The beauty of a year is not in the new number you add to your age or the activities you get involved in but what you effectively get done!

Welcome to 2013. First off I’d like to appreciate my most dedicated readers from March of 2012.  I will be the first to admit that keeping a dedicated weekly column is a tough job but keeping faith with a column as a reader is a lot harder.  Thank you for keeping faith.

This is the reason my first column for the year will be dedicated to you rather than politics and governance. The danger of a New Year is that if you are not an intentional person, you’d get so carried away you’d mentally think you are still in a New Year even in April.  Before you close your eyes and open it again, 2013 would have been expended, invested or even plainly wasted.

It helps to understand that the numbers are already counting. 2013 started yesterday and the novelty of a New Year should be off your mind by now. Do not expect things to get better in our country – you can hope they do – but your best bet would be to do better for yourself by making the best use of the resources available to you no matter how seemingly inadequate. You will never really have all you need anyway but you will always have enough to get started.

The beauty of a year is not in the new number you add to your age or the activities you get involved in but what you effectively get done!  This may not sound intuitively right to you but the challenges we face as a nation could actually be your own mine of opportunities. You stand a better stead of fighting for a better country if you have enough passion and competence to survive in that country irrespective of who the rulers/leaders are. Remember, you cannot truly set the poor to the path of riches if you are poor yourself. You cannot help the powerless if you lack power yourself. How can you become a man of wealth, power and influence if you do not value time?

Time is the difference. The reason most people are poor is because they are yet to place a value on time. Time is what we all convert to money. You cannot create any form of value without a resource called time. If you must be different, especially in a nation like ours where time is not regarded, you must value time at all times. You must be conscious of how you are spending your time and what you are spending same on. You want to know if you are wasting time at every point in time, just spending time or investing time. Time is Money. The reason a rich man prefers not to spend time washing his own car is not because he really would not love to. The reason someone else has to do it for him is because if he does it himself, he’d be wasting a lot of money/time doing such. If you earn N5,000/hour, would you wash your car yourself or you’d prefer to employ someone who’d get paid say N500 to do the washing? If you earn N5,000 per hour based on your monthly income and you spend one hour washing your own car, take it or leave it, you’d have wasted some N4,500. Imagine how much Dangote gets burnt by spending time in the toilet… so he takes a book along when not in the shower.

Make it a point of duty not to waste your time this year for any reason. I never waste time. If you make me wait for you – which I really hardly do – you’d never see me waiting without doing something. I at least have a book handy to learn something from as I wait.

2013 has come. The parties are not over yet but you really cannot wait for all that to get your year started. The celebration is now over, no time to waste! To waste time is to literally waste your life. Life is measured in time.

Have my best wishes for the year ahead

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.