“Madness” brings positive changes

“No one who is completely upright in his head has ever changed the world” We are grateful to the Giver of life for his mercies. Seeing 2015, it’s a milestone and we are grateful Father. As characteristic of human beings and businesses, we set goals every year.

At the end of the year, we take stocks and assess our flaws and successes. Thinking aloud in my closet on New Year day, it hit me hard to ask what will make my continent, Mama Africa better.

Why is it that almost all the people who have initiated positive disruptions in human history never started on African soil? The conclusions that came to me were two. Individuals including some entrepreneurs and businesses think more of our feelings, our environment and so conscious of the stigma that comes with failure.

Secondly, we think small and apply too much logic in everything we do. You may have some cogent reasons to disagree with me but allow me to present my case. I am a youth and have spent relatively few numbers of years on earth but from the little I have read, known and seen, I have come to the firm conviction that the World changers are GREATER FOOLS.

A greater fool is someone with the courage and ridiculous naiveté’ to believe they can succeed where other people flopped. Put differently, it means a person with a perfect mix of self-delusion and ego to think that he or she can succeed where others have failed. This is a coinage by the public to describe positive disruptors (great innovators, movers and shakers of our world).

If your world is governed by feelings and logic, excuse me you are an average individual and until you have a paradigm shift, you will die as an average person. If Karl Benz of Germany allowed his senses and the ridicule of friends, families and public to determine his direction, we wouldn’t have gotten the first automobile in 1885/6.

Assuming in December 1903 you had the privilege to witness the Wright brothers’ experiments on their first flight, you may have advised him to be rational and stop courting intentions of doing the impossibility.

You may have blatantly called them foolish but see travelling has become convenient and easier because of someone’s positive foolishness and madness. I don’t want to comment on Alex Bell Graham’s (inventor of the first practical telephone in 1876), Edisons et al.

In our contemporary times, the Mark Zuckerbergs (facebook), Bright Simons (mpedigree), KwadwoSarfo (Kantanka) are names that are causing positive disruptions in Africa and the world. The people counting millions and dominating the business space (the real practical and genuine businessmen not the “polipreneurs”) are what we see because they refused to be average thinkers and doers.

The only thing similar about these inventors and disruptors is that they may have been considered foolish by the public including friends and familieswhen they dared to cause change, but theirsuccess stories today show us that everything is possible.

No one who was completely right in the head has ever changed the world. Willingness to dare greatly will be so uncomfortable for some people but note you cannot look good and hope to do better in the future. Dare to be different, get your hands soiled once you dream and the dividend will be a wow experience.

Everybody wants to own the results but nobody wants to own the process especially when the process will temporarily inconvenience our pleasures. Many of us prefer to stick to the safe path; the downside to that is that the reward would tend to be more limited and regulated. There is always a clear risk-reward payoff.

You may have jumped and somersaulted over some declarations on 31st Night but may I humbly submit to you that nothing will change until you are mad for change. Expand your disruptive capacity. Be mad. Dream madly and push hard. Risk everything.