Taking Up Challenges And Doing Things Right

Ever wondered why our beans still need to be manually picked and separated from stones before we cook them? The answer is simple: we seldom take up challenges and do things right. All our creative thinking starts and stops with fixing our family issues. When it comes to big economic and technological issues, we simply wait for US, Germany and China to find the solution and export it to us. The only exception I know of is the poundo yam. And we could do it a lot better if we kept the thinking cap that lead to it.

IQ by Nations (eutimes.net)

Try imagining what it would be like if Henry Ford hadn't taken up the car challenge? Or if the Wright brothers hadn't dedicated their lives to figuring out how to fly? Or Thomas Edison had lived a more regular me and my family only kind of life? What if Bill Gates hadn't dropped out of Harvard to take up the PC challenge? What if Steve Jobs had retired at 40 and quit forcing himself to build the world's most innovative company? What if Dangote had gone full-time into politics or put all his money in some safe foreign account/investment instead of taking up the industrial challenge in Nigeria? 

Most importantly, what if you begin to take up the big challenges you complain about and set to do things right? We too can be creative. We can build original things (beyond the popular moi-moi) that people in other places in the world will be grateful to us for. We can solve our own problems -- technological and economic. We can make an automated process of bagging beans (like it's being done for rice) that will ensure that no stone or bean pod slips into the bagged beans.We can make the most of the abundant natural resources we have that are less common in the developed world and, hence, have no technology made abroad for us to import. We can begin to further the Solar electricity technology to harness the bountiful sunshine we get year round. We can begin to think for ourselves beyond politics, national and corporate, beyond immediate family needs and beyond being just a consumer. Celebrities in US start businesses, innovative businesses, with their money. Celebrities in Nigeria act like the peak of life is in buying cars, dubai wedding, expensive jewelry, and posing for pictures beside the foreign celebrities. What do they want the owners of the companies that produce those cars, private jets, 5-star hotels and jewelry to feel like? Like they are gods who make the dreams of the richest Nigerian celebrities come true. 

Everything starts and ends with the mind. If we've got a poor mind, we'll never have a better class of people regardless of their bank account. We will always remain poor, intellectually and materially, in the comity of nations. We will continually be seen, by some racist, as an evidence of human evolution. But worst of all, we will continually depend on US and China for everything from the clothes we wear to the companies to work for and to the security of our lives. Every diminutive talk about us in the foreign media will be validated by our own national actions.

If we don't take up challenges and do things right. If we don't start as individuals to take responsibilities for not just our lives but our community and the nation as a whole. All that the world will know about us are our brain dead politicians, childish celebrities and daredevil criminals.