BY PAUL OKADE Jr
As a Nigerian with a strong entrepreneurial gift, I make it a point of interest to research or investigate if you will the lives of other Nigerian entrepreneurs who are making waves. Growing up in the United Kingdom as a child I never really felt at home, and deep down inside me I knew that my destiny was in Nigeria and that one day I will be a major player in the Nigerian business sector. After I left university I worked in countless companies and each experience was a disaster. I never really fitted in and I didn’t like being an employee either,
I wanted to be the guy who owns the company and who makes the decisions.
It’s a bit like renting a house or buying a house with a mortgage, I hated both scenarios because they’re pretty much the same thing. When you buy a house using a mortgage the house doesn’t actually belong to you, although the banks give you the sense that it does, and the day you’re no longer able to meet your monthly payments the bank will take the house from you. The mortgage industry is an illusion, and I should know because after all I am a qualified mortgage broker with over 10 years experience in the industry.
Entrepreneurs are driven by the desire to control their own destiny. They don’t want to be at the mercy of an employer or a bank. They want absolute control and freedom. When most people write articles about entrepreneurs they always seem to allude to them to be people whose sole desire is to build large companies and create jobs etc, and yet that isn’t really the main thing which makes us tick or our primary motivation, those are simply by products, as it were. A genuine entrepreneur is running from something, and that “something” is dependency. They don’t want to depend on anyone or on anything. They have an insatiable need to be free to do what they want when they want without having to answer to anybody.
Entrepreneurs are born, they’re not made. I know people who have MBA’s in entrepreneurship and yet they’re not entrepreneurs and never will be.
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