No one is ever too busy to return your call or text. No one. Not even the President of America. If you think anyone is too busy to respond to you, test them by sending them a text saying, ‘Your money was mistakenly paid to me’. They will reply in seconds!
The reason they do not take your calls or reply to your texts is because you are not relevant to them. It is not because they are busy. Do you want them to start taking you seriously? Then, make yourself scarce, and use the period of your scarceness to grow your relevance.
Take steps to increase your intrinsic human value to the extent that people call you because they need you. And that can only happen if you are a person of value.
So, how do you become a person of value?
You see, when they want to increase in value, most people tend to invest on themselves. They invest in clothes, watches, shoes, and other outward things. They may even invest in luxury cars and the latest phones, but those things do not increase your value.
Value flows from the inside out, not from the outside in. Designer clothes will not make you the man you need to be. A decorated monkey is still a monkey.
You cannot increase your value by external visible things because, by their very nature, they are temporal, meaning that they can give value only for short periods.
If you really want to increase your value to the extent where you become too relevant to be ignored, then you must invest in yourself rather than on yourself.
Read books. And not just any book. Read books that have been proven to change lives. Other than Scripture, one of the most influential books I have ever read is ‘As a Man Thinketh’ by James Allen.
Nevertheless, no book has demonstrably changed more lives than the Jewish Scriptures, the Christian New Testament and the Islamic Quran. Read them objectively. Not to become religious. But to become enlightened.
You do not even have to become a Jew or a follower of Christ. Or even a Muslim. That is up to you. But read them and become a follower of the undeniable wisdom contained therein.
And even if you do not want to read these books, still read. Read leadership and self-development books.
Below are 14 books that I recommend for those who want to develop their minds:
* Scripture (The Tanakh and the New Testament)
* The Mind of the Leader, by Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter
* The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
* How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
* The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
* The Black Jacobins by CLR James
* The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John C Maxwell
* Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence by Daniel Goldman
* The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale
* The Speed of Trust by Stephen M. R. Covey
* Battlefield of the Mind by Joyce Meyer
* Start Solving Problems by Reno Omokri
* Atomic Habits by James Clear
* Power and Progress, by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
And the idea is not just to read. It is to read and meditate upon what you have read until you start ideating.
What is ideating? It is a fact word that just means to come up with ideas. Reading stimulates your thought life, and your thought life stimulates ideas.
Reading and meditation are exercises for self-development. Ideas lead to self-improvement. Implementing them results in self-mastery.
That is why Scripture says, “My eye affects my heart”-Lamentations 3:51 (KJV).
It is impossible to read the Book of Proverbs, for example, and then meditate on what you read and still remain irrelevant in life.
I know this sounds simplistic. However, the most outstanding truths tend to be very simple, and their simplicity is why they are often overlooked.
Read uplifting books, books on leadership, management, and discipline, and have a highlighter with you when you read. You can have a physical highlighter, if you are reading a traditional book, or a virtual one, if you are reading an ebook. However, never read without a highlighter, a pen and paper, or an audio recording device to record flashes of inspiration.
Doing so makes the exercise of reading become almost a futility.
Jotting down or highlighting as you read forces your mind to identify what is important.
What you write connects your spirit MSM with your physical man, making your conscious and subconscious mind work together as a team to help you remember and utilise what you have written. Write, because a short pencil is longer than a long memory.
For best results, try to read for at least fifteen minutes so that your state of flow can kick in.
In psychology, flow is defined as the mental state in which a person performing an activity is energised by the power of focus to the extent that your brain is devoid of all distractions and projects its highest creative abilities towards providing you with solutions, ideas, initiatives and strategies.
It takes an average of fifteen minutes to achieve flow. That is fifteen minutes of uninterrupted deep reading, which then stimulates deep thinking. The type of thinking that made Archimedes shout Eureka! after he discovered the Archimedes principle. Sir Isaac Newton was in that type of thinking state when he had the aha! Moment that led him to discover the law of gravity.
This is very important because you are not developing your mind because of vanity. You are doing it for your sanity. You want to become a person of value. A relevant person. A person who is sought after.
Reno Omokri
Gospeller. Deep Thinker. #TableShaker. Ruffler of the Feathers of Obidents. #1 Bestselling author of Facts Versus Fiction: The True Story of the Jonathan Years. Hodophile. Hollywood Magazine Humanitarian of the Year, 2019. Business Insider Influencer of the Year 2022.
