Learn from Life

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So...something happened yesterday and my writer's block was lifted. I have been trying to tame all the ideas rushing in my head so, I will just offload them now.

Life always allows us to learn something necessary for the future. I must reiterate this: life always allows us to learn something necessary for our future!

When I was younger, I always had a penchant for writing. The only problem was that I would start a lofty project and fail to finish it. When I got to secondary school, and we were to write either a letter or an essay, my problem was how to control the flow to 'not more than X number of words'. Believe me, it was hard!

Acting was something I could do naturally so it was normal to join the Drama and Debate club in school. That taught me how to debate, which added the art of public speaking to my talents.

While doing this, I had this burning desire to soak up all I could. Learning how to improve things was always at the forefront of my thoughts. I wanted to be the best speaker, writer, and actress that the world could ever see. I remember picking out the big words from my novels and transcribing them, learning their meanings, and trying to inject them into my daily speech. I must confess that I knew absolutely nothing about transcription and phonetics but I would write them anyway. When my teachers, especially Mr. Girgir and Mr. Jerry started talking about phonetics, I was happy because I felt I already had a head start.

When I finally graduated from secondary school and was waiting for admission, my friend - Kenniewest - told me of this gospel group called Crystals Family. After some pressure, I joined the group. I went there to act and I was able to be a part of the team because I seemed to know a lot about theatre performances and stage rules, things I had learned from my club in school. A day came and we were asked to submit articles for a proposed magazine. I submitted an article and I was invited to attend the leadership meeting of the group. We had training on 'The 360° leader', a lesson culled from the book by John C. Maxwell with the same title. After the training, I was made the leader of 'Da Scribes', the writers' unit of the group. In that group, I learned to finish plays, articles, and best of all, edit stories. When I got to school, the editing I learned from 'Da Scribes' helped me get on the editorial committee of the Student Representative Council in my final year in school, where I got to meet Muideen Olawale, who taught me so much.

Even though I had been planning and organizing class parties and events since JSS1, I had not done a major event until 'Da Scribes' came up with 'Face of Crystals' and that launched me into my event planning career! The same was seen when I joined the less gospel Crystalz, which organized epic parties in school: the university I mean.

'Da Scribes' taught me so much about writing that when I graduated and was made the head of the theatre unit in church, I wrote, for the first time in my life, a full script for the team. One script became two and by the end of the week, I had written six scripts. You don't know the joy I felt when my scripts were translated into reality. This happened when the theatre group, Kingdom Expressions, hosted her first theatre night!

Now when I got to Adamawa State to serve the nation as part of the National Youth Service Corps, my head of department in church, Frama Ambrose called me up one day and asked me to go with him to be on a radio show. I was nervous but I agreed. That was how I heard of Campus 360. I got on the show and found out that a pastor in my church was the pioneer of the show. Pastor Stanley Innocent was doing good work: believe me, I was soaking up his presentation skills and learning all I could from him. One day, he told me to understudy Toolz, the superb on-air-personality with the Beat FM and I started picking up stuff from her. Tyra was another woman I understudied and I had always liked Oprah's presentation skills so yeah, I was feeling good. Eventually, the FM supervisor, Madame Chika Ngalome, asked me to come over, and to cut a long story short, I got my own show and started giving myself to it. From one show, it became four shows on the radio and one on TV.

This brings me back to my opening thought: life always gives you an opportunity to learn something necessary for your future. There are things you learn today that may seem unimportant but will make you stand out in the future. It might be something simple or something complicated but no knowledge is ever wasted.

If you refuse to learn the minute things that are not important, you just might lose great opportunities when they finally present themselves! 

I am going to be a great written, audio, visual, and audiovisual creator and I owe all my thanks to God for all the little lessons set on my path which has made fitting into who I am now a much more easy task.

Learn from life today. What you learn today might be what makes the difference tomorrow!