so hard to my utter annoyance . How could this teenage girl attempt to teach me how to use what I bought with my own money ?
Needless to say , she had a greater laugh when it was all over . I could not believe that my decoder had the capability of doing everything that she said . Whenever I share this story at conferences or when I am training everyone laughs . The reality of things however sinks in when I remind them that as my daughter laughed at me , there are people in their offices who laugh at them too .
So , to stay relevant in the eyes of the people we lead we must be very teachable . Humility must become your greatest virtue because without humility you cannot be teachable . Reverse mentoring has to become a cultural thing but as a leader you must create the environment for this to thrive . Many in my generation are clueless and we are literally signing our own irrelevance forms daily if we do not put on the cloak of humility .
Recently my daughter came to me and was excited about another platform called Clubhouse . I had never heard of it but my children were going on and on about it and then I discovered that it was a very fast growing platform that was making waves . As usual , I came up with all the reasons why it could be the wrong place to be .
Now , she is a beauty and make-up artist whose vision is to transform lives through beauty . A few weeks after she told me about Clubhouse , she excitedly told me that some organization in Australia that she met at Clubhouse took an interest in her work and decided to sponsor what she was doing . The next thing I know was that one of the world ' s top beauty schools that also interacted with her on Clubhouse had given her a scholarship to take her knowledge to the next level in their school in Canada .
My first son is in an interracial relationship with an amazing young lady from India . So , my Nigerian son and my Indian daughter decided to have a YouTube channel which they call From Chennai to Lagos . They put so much effort into it and my traditional thinking was again pitched in favor of my fears and concerns . I heard them talking about algorithms and many other big words which I was clueless about . Before long their videos began to gain traction and they were featured on several media platforms around the world . This was crowned with the BBC doing a story on
Digital revolution is here and many old school leaders calling the shots today are clueless about what the future holds . If they can be teachable and if they can humble themselves to unlearn in order to relearn , there will indeed be hope for them , the industries they lead and Africa as a whole . Never underestimate the power of a company colonizing a nation . Lots of precedent abounds to this effect .
them . The rest as they say is history .
The natural inclination of human beings is to resist and reject what we do not understand . Even when reading we often read only what we believe . We don ' t believe what we read . Our revelation and understanding is pitched in favor of our preconceived mindsets .
The truth is that we will always interpret life based on our mindsets . The key to a life of continuous relevance therefore is to work on our mindsets . We need to have a mindset guided by the fact that all that we know is not all there is to be known . We need to come to terms with the fact that what we do not know is exponentially greater than what we know and so humility becomes our gateway to growth .
If we don ' t do this , we can see billion dollar opportunities and all our mindset will permit us to see will be our own fears , never the opportunities . For this reason , many stay small and for this many become irrelevant . I often get asked by people what I consider to be the greatest challenge that leaders face . I will not share any opinions but instead I will share some experiences . There is someone I worked with many years ago . He was a leader ' s leader and very visionary and articulate . He was the recipient of many corporate awards and seemed to be on the cutting edge of corporate development .
However , a new wave came for which he was not knowledgeable and just like that , he missed out on one of the biggest opportunities of his life and quietly fizzled out into the oblivion . Today he is content with living in the glories of his past and is quick to remind everyone who cares to listen about his past accomplishments . The stark reality of life is that if you do not position yourself to catch a new wave , you will be forced to keep recycling stories of all the old waves in your life .
Best-selling author , Walter Isaacson captures another fascinating story in the book titled Steve Jobs . Back in 1974 , Steve Jobs landed a job at one of the pioneers of computer gaming - Atari . It was here that he met and developed a friendship with a draftsman at Atari - Ron Wayne , a young man who had earlier started a company that built slot machines .
The company failed but it was from Wayne that Steve Jobs got the inspiration that it was indeed possible to start your own company ! Jobs was so captivated by this young man who had the guts to start his own company that he proposed to him that they go into business together . Jobs offered to come up with borrowed cash of about $ 50,000 to kickoff . Unfortunately , Wayne had already had a bad experience with his past failures and so was content with where he was working at Atari .
Eventually Wayne did join Steve Jobs and he played a pivotal role in getting Steve Wozniak to leave his job at Hewlett Packard to join him and Steve Jobs as the founders of the new company which was initially called Apple Computers . For his role in this task , he was given a 10 % stake of the company . On the 1st of April 1976 the initial Apple partnership agreement was drawn with both Steve ' s having 45 % and Ron Wayne having 10 %.
When the demands of being a company set in and Jobs was planning to borrow money , Wayne ' s past came back to haunt him and the fear of not being able to repay the loans paralyzed him and he opted out and sold his 10 % stake for $ 2,300 . According to Isaacson , at the time of writing the book , Wayne was living off social security checks and staying in a small home in Nevada . At the time of my
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