See the Things You Can Control to Improve Your Life

 

Navigating your way through life can be challenging and many people find it difficult to cope. Problems like depression, drug abuse and suicide are increasing in both developed and developing countries. Despite the challenges that we face in life, there are a few things that we can work on to make positive change, let us have a look at them:

Your Attitude 

You can decide that you are going to let your problems or negative people in your life wreck your life or you can use such negative factors, people or events as motivation to succeed. Let those people that seek to ridicule you or tell you "you cannot achieve your dreams" be a source of inspiration to drive you towards success. Yes, it can be tough but if you believe in yourself you can achieve great things regardless of what people say. 

Your Network

While it is true that we cannot choose our family, it is definitely true that we can choose our friends. Are your friends or acquaintances having a positive impact on your life? If they are not, begin to reduce the contact you have with them and begin to align yourself with positive people. For example, if all you and your friends do is gamble and idle away, you can stop associating with them by going for a form of training, the time you spend training takes you away from negative friends and habits. The same applies to toxic people that put you down. Try to build a network of friends that will add value to you while you add value to theirs too. Initially, it might seem like you have nothing to give but over time, you will begin to discover your own talents, strengths and abilities when you relate with positive people. 

 Your Gratitude

You can always be grateful for God's blessings and the help you receive from people. Do not ridicule whatever kindness or good you receive from people. People who show sincere appreciation are often recipients of greater help. If you are thankful for little, you are likely to receive more. Moreover, a grateful mindset helps you avoid negativity and depression. You do not look at other people and feel bad because you are not as rich, good-looking, popular or successful as they are. This is beginning of great things because you find peace with what you have and can build on it. 

 

 Your Physique

As you work on your mind, you also need to take care of your body. Eating well, exercise and rest are things you need to do to feel fit and energetic. It is a fact that being overweight  or obese creates health problems as well as self-esteem issues for many people. Watch what you eat and try to have a healthy lifestyle. It helps to keep you with a positive mindset and increases your capacity to achieve your goals. 

Your Habits 

An adage says: old habits die hard. This might be true but if you make a genuine conscious effort to build good habits, you can change your life considerably. Let us look at one example, you could decide that you want to read more. So, you set yourself a modest target of reading one new book per month. There is a good chance that if you are sincere, you might read more than one book in that month and subsequent ones. The more you read, the more you know and act upon the things you learn, without realizing it, you begin to form new good habits and begin to drop old bad ones. 

 Your Work Rate

If you are dedicated in following the previous tips, there is a high likelihood that your work rate and productivity will increase. Yet, there should be a conscious effort to improve on it. In fact, this blog post is a testament to this fact. I had the option of going home from work and finding something else to post here later. However, I decided to do something positive and impactful, thereby improving my overall productivity and the usefulness of this blog. You should do the same with your work, tasks, chores and other activities. Increase your work rate to achieve more and improve your value. 

We have a choice to complain about our problems or to take steps to begin to solve them one-at-a-time. It is probably easier said than done but with a positive mindset and managing better the factors we can control, we can hope to affect positively the ones that might be out of our control. 

There is a certain peace and satisfaction that comes from doing your best, I hope you experience it. Feel free to share your thoughts and experiences by dropping a comment. I look forward to reading them.   

 

Chinese Men Dancing to Song Praising President Buhari in China

What do you think?

Publiseer Debuts in Ghana

Chidi Nwaogu during an interview with Nairametrics

 

 

Today, Publiseer took to its Facebook and Twitter pages to announce the company's first presence outside Nigeria. Before today, Publiseer only offered WhatsApp and voice call customer support to its Nigerian writers and musicians. With its new presence in Ghana, Publiseer's authors and musical artists from Ghana can get customer support via Whatsapp and voice call on +233 50169 3318. 

When Chidi and Chika Nwaogu started Publiseer about a year ago, they knew that the digital publishing industry in Nigeria had a huge potential, however, they knew that Ghana has an equally huge potential too. So, expanding into Ghana was always in the pipeline since inception. A pioneer of its kind in Nigeria, Publiseer publishes and monetizes the creative works of African writers and musicians from low-income communities, at no charge, with just a single click.

The journey to help budding African writers and musicians earn a living from their crafts started on August 4, 2017, and as of writing, Publiseer has published and monetized 133 books and 467 tracks by 110 writers and 217 musicians, generating thousands in revenue. Ghana has a very robust book publishing and entertainment industry that is growing exponentially with big players in the field, and this explains why Ghana is Publiseer's first expansion move.

"Ghana has an amazing music industry that spreads across Africa and even the world. The book publishing industry in Ghana is also huge, and Publiseer wants to tap into this huge resource. Ghana is a country with really intelligent and creative people, and it will be an honour having these amazing people use our platform to monetize their digital contents," says Chidi Nwaogu, Co-founder of Publiseer.

Publiseer has received several awards and recognitions during the past year, which includes being the first African publisher to be inducted into the International Publishing Distribution Association. The digital publisher came into limelight when it emerged a finalist at the Harvard Business School 2018 New Venture Competition, and most recently was accepted into the Venture Incubation Programme by the Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town.

The Super Guide to Successful Blogging Launched

There are billions of blogs on the Internet and the number is likely to increase in the future as more people begin to understand the importance of the Internet and the opportunities that it provides. This is especially true in Africa and other developing regions of the world.

Despite this increase in the number of bloggers, it is a very small percentage of them that are truly happy with their blog and what they have achieved with it.

A lot of people blog to earn additional income, others take it as their primary job while others just want to share their thoughts and ideas. Businesses are realizing that blogs are a great way to connect with their potential and current customers.

Regardless of your reason for blogging, it can be incredibly frustrating and sometimes depressing when your blog hardly gets any visitors. No wonder, many people abandon blogging altogether.
However, this need not be so, with the appropriate information and guidance, just about anybody can be a successful blogger.

This is why, serial Internet entrepreneur and blogger, Abdulkabir Olatunji has written the book: ‘The Super Guide to Successful Blogging’. The book is written in simple language and guides you as a newbie on the steps you need to take to be a successful blogger. Upcoming and experienced bloggers will also find the insights in the book very useful.

To show you how blogging can be done successfully, the book contains a breakdown of what successful bloggers like Neil Patel and Linda Ikeji did when they started and the things they are doing now to maintain their success.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential to your success as a blogger and this book breaks-it-down for you in a way that you can easily implement to ensure the growth of your blog.

This is the book you need if you are serious about being successful as a blogger and beginning your journey as a successful online entrepreneur or opinion leader.

Get the Book Here

About the Author
Abdulkabir Olatunji is the Head of Strategy at Jarus & JAN Internet Group and an Associate Member of the Nigerian Institute of Management (AMNIM). His interests include writing, blogging, all-things-tech and analysis of current affairs and sports. He has helped to successfully launched several successful websites including http://www.opinions.ng http://www.hotproforum.com and https://www.hostdey.com.  He is also the owner of  http://www.coolstuff49ja.com
You can follow him on LinkedIn and on Twitter @maclatunji

How to Stop Video Autoplay on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a very useful website for professionals to promote themselves, network, recruit and be recruited.

However, in recent times, there is an annoying element of videos playing automatically when you visit the website.

Follow these steps to prevent this from happening especially in a country like Nigeria where data is expensive.

Steps to Stop LinkedIn Autoplay 

1. Visit https://www.linkedin.com and login

2. Click on 'Me' on the Menu Bar.

3. Select 'Settings and Privacy' from the list you see.

4. Click on 'Site Preferences' on the next page.

5. You should see 'Autoplay videos' with the option to 'Choose if you want videos to autoplay on your browser.' You will see a button in blue. Click on it to turn it off, it should become grey and your setting for autoplay changes to off. 

That is it, you are now free from autoplay. What you need to do if you want to watch any video in your feed is to click on it yourself and wait for it to start. 

I hope you found this useful and you can let me know what you think by dropping a comment.  

 

Review of ‘The Road to Victoria Island’: The Road to Corporate Success

By Abubakar Sulaiman Muhd

@mallamabubakaar

Suraj Tunji Oyewale’s ‘The Road to Victoria Island’ is a stimulating book dissecting the entry myth into corporate Nigeria. I read the book right-away the minute I received it from Lagos as a gift from the author. Insightful, absorbing, it fills me with electrifying thrills and sensation, like just the next day I would become a top executive.

I have had a dream to become a world-class economist. This dream was inspired by the 2008 world economic welt-down, listening speeches on BBC Hausa Services from business leaders around the world and economists including our own Emir, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the nation’s Central Bank Governor at the time.

Perusing each sentence, each paragraph, I was ravenously filliping through and asking “what next” till the end and was not glad when I finished. I was hankering for more.

Suraj brought together gem personal experiences and stories from contributors in critical moments of making career decisions in their life. I must thank Suraj and his team for bringing and sharing his experiences. It saves a lot of people years of hard work trying to invent their own wheel. Not all of us may have the privilege of personally meeting the people Suraj met, or the kind of experience he lived through.

In the book, we learn that hard work and merit are the primary parameters for employment and pathway to the zenith of corporate ladder.  The myth of employment bias in top jobs is debunked, especially in oil and gas, the most lucrative sector of the nation’s economy. Mr Suraj has consistently made the point that no one in his right senses, no organization, even the much accused public institutions, will adopt as its mission to populate its workforce with dumb heads.

There is no acceptance of indolence and hoping for the best. But people resign to the negative mentality that you can only get a top job through favour and other unmerited connections. They indignantly express the sentiment that Dangote doesn’t like to hire his own people to managerial positions. It is naïve thinking this way. Successful corporate entities don’t work like that. No serious business would like to fail.  So, people should develop skills up to the standards.

I can vividly recall an instant that happened some time ago, eavesdropping one guy praying God should give him MTN Telecommunications Company for free. In my mind I was saying “Oh young man, it doesn’t work like that.” The MTN owners didn’t just pray or wait for someone to dash them the multi-million dollars corporation.

I could remember the other time Dangote was delivering a convocation speech at our university. People were cheering and shouting kudi… Dangote was smiling, a smile that revealed his mind, business and life philosophy. In his shoes, these young people would lead a fabulously ostentatious life.  One guy even said it, “If I were Dangote, just a week to be him, I would ride the most expensive car on earth.”

Certainly, if Dangote has had such thinking he wouldn’t have been where he is today, and would have long vanished from the list.

Going through the book, one is jarred and sliced by fear, thrill and motivation. You encounter accomplishments made in the face of seeming insurmountable odds. These successes throw challenge at your feet. But it is great sigh of relief encountering those achievements. They give you hope.

GTBank, Access Bank and other financial institutions were established by young men of no more than 30-32 years. At 27, some of them had been given the task of managing billion dollars enterprises like IBTC, duties that people of similar ages nowadays would have found unthinkable to handle. It is not entirely their fault, however, the system makes them not to believe in themselves.

The overall point Suraj has logically made is that grade is key. Achievement is something you will have to prepare right from early age through the university and follow up to your public life, always trying to upgrade your skills and knowledge and keep decent personal conducts.

The Road to Victoria Island is a book that every Nigerian should read, especially students preparing for college admission, graduates, early and mid-career staffers in corporate Nigeria.




You can get the book by clicking here.

The version of this article was initially published on Facebook October 30th 2016.

Abubakar Sulaiman Muhd is a writer, aesthetician, minimalist and success enthusiast. He is from Kano and has a BA from Ahmadu Bello University Zaria with passions in strategic communication, literature and new media.

Why Everyone Should have a Website

We the team at JarusHub are passionate about the Internet and over time have demonstrated that we have not just interest but capacity to make a positive impact online.


However, we know that we cannot chase all the ideas by ourselves and implement them. Therefore, we got thinking: “what can we do to help many people especially the youths to begin to take advantage of opportunities online”?

Then it hit us, we should create a domain registration and hosting platform that is simplified and allows flexible payment plans with top-notch customer service.

This is our motivation for creating Hostdey.com, we believe every individual should own at least one domain –as a personal website to promote yourself as a brand, a personal or business blog or at the very least a website for your business.

Having an email address and phone number is not good enough these days. People want to see your digital footprint and there are fewer ways to achieve this than to have your own website.

So, whether it is a .com .ng .biz or other type of extension, the choice is yours. Let us start the journey to your online success together.

Visit Hostdey.com to get started.