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Define Yourself
Don’t give that power to someone else
The mother of a good friend once shared her entrepreneurial journey with me — starting with quitting her job with an oil refining company, to owning more real estate than I could count. According to her, she caught her big break by travelling overseas to buy used clothes, repackaging them and selling them off-the-shelf for insane margins in Nigeria. She had apparently stumbled upon this line of business after trying her hands on a gazillion things to make enough income to cater for herself and her two kids whom she raised singlehandedly. One of the businesses she tried her hands on early in her trading career was bagging water in little polythene bags and selling them to school children after school hours. One day while selling water by the roadside, she stumbled on an old acquaintance from her oil refining company days and that meeting proved pivotal in defining her resilience in business.
Shame on the Sidewalk
On that fateful day, the oil refining company she used to work for was having a corporately sponsored marathon along the route where she usually set up her wares. It had started as a good day — a jolly crowd of lazy marathoners are every cold water seller’s dream come true and her water was flying off the shelf until the old acquaintance spotted her. According to my friend’s…
