Mind Boggling
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta
Wait a minute. Who am I kidding? Could it really be that simple? Sit down, think deep, feel the passion rise, act on it and you are rich!! It sounded silly to say the least. I could not believe that I actually thought that I could live my life being indifferent towards money. How? Money makes the world go round. Not passion!
To try to convince myself that I was on the right path, I decided to make an assessment of the lives of people I knew who had made passionate decisions in their lives to achieve success.
My dad was the first person to come to my mind. What I know about him is that he was a golf caddy. He used to carry golf clubs for the white people when golf was an exclusively white man’s sport. Eventually he learned how to play and became one of Kenya’s champion amateur golfers. He was not highly educated. He was a shop attendant and a court clerk at some point in his life before he set up his own company and made more than enough money to educate all six of his children abroad and still have enough left over. He has been a great inspiration to me but also a great challenge. If he could make of himself the person that he became starting from nothing, it would be a disgrace for me, his child, not to excel in whatever I do having been given such a long head start and with his blood flowing in my veins.
I never got the chance to ask him how he did it but I do know that he was passionate about success and would not settle for anything less than the best that he could be. He despised weakness in people and did not allow himself to show it at all. Before he died he made it very clear to his children that the only thing they were ever going to get from him was a first class education. The rest was up to us. Hence my struggles. He was also a very kind and generous person and enjoyed a good laugh and a game of cards with his family. He was a teetotaler and was always home early.
It is obvious that he never let money make any decisions in his life otherwise he would have remained in rags. There had to be something propelling him to strive so hard. Something that gave him the determination not just to make it in life but to excel. Going by my experience in life, to rise from the depth he started at to the height he attained requires you to be experiencing an extremely strong feeling. A feeling that would overwhelm an ordinary person like me.
I remember that he always wore a serious face and as a child, I always wondered what it was that he was thinking about so seriously. He must have been a very deep thinker to be able to find enough passion inside him to fight off the discouraging fear and pride. Should I not follow his example and let passion rule my life?
Perhaps it was because he had nothing to lose that he was able to risk it all. But the point is that he succeeded. What guaranteed his success? There are those I know who have risked it all but failed. Is it because they were not passionate about their goal? Or is it because they took a misguided risk allowing money to determine their actions? I don’t know.
By Njeri Mucheru-Oyatta
Wait a minute. Who am I kidding? Could it really be that simple? Sit down, think deep, feel the passion rise, act on it and you are rich!! It sounded silly to say the least. I could not believe that I actually thought that I could live my life being indifferent towards money. How? Money makes the world go round. Not passion!
To try to convince myself that I was on the right path, I decided to make an assessment of the lives of people I knew who had made passionate decisions in their lives to achieve success.
My dad was the first person to come to my mind. What I know about him is that he was a golf caddy. He used to carry golf clubs for the white people when golf was an exclusively white man’s sport. Eventually he learned how to play and became one of Kenya’s champion amateur golfers. He was not highly educated. He was a shop attendant and a court clerk at some point in his life before he set up his own company and made more than enough money to educate all six of his children abroad and still have enough left over. He has been a great inspiration to me but also a great challenge. If he could make of himself the person that he became starting from nothing, it would be a disgrace for me, his child, not to excel in whatever I do having been given such a long head start and with his blood flowing in my veins.
I never got the chance to ask him how he did it but I do know that he was passionate about success and would not settle for anything less than the best that he could be. He despised weakness in people and did not allow himself to show it at all. Before he died he made it very clear to his children that the only thing they were ever going to get from him was a first class education. The rest was up to us. Hence my struggles. He was also a very kind and generous person and enjoyed a good laugh and a game of cards with his family. He was a teetotaler and was always home early.
It is obvious that he never let money make any decisions in his life otherwise he would have remained in rags. There had to be something propelling him to strive so hard. Something that gave him the determination not just to make it in life but to excel. Going by my experience in life, to rise from the depth he started at to the height he attained requires you to be experiencing an extremely strong feeling. A feeling that would overwhelm an ordinary person like me.
I remember that he always wore a serious face and as a child, I always wondered what it was that he was thinking about so seriously. He must have been a very deep thinker to be able to find enough passion inside him to fight off the discouraging fear and pride. Should I not follow his example and let passion rule my life?
Perhaps it was because he had nothing to lose that he was able to risk it all. But the point is that he succeeded. What guaranteed his success? There are those I know who have risked it all but failed. Is it because they were not passionate about their goal? Or is it because they took a misguided risk allowing money to determine their actions? I don’t know.
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