During my upbringing, I grew up being routed 45 minutes in a car every Sunday to spend the day with my grandmother. It started with church for a couple of hours, followed by lunch as a bribe. However, immediately following our meal, there were chores for the next 3-4 hours, doing everything my grandmother could find around her 2-acre home. Later in life, I did learn to appreciate the time in church, which led to my motivation to visit another church destination as I got older. All of this provided me with the baseline of religion that gave me the strength and guidance of God.
Learning spirituality and the belief that there is a higher purpose gives a person some confidence in what they want to pursue. It will leave a person to believe that in anything he or she is attempting, the higher power will be there to provide confidence, mental support, and depending on your belief level…possibly guidance.
However, over the last couple of decades, I have experienced various levels of success and failures related to my business ventures. Most entrepreneurs will share similar stories, but it was not till the faith of my friend and God, that I found my direction. The irony is that I have been preparing for my success my entire life – and was never aware of the preparation I was undergoing.
For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Ephesians 2:10
When I was about nine years of age, my father purchased a book for me to learn how to play chess. The book was authored by the great Bobby Fischer for beginning learners. I studied that material and gradually got better and better to become one of the best players in my high school.
Although the game itself is very intriguing, it was the nature of strategy that I enjoyed the most. The fascination of giving my opponent the impression of one direction and positioning myself elsewhere was an amazing experience. However, as I got older, I began to notice how life portrayed itself as a chess game. The synchronisms of making decisions that would impact me later, and how I made choices for better or worse, based on processing moves versus managing the urges of impulsiveness.
The terms behind strategic decisions grew more apparent as I got older and started evolving in making business decisions. Unfortunately, my strategic decision skills were limited to the board game of chess. I was not doing well when dealing with people and I found that my reckless efforts to attempt such resulted in me trying to manipulate others to gain information or contacts. My choices of building on fake friendships for opportunities would fail miserably. I was even finding myself under the false awareness of financial gains as a definition of success. All of this looked as if I was very strategic on the surface; but in my professional performances, I was destroying myself as a person. (TO BE CONTINUED)