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THE SUCCESS SYSTEM FOR YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE 21ST CENTURY

Many young people, especially in Uganda, seem to have given up on success. They think they have reached the end of the road and that their nearest friend is failure. They see no future for themselves. Many of them think that they can only succeed when they serve the interests of rulers or when they serve politicians, some of who may be less educated than them. Some believe that if they get money bonanzas from the government or from President Tibuhaburwa Museveni, they will succeed.  Others think that they can succeed only when they give in to modern slavery and make it to the Middle East or elsewhere.  They think success can only be measured in terms of money. They are convinced that if you don’t have money then you are not successful. But there are other more significant measures of success than money, singly or collectively. They don’t even know that success without a successor is no success. They don’t know that there were men and women of money who took themselves as successful but they and their success of accumulating money and properties were left in the 20th Century. Their genealogies almost ended with them.

It is not uncommon for young people to clandestinely sell the properties, principally land, of their ageing parents so that they can get rich quickly on the sweat of their parents who worked hard to get what they got. Some use the proceeds from the illegal sale of their parents’ properties to go to foreign lands, ostensibly to get work, get money and become successful. Others sell the properties preserved by their ageing parents so that they can buy motorcycles and taxis, ostensibly to get money and become rich and successful. All this can be wishful thinking. It is wrong thinking.  It is the kind of thinking that drives parents to rethink the value of having brought forth children into this world. I heard one parent say:

“Why did I bring forth a son who ended up not attaching value to me; who ended up robbing me of everything that I had? He even forged my signature and took all my money from the bank. I ensured he got an education at the highest level, but all ended up in vain. I was nurturing a robber with my genes”.

It is a pregnant fact that young people in the Musevenite era want to live good lives but don’t want to work. In my village, Nawaka, I see many young people valuing the time they spend in the markets or loitering in the nearest townships. They leave their parents to toil in the gardens to make ends meet or sustain their families, including getting fees to pay for the. They only come back to eat and sleep. Even when they get jobs to cut sugarcane or run a maizemeal their laziness and lack of concentration make them useless and they are sacked. They choose to steal coffee or maize or beans to sell and get money, often to bet or buy marijuana. As I once wrote, it is a wasted generation, for which, unfortunately, there is little evidence that anyone at the centre or periphery is planning for it. It is simply a tragedy whose dire consequences are yet to come.

What I am submitting below is for young people determined to succeed, whatever the roadblocks before them. I hope they will drop the temptation to run off into modern slavery and stay in Uganda to make it at home the way young people did during the colonial and early post-colonial times. These are the young people who will not be hoodwinked to believe that they will succeed through money bonanzas from the government in general and President Tibuhaburwa Museveni in general. They should know that there is no country anywhere in the world that developed through its people being given money bonanzas. Success through money bonanzas is diversionary and deceptive. The theory that money will trickle down from, say, 100 (out of 10,000 people in a parish) targeted with money bonanzas to enrich the rest of the impoverished community is defective in a Century where artificial intelligence is competing with humans in many areas of thinking power. The success system cannot include money bonanzas dished to a few poor individuals. The community approach to creating wealth is superior to the individualistic approach because the wealth is created in the whole community; not around an individual. When God created humanity, he commanded us to work and get through work (sweat).

The success system demands of young people require a different set of essentials for success. Let me list some of the essentials here, but the list is not exhaustive.

  1. Success or Failure is Your Choice. Bantam Books.
  2. Be a Possibility Thinker.
  3. Nothing is Impossible under the Sun.
  4. Never lose hope.
  5. Never give Up.
  6. Be obsessed with giving and helping others.
  7. Keep Thinking, Think Critically
  8. Success and Failure are Cyclically interconnected; meaning that Success never ends and Failure is never Final.
  9. Think good thoughts and develop a positive attitude.
  10. Awake the sleeping giant within you.
  11. Work hard. Laziness will fail you. Don’t wait for money bonanzas from the government or politicians.
  12. Be patient; don’t hurry.
  13. Be interdependent but not dependent.
  14. Sacrifice what many think are the good things of life.
  15. Be disciplined.
  16. Manage your time well.
  17. Be confident and decisive.
  18. Maximise your mental power.
  19. Be consistent, honest and a person of integrity
  20. Associate with only people who will add value to your life.
  21. Develop imagination and imagine a future you want to be in charge of.
  22. Develop Thought power.
  23. Develop serenity.
  24. Recognise your strengths and weaknesses
  25. Learn to say NO when your conscience tells you it is the right response.
  26.  Banish timidity fear from your life
  27. Motivate yourself.
  28. Believe in your full potential.
  29. Define personal desires, ambitions and goals.
  30. When you go for something get it and in the right way
  31. Turn disadvantage into an advantage.
  32. Relate with the best to assimilate the best from them.
  33. You must develop moral responsibility.
  34. The more you share the more you will have.
  35. The little difference is attitude and it makes the big difference when positive.
  36. Focus on your goals and targets.
  37. Hate creating or being involved in conflicts.
  38. The best time to succeed is in your 30s. Later is too late but some have succeeded later in life when they have made the right choices and right decisions.
  39. God is Key to success.  Allow God to be at the centre of your success story.

For God and My Country.

Further Reading

  1. The Holy Bible
  2. The Holy Quran
  3. Max Anders (1947). Spiritual Growth in 12 Lessons. Thomas Nelson Inc (Publisher).
  4. Miles McPherson (2000). Parenting the Wild Child. Bethany House Publishers.
  5. Schuler, Robert H. (1970). Success Is Never Ending; Failure Is Never Final.
  6. Hill Napoleon and Stone W Clement (1990). Success Through A Positive Mental Attitude. Thorsons (Publisher).

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Written by Oweyegha Afunaduula (3)

I am a retired lecturer of zoological and environmental sciences at Makerere University. I love writing and sharing information.

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