Fola Daniel Adelesi: Working for Posterity

From time to time I keep thinking about how we all are working. I marvel at how many of us are doing anything for posterity and not just for ourselves. I know some people will only say ‘all I can do is my best and if God wants me to have abundance that posterity can benefit from, then I’ll have it.’

That statement often sounds like the story of a young man in the book titled ‘Success through Positive Mental Attitude‘ by Napoleon Hill. The young man believed that it was the will of God for his family to be poor. He probably saw other families that were rich and wondered why they were not rich. I guess he thought about it for so long and the only answer he came up with is that God must have wanted it that way.

One day, he voiced that thought in front of his mother and his mother shut him down. Then she said, ‘it’s not God’s will for us to be poor. It is your father that has never desired to be rich.’ Armed with that statement, the boy went all out and eventually became very wealthy.

I had to start on that note because when you start talking about working for posterity, people will naturally talk to you about how hard things are and the economic situation of their country. They eventually leave their responsibilities in the hands of a God that has already given us the chance to make the most of our destiny.

Maybe like me, your parents may not have had it all, but they still did their best. That often propels me to think a lot about what my own children will go through and the kind of life they will have.

Let me be a little tough and say that the way some of us are living right now, we are already consuming the future of our children. You buy that extra car or the latest car that you don’t need yet to impress people at the expense of your children’s future. You could have invested it in a business that your children can take over when they come of age. There are employees whose cars can at least build a nice bungalow and start a good business. But they ate still driving that bungalow and business around on four wheels while they are still paying rent to someone else.

A few others don’t seem to live large but they are out of the country at every opportunity in the name of a vacation. In fact, someone ought to be vacating some things from your brain right now.

It’s very important that we deny ourselves and also taken some vital decisions not just for ourselves today but for our children. There are risks we must take for them and there are denials we have to go through for their sake just to have a better future. If we don’t do these things we will end up have a posterity that keeps cursing.

That also reminds of the story of a man who went to his child’s school on invitation from the school management. The child had failed woefully and there were other kids given awards. As man and his child were leaving the school hall, the father asked ‘are those ones not someone’s children? See how they collected prizes. Why can’t you be like them?’ The child waited till the got to the parking lot and answered, ‘father, are those ones too not someone’s parents? Why can you be like them?’

Let’s not live for today alone or eat up the prosperous future of our kids with our own through our lifestyles today. Live and also work for posterity.

Photo Credit: Dreamstime | Michael Zhang