Yaky Ink-spired: REALITY CHEQUE

I’m introducing a new regular to MyMindSnaps – a new Toby-Osigwe-esque column that will be penned by a good friend and absolute writerly mentor of mine, Ebuka ‘theYakadude’ Igbokwe. He’s brilliant and he has a lot to say. And here’s the opening salvo. Read and enjoy.

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Yaky Inkspired: REALITY ‘CHEQUE’

Produce something. Anything. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you should produce more than you consume. The greater the proportion of things you’ve produced (or caused to be produced) is to things you’ve consumed, the greater your worth. The progress of society is that at every point it has produced more than enough to prevent automatic autophagia. There’s usually this belief that quality always trumps quantity but that really is a fallacy. Quality comes from quantity. You’d expect one who’s been making crappy stuff longer to have more experience. It is said that the key to better writing is writing more crap until it evolves into something better, and there is a certain truth to that. If one’s percentage of quality is only 10% and he makes 10,000 items, he has produced better quality than one whose margin is 99% who has only produced 500 items. He even has more experience at producing quality stuff (as odd as that is). So flood the world; who knows, some people might even have a liking for your crap (if anything, it’d be cheap). So, do not hate on the waste paper basket; feed it generously; it would reciprocate your generosity.

It may be tempting to produce a lot of kids with this in mind. LOL. I said feed your waste paper bin; there is a reason why it is so easy to produce quantity. Anyway, kids sort of are short term production, long term consumption and potential (that’s the operational word) longer term production.

Never pray for talent. Nothing predisposes one to laziness more than apparent talent. Talent discourages one from working hard most times because it promises you easy qualification. It makes the notion of building muscles in wherever one’s talent lies redundant. I’m not saying that talented people rarely work hard. I’m just saying that it is easier not to work hard when one is talented. One might achieve the means for survival relatively easy, while less talented ones strive for meeting basic survival requirements, working hard, applying themselves fully. And when the talent sees how easy this is, he counts himself mighty fortunate and usually takes a nap in the shade under the tree, blissfully unconcerned. Determination and drive; exertion; these drive progress, these really move things. Talent is just a crowbar, which is nothing but a piece of metal in incapable, irresolute hands.

Look around today, the apparently blessed countries seem to be very impoverished. Societies with great natural endowments have been characterized by complacency towards industry. It has nothing to do with talent because I believe that to be homogeneously distributed among humans. It has everything to do with the level of exertion towards survival.

Another thing is that our social evolution has widened the scope of relevance, making the definition of talent more accommodating, making more geniuses than ever. Case in point: Guinness World Records. Talent has become more like stamp-collecting; there are loads of them out there, most worth a little more than a large stool sample but only one in a millions odd enough to be worth a lot of its weight in gold. In the not too distant future, everyone will be talented.

Learn to lie. God created man and saw how pitiful and how out of place he really is. He gave him the ability to lie to FEEL great. He gave him the ability to lie to BE great. He gave him the ability to lie to make him enjoy life. He then told him not to lie not to stop him from lying (God isn’t that naive to wish for that) but to curb the excessive use of that resource. Like everything else (even lifesaving resources) if indulged in excessively, lying has its deleterious side effects.

I know a lot of brows have furrowed deep like my mother’s rainy season corn patch. Let me explain myself. Fake it till you make it: the singular maxim responsible for shooting 97.098% of people into stardom, and the opening statement in almost all self-help motivational books. How many romantic lines have an iota of truth in them? Novelists, poets, dramatists; people who have lied their way into our hearts (I’m not complaining; still intend to tell mine). Hope: lies we tell ourselves to keep on going on in tough times. Have you read Arabian Nights? What would have happened if Scheherazade didn’t know how to tell lies? Where would we be if we didn’t tell any lies? It would be boring too; there are a million ways to tell a lie and only one way to tell the truth.

The lie is necessary to tell the world why it needs you; which may actually be that it doesn’t but you don’t let on on that. Watch out, you are as successful as the job you did is good. The world needs you as much as you convince it that it does.

Summary: Make crap. Screw talent. Lie capably.

Written by The Yakadude

Posted by Walt Shakes on January 30, 2014

https://mymindsnaps.wordpress.com/2014/01/30/yaky-ink-spired-reality-cheque/