Crisis can force you to find solution

While undergoing financial literacy coaching in February 2008, my mentor taught me a lesson that I understood vaguely until recently when I went through the real experience.

I was then comfortable in the pocket, thanks to my employers who paid me well and on time.

Coach Paul taught me that a crisis compresses many lessons you would have learnt in many years and delivers them to you at once.

This, he explained, is the reason a crisis helps those whose minds were ready for it to rediscover themselves, but also destroy in equal measure those who had not been mentally prepared for it by their past life.

He intended to prepare my mind to accept that moving out of regular job will only introduce me to a sharp financial crisis, and that I will learn rather than die.

I had to go through a year without regular income to appreciate the meaning of the lessons a crisis carries.

For example, I quickly lost interest in working for pay as I had done for over 13 years.

I later registered for the chartered financial analysts classes, spent 16 months studying investment analysis and management, and then took up a job in local investment advisory business.

By the start of 2008, I was mentally retired and no longer able to take instructions I considered ill informed — contrary to the rules of succeeding in employment.

I did not recognise immediately that during my coaching lessons, I had set forth my attitudes for the first steps into a journey of faith padded with many crisis.

In business and investing, contrary to formal and self employment, you learn more about how to succeed from your failures than from the so-called success, because in this other world of wealth, you must be willing to create experiences.

Like Carnegie told Napoleon Hill, you “will discover that the cause of success is not something separate and apart from the man; that it is a force so intangible in nature and that a majority of men never recognise it.”

When man will come to recognise that successful investing starts with preparing the mind for success, poverty will disappear from the list of global concerns. 
By Patrick Wameyo
He is a financial literacy educator and coach