Let’s recap on what we have discussed so far:
1) One Thing We MUST Begin Doing NOW As African Immigrants
2) What Every African Immigrant Ought to Know About Recording and Sharing Success
This article has been written to give you some ideas about areas where we as African immigrants need to share useful information with each other on a mass scale. It has two parts:
1) What I personally think is more important and what I value. MORE IMPORTANTLY:
2) What I have observed we as a community need to learn
What I Have Observed We Need to Learn
Getting Started Making an Income
Here folks need all the help they can get. There are a few situations when it’s especially necessary:
a) When a young adult arrives in a foreign country never having worked or been job searching a day in their life.
b) When someone comes from a poor family who put all their financial resources to send them abroad and have left them on their own.
c) People who are transferring over to a country to pursue an occupation but have a long transition, preparation and “one-more-damn-form-to-fill” period between their overseas arrival and working in their job.
Here people need to know where they can begin making money instantly. Not necessarily a lot, though if you know how, do tell. Just enough to get by.
One of the aims of this blog is to explore “alternative and unique” ways this can be done so that this is never a problem.
Material Success
Once people do get a job and begin working, and if their visa is in order, there is a tendency to get very very comfortable and stuck in a rut. You’re not growing. You’re not making as much of a contribution as you can to your community. You are not even close to maximizing your potential.
This is where people who have succeeded materially at an extraordinary level need to begin writing autobiographies and how tos so that they reignite the passions of the comfortable and give them a new pinnacle to aim towards.
Relationships
This is the area we’ll ask for the least help in and yet know the least about. One of the worst consequences of losing our tribal societies is we lost a sense of continuity of education in this area of relationships.
This world is constantly changing so fast that the rules that governed our parents aren’t the same rules that govern us and probably won’t be the same relationship rules that govern our kids. (As a sidenote, have you ever stopped to think about how weird, or probably repulsive, a lot of our generation’s sexual habits would be to our grandparents….we have changed A LOT as a people)
As long as there is this thing called man, and there is this thing called woman, majority of us will always be sexually attracted to each other and feel kinda incomplete if we don’t at least have some relationship with members of the opposite sex.
Why something so quintessential to the human experience isn’t part of the everyday school syllabus but logarithms are is beyond me.
As an immigrant it’s even worse. Not only were there “no solid rules” to begin with, but now you are in a country where the rules are entirely different. A world where people are more and more about “private space” and “individual ambition” as opposed to “just sitting connecting and sharing”.
When I began writing this section, I thought I was just talking about romantic relationships. I have realized I am not, even platonic relationships. If you have any sort of rock solid bond with another human being abroad in spite of the circumstances, you need to share this.
What I Think We Need to Know?
We need to sit down and teach future immigrants how to avoid constantly jumping on the next material trend and entering themselves into debt so that they can live like a rich man on a pauper’s salary.
This is just my personal issue though. I don’t see why you should be buying leather seats, a plasma screen TV and a sports car when you have to work 14 hour days just to pay for all of that. Shouldn’t you build your financial foundation on a life of frugality first and then once you actually HAVE an excess of capital, live like you do?
Next time you are in an African function, look to your left, then look to your right and then look to the center. Tell me how many of those people have love handles that can only come from excess junk consumption or if not how many have a very high metabolism that pretty much gets rid of any signs of junk in take.
We eat like crap more often than not. We need to eat better. We have greater access to information and are much smarter than that.
Unique Immigrant Experiences
If you have gone off the beaten path and done things that people thought were undoable abroad, record your tales and share them with your fellow immigrant and enlighten us that we constantly remember that no life is not static and human life is indeed a fluid concept.
All breakthroughs and great innovations come from outside of the boxes, mental or otherwise that we chose to live within. Share your insights from outside this box and help the people within it expand.
Can you think of any other areas we need to record success? Have any thoughts on the matter? Leave a comment below.
In the next, and me thinks, final edition of this series, I will share some quick ideas on just how to present your message to make it most compelling and useful to other African immigrants.
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ii) Finding employment
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Be blessed and bless others,
Mwangi
Tags: leadership psychology, mentorship, self help, self-help books, self-help industry, Success psychology