The day you can conceive a greater dream than Dangote’s empire, is the day you gain the capacity to dislodge Dangote as the richest man in Africa. The day you can dream bigger than Mrs Folorunsho Alakija, is the day you gain the capacity to dislodge her as the richest black woman in the world. And the day you can conceive a greater dream than that of Oprah Winfrey, is the day you can override her as the most influential black woman in the world. The world responds to men and women who can dream, and by that I don’t mean those who can sleep.
To have a great empire, dream of serving people – they will pay you for it! Service is the key to greatness. It is time for you to stop having selfish dreams of cars, houses, jets and so on. Have a dream that will make you leave a footprint on the sands of time.
To live without a dream is to merely exist; and to live with a dream, is to live for impact. This is not to say that you only need a dream and nothing else, but DREAMING is the starting point. If you miss it here, you have missed it for life. Get off your butt and dream again – it is not too late!
Age has nothing to do with it
Your age is not a factor in this equation and if you will read the next lines I will prove that to you. We shared the story of the 7 years old boy that inspired many by starting a restaurant business (you can read the story HERE). ‘McDonald’ was just a shop across the street until a certain Ray Kroc had a bigger dream and joined forces with the owner. Together, they worked for six years and created a ‘McDonald’ brand before Ray Kroc finally bought them out of the business. He was 52 years old when he started this dream. Even Jesus Christ in the bible already had a dream at the age of 12. So do not tell me you are too young or too old to dream – you are just at the perfect time when you should dream.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook dreamt in his twenties; he created Facebook and that invention has over 1.15 billion users as of March 2013 – that number is almost 20% of the population of the whole world, which is 7.046 billion as at 2012.
Have a dream that over 1 billion people will be interested in and you will never need to think of food again for the rest of your life. You will automatically be listed among the greats!
Don’t Dream for ‘I’, dream for ‘We’
The difference between a man who only exists to make a living and the one living to make an impact is the capacity to dream for more than oneself. Do you know that Twitter could have been an invention just for one family? But if they had done that, Twitter will not be worth the 30 billion dollars it is worth today (that is just ten million short of Ghana’s GDP as at 2012). What that means is that when you have a dream for ‘we’ and not ‘I’, you can become as valuable as a whole country.
How far can your eyes see?
The farther you see is the farther you go. Even as a young boy, Nelson Mandela sat behind a Baptist church and he said to himself, “one day I will be the president of this people”. He was a young boy when he said that to himself. What happened to him in prison should have killed him but his dream kept him alive. After spending 24 years of his life in prison, the dream of that little boy behind a Baptist church came alive. If you only see for today, you will only achieve for today. If you only dream of buying a car you will never manufacture a car. If you only dream of cooking for your family you will never own a chain of restaurants.
Dreams make you a signature
The next time you are about to branch into a Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) outlet, observe the signage again and you will notice the picture of a man. The man in the picture had the dream of KFC, he is no longer living but we still see his face everywhere we turn. His dream has made him a signature such that when you see his face you think of KFC. This is a law of life, you cannot have a passionate and purposeful dream and end up at the backend of life – Your name and face will never be forgotten. Dream again!
How do you dream? What should you dream about? How to make your dream work? And many more…
…To be continued next Wednesday on this same site.
This is the first from the new Wednesday series tagged #UNCENSORED (It’s Inspiration Uncensored) which will be written by Gabriel Olatunji ‘Legend’. He continues to write #MondayInspiration on Mondays. If you have not read any of his Monday Inspiration before, you can read one HERE.
Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of OLATUNJISPEAKS.com.
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[…] is why I have decided to write a sequence to last week’s #iUncensored titled, A little dream; A little vision; So shall your empire grow like that of Dangote and Oprah Winfrey. But I want us to take it from a different angle […]
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