opposing anti-slavery agitation. In 1860, however, he broke with the Democratic Party after Lincoln’s election as president. He opposed Southern secession. When Tennessee seceded in June 1861, he refused to join them, remaining in his post and loyal to the union. In recognition of his loyalty to the States, Lincoln appointed him military governor of Tennessee in 1862 by then liberated by the Union army.

  To broaden the base of the Republican Party Lincoln nominated Johnson for vice president on his successful re-election ticket of 1864. Thrust unexpectedly into the presidency in April 1865, he was faced with reconstruction of the Confederate states. Congressional Republicans who favoured severe measures toward the defeated South were disappointed by Johnson’s programmes. Then, Congress voted articles of impeachment against the President. The move failed by one vote short of two-thirds majority. But Johnson’s usefulness as a leader was over and he was not nominated for re-election. However, in 1875, he was elected senator from Tennessee shortly before he died in July of the same year.