Biodun Da-Silva: Find Your Ingenuity & Share it With the World

We all are created differently – with different skillsets, talent, passion and DNA. What that means is that you are unique and you posses qualities that are very unique to you.

When I was in Nigeria, there was a woman who supplied my family with moi-moi bi-weekly, sometimes I drove several kilometres to buy from her. Her moi-moi was so good that she also supplied eateries and few restaurants at the Lagos airport, and the business created more opportunities for her family.

One day, I asked her how she started the business of making moi-moi, especially for someone who used to work in a bank. She told me she got the recipe for making it through “inspiration”. She then went ahead to tell me how she got this inspiration, her struggles to scale the business and a whole lot more. My takeaway from the conversation was that every individual has a genius living inside of us. We posses the ability to think and come up with ideas that can propel us to success. What is lacking is the ability and the tenacity required to put those ideas to work.

Recently my hubby was having a conversation with his friend and they talked about the moi-moi woman. His friend was asking how to get the moi-moi shipped to him because he had tasted it and, like everybody else, liked it.

When you do things differently and uniquely, you are bound to produce results that will get people queuing up for your products or services. My husband’s friend wanted that particular moi-moi because he had tasted others and none compares to that which the woman makes. And that’s why he could still remember the taste years after.

Every manufactured product was once an idea in the manufacturer’s mind. What made the difference is the action taken to make dreams become reality. Ingenuity is what then keeps us going.

Our greatness lies in our ability to think creatively, put our ideas to work and find the tenacity to pursue them unrelentlessly. We are the product of our thoughts and actions. It is extremely easy to tell where you’d be in 5 years just by looking at how creative and innovative you are, your thought-process, your eagerness to learn, how you utilise your time and maximise your resources.

Our minds are very powerful; from there sprouts our ingenuity and creative geniuses. We must then put our mind and brain to good use if we want to be successful. To find your ingenuity, you must be willing to search yourself and locate your area of strength. Whatever you do more easily, uniquely and creatively than everyone else can be leveraged to your advantage. That may be the key that’ll unlock your success.

After that, nurture it by learning and practicing and then share it with the world. We kill our ingenuity by doing nothing with it and then complaining all day about lack of opportunities. If as an entrepreneur, I design a product but the final consumer cannot have access to it, then the product isn’t a success. If after writing this article, people don’t get to read it, it’d have failed to accomplish the purpose it was created. If you don’t find and share your ingenuity, you’d have failed as a human being and the purpose for which you were created would be lost on men (us) and on earth.

So don’t be scared to share your talent, skill or uniqueness with the world. You may not be perfect now, but with time, the world will recognise you for who you are and what you do.

 

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