POVERTY IS A MINDSET

By Jaymo Wa Thika

The worst thing to have in this world is the poverty of the mind. You can be poor financially but very rich upstairs. What you do with that wealth is what matters.

We need to teach our people to avoid that dependency syndrome and learn to believe in themselves. That is our only hope.

Instead of concentrating on those blocking our way to success, we should work out our ways out of those hiccups because any step forward in life, however small, is worth a million. We can never afford to lose hope.

Even in the most developed worlds there exist poor people.. not because their countries don't support them but because they have decided not to take that bold step to believe in themselves, no matter the situation they are in.

We have seen people start earning by selling a few mandazis within the estates to a point they have opened their own food kiosks. We have people in Thika owning supermarkets but started as hawkers. Did they wait for the government to build their empires for them? No. They sacrificed and stayed focused.

That is what most of us lack but we want to blame our individual failures on others.

As much as the government has something to do with growth, 90% of it depends on our perception and our mindset and we can never run away from that fact. It is true that the government is supposed to create a conducive environment for people to work and prosper but 99% of individual success depends on the individual him/herself. We can never run away from that fact.

The problem with us is that we tend to get stuck in the past. We are very rigid and won't let go of what is not working.... We only want to stay in our comfort zones, .... what we grew up to know, even if it has been overtaken by events.

If Covid didn't teach us anything then we shall never learn.

During this Covid season, there are so many people who made genuine money because the seized the opportunity and made the best out of it as the rest of us settled on the normal and died a natural economic death.

We saw people who owned schools or clubs turn them into something else and moved on with life. We saw pastors and teachers turn to hawking or farming when what they knew turned out unproductive. That's the spirit we need to have.

When we allow ourselves to be stuck on negativity, we will never make any step towards redeeming our lives. There will always be something or somebody standing on your way to success. How you handle the situation determines the direction your life curve will take