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Blog, FEATURES, Lifestyle

Your Values Become Your Destiny: A Book In A Year Month II

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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

Blog, News, Resources

Write A Book In A Year With Cmonionline.

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The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better. ~ Stephen King We are finally here. It is official and it may seem to have come too fast but it’s always good to get started. If there is one thing I’ve learned in my 7 years abroad it is that the Western world thrives on productivity and lengthy deliberations can sometimes turn to prevarication. So it’s always better to start acting on your ideas and improve along the way. It gets better when you are accompanied because you have a challenge and support. ACT==>FAIL/PASS==>LEARN==>CONTINUE It is that simple guys. I know some have already started writing like myself. Some will still start and some may not write a word in the entire period. It’s different strokes for different folks but push on…we must! Now why do we want to write a book? The answer is simple. Because we can write a book! In our last session, we deliberated on spicing up the next 365 days of writing a book. It is important to reward our efforts for good reasons. The obvious is encouragement, and then it is necessary to take breaks — it could be monthly or quarterly — with some rote activities that may help to replenish our cognitive resources. Ideas like spoken word contests, poems, word count, and periodic writing competitions in the manner we usually have were mentioned. Well since variety is the spice of life and writing it will be nice to try these suggestions as we progress. We will simply put them to vote in the group and go with the majority choice. Book reviews: We will recommend 3 or 4 books for writers to choose from and then do a review. Writers will then determine the winning entries to be rewarded. I think this is a brilliant idea especially if we include authors/genres that may resonate with our writing ideas. It is actually killing 3 birds with a stone. You get a break, draw from reading and receive a bank alert. Well, the 3rd bird depends on the house. And finally, we agreed to START on 11th June 2023. So all things being equal, by 11th June 2024 through our effort each person should have published a book or at the very least have a draft. A Tip We Skipped. Find a reader, preferably someone you trust to always tell you the brutal truth. No flattery or undeserved adulation but honest feedback that will encourage you to keep pushing. I have my uncle and because my work will be published here I may request feedback from you at intervals. Next up…  On Sunday, June 25, 2023, we will host two content creators Ada @lightwoxng and Ifunanya @iphie_explores who will share their thoughts on digital creativity and social media. Further details on this will be shared on our social media platforms soon but it’s IMPORTANT to know the Talkshop is part of the criteria for choosing 10 beneficiaries of the FREE graphic design training. If you just started following you can still catch up with previous sessions and read some posts on writing in our resources category. That’s all, start writing and all the best!

Essays, Writers

Why I Write by Augusta Ndeche.

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Everyone was good at something, Stan had his blog, Vicky her music and fashion was taken by Kate. We would gather every evening in front of the compound of Chief Ayo, one of the few men who could afford to buy a generator, charging our phones and talking about whatever we could think of. Amidst random discussions, Vicky will talk about how sunday’s music presentation was going to awesome, and Kate will say she made the beautiful dress she was wearing. All I could do was smile, not out of happiness but of regret that I had no talent to boast of. I wished I could also talk passionately about something I was good at. Although serving in a village had never been part of my plans, it wasn’t in my nature to bribe my way through hardship. So, when I was posted to a village where electricity and internet connectivity were uncommon luxuries, where bicycle was the major means of transportation and if you are given a penny for every car you saw, you wouldn’t have up to fifty pennies at the end of the year, I choose to stay and serve my country. I wasn’t one who enjoyed the rush of busy cities, but I would have gladly chosen it over life in a rural area a thousand times. Daily activities were routine – Wake up, go to work if you felt like it, cook, eat, play games, fetch water, charge phone, sleep and the next day the whole cycle continues. I had a lot of time and nothing to do with it, so out of frustration, I wrote. I wrote about my feelings, I wrote about the crush I had, I wrote when I fell in love, I wrote when my neighbor’s husband died, I wrote about my dislike for some corp members. I wrote in a book which I would hide immediately after writing. But one day I forgot to do so and Emma read it, then Vicky read it, they said my essays were very good. So later when Stan would ask “Augusta, what can you do sef” I would say, “I can write”, even though I didn’t believe it, even though I felt like a fraud for calling myself a writer. Still I kept up the deception, whenever someone would ask, what are you doing whilst waiting for a good job, I would say I am a writer, a creative writer, a content creator (who had never completed a single story). The Pandemic came and I had to go back to my state of residence. Unlike the village that had nothing worthwhile to spend on, I now had within my reach the variety I craved for. I needed money, and being someone who disliked asking friends or family for money, I surfed the internet and social media platforms for ongoing competitions and came across Cmonionline on Facebook. I was impressed with the consistency of the competition so I decided to try it out. When the week’s topics were posted, I had no idea what to write about. I would write a sentence or two, delete it and start all over again, this went on for days and on the day of submission, I still had no idea for a story. At 7pm it was as if a writer’s spirit possessed me, I started writing the first ever story I had ever completed, as the deadline was almost near, I read over it twice and submitted by 11:56pm. I waited in anticipation for the winner to be announced and when it was, I wasn’t one of them. I was convinced that I wasn’t good enough a writer, and thus it was foolish to keep referring to myself as one. I was ready to give up, but then Cmonionline sent a response to my essay where my grammatical errors were highlighted. This made me rethink my decision to give up writing as I thought it may have been the errors that deterred my victory. I wrote two weeks later, this time around it was easier. As I wrote I could see my characters, I could feel what they felt, I could smell what they smelt and see what they saw. I had my sister proofread my work and I no longer submitted minutes before the deadline, it was now hours. It was like the feeling one gets when something desired for a long time is finally acquired. I rejoiced like someone who had won a trip to Dubia. As I saw my face and essay displayed as one of the week’s winner, my joy knew no bound, not just because I was some thousands richer but because I felt validated as a writer as the second story I had ever completed won a competition. Since then week after week I would carry the topic at the back of my mind and every time I was inspired, I would write, in the bus, at work, on the road, whilst cooking, whilst eating, I would pen down the ideas for my stories. Two weeks later I wrote and won again. I was blushing when I saw the post which made a colleague ask if I was proposed to over the phone. I screenshotted the part where a judge described my imaginative power as out of the world and sent to my siblings. Then I wrote again I didn’t win and I didn’t know why, so I thought that if Cmonionline can introduce a platform where writers can come together and criticize each other’s work, it would help all writer identify their weaknesses, mistakes and strength and adjust accordingly. Cmonionline yet again choose an amazing topic that made it possible for me to share my story, so I decided I must write. I must write in appreciation of the platform given to me to showcase my talent as a writer. I must write in appreciation of the judge, whose description of me motivates me to keep writing. I

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