Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words, Your words become your actions, Your actions become your habits, Your habits become your values, Your values become your destiny. ~ Mahatma Gandhi LEADERSHIP: As a growing boy, I perceived leadership from a limited political prism. I believe it was the same for most of us. My model leaders were Mandela, Azikiwe, Awo..Ahmadu bello..Lincoln..Churchill..Martin Luther King..Sankara etc But with maturity, I realised that we are all leaders. There are social..religious..traditional..educational groups where you can lead. We lead friends and we lead our families too. The most important leadership, however, is self-leadership. When you are able to influence your thoughts towards laudable objectives and act to achieve them you will likely want to encourage others to travel that path. And in doing that, you build other leaders. We cannot build our own future without helping others build theirs. ~ Bill Clinton To lead we must participate. That’s what leaders do. They don’t sit in the back row. No! They learn, grow, volunteer, contribute and inspire others. I urge everyone to lead. Don’t wait for me or the other person. This is a community for skill and knowledge acquisition. Share your thoughts, ideas, writings, resources, tips, jokes etc. PARTICIPATE & LEAD. There are millions of books out there on leadership but for the purpose of our community and what we want to achieve, I recommend Tribes by Seth Godin. If you can’t get hold of it now check out a wonderful summary here. It’s a small but powerful book. Seth’s words will spur you into passionately pursuing your goal and sharing it with others. Getting them to believe in you as well. There are noble ideas and causes around which we might organize. But to achieve them, we need to be out there, making things happen. We can do it if we refuse to live with the fear that we can’t. If we aren’t afraid of embarrassment or failure. MORE ON OUR VISION: I previously outlined our vision thus: To be the leading platform for FREE and AFFORDABLE digital skill acquisition. To this end, I have reached out to a friend who is an experienced academic, writer, communication expert and thoroughbred professional for a potential collaboration. Of course, we all know the meaning but as usual, let me illustrate with my experience. When the volume of submissions for our essay contest grew too large for me to handle alone, I sought assistance from a young Nigerian, Chukwuemeka Ibeh, a staff writer with Brittle Paper.Brittle Paper. I never met him in person but his work impressed me. The power of the written word! In any case, he was too busy so he recommended Daniel Ogah, another brilliant young writer. You all know the great work Daniel did assisting me before he took a break to focus on his studies. That’s the type of collaboration I want to engage in going forward. Whatever venture I build now must have a system that can be macro-managed remotely because I’m a traveller. I can’t afford to be physically rooted in one location and the internet makes it possible. If my friend gets on board we may be launching before the year winds or early next year and we will definitely need capable hands. So guys if you have WordPress skills get ready. If you wish to learn then ask and I will send resources. It’s easy and in a short time, you can be proficient. PLATFORM/AUDIENCE: I mentioned consistency and platform as requisite factors that will help us achieve our vision. Let me hammer a BIG POINT again. To build a platform you need to have a domain of your own. Please get an account with Medium, Substack or some other platform. If you have noticed I publish almost all my stories on Medium as well as cmonionline. You need a personal domain to publish. Please do this. I’m surprised that many of you haven’t done so. How difficult is it? Then get active on social media. Frankly, I can’t imagine what any serious person wants to achieve without this. We live online and mostly on social media. You don’t have to waste time like I did in the past..no be strategic. You can check out Buffer and similar tools that can help you manage your social media accounts. Social media is addictive so you need to be careful to maximise its use to your advantage. It took me many years of wasting precious time to realise this. These days even though I still chat nonsense at times I’m more conscious and deliberate with my posts. Now let me elaborate more on platform building using Twitter as an example. Those who know me well know I spent years on Facebook. I built a large following there mostly by writing about socio-political topics. But at a point, I realised I had to take a break for two reasons. 1. Because it was a time-consuming addiction and 2. It was time to build a brand by doing more productive and scalable writing that needed Twitter. I will return to Facebook later because my audience is still there. That’s the great thing about building an audience..you will have loyal readers who keep asking after you when you take a break. Those years of building will not go to waste. The leverage of that audience must be converted from potential to kinetic. But for now, I want to concentrate on Twitter. You may not know but Twitter isn’t exactly similar to Facebook even though both are basically for engagement and connecting with people. Twitter has some specific attributes that make it suitable for my intent. It had more of the demographic I sought. It offers a faster way to reach a wider audience. As writers, we want to excel and also get published. But that is half the job as we learned from Bolaji who spoke to us on this platform. Marketing your book requires the same effort as