First Gentleman with Wilson Orhiunu
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Friedrich Kekule slept in 1865 and dreamt of a snake eating its tail and discovered Benzene rings. Keith Richards woke from sleep to play the guitar Riff of Satisfaction – the 1965 hit for the Rolling Stones. Archimedes slept, woke up then jumped into the bath and discovered that his displaced bath water equalled his body’s volume.
You have slept, you have had your bath and you have done this for many years so tell me, where is your Eureka moment of morning glory?
To wake up with an award-winning solution, one must go to bed with an all embracing problem. Weeping may endure for a night but joy comes in the morning.
Everyone has problems but not everyone is in great turmoil and internal conflict striving for a solution. The beauty of life is humans have the ability to live side by side with a problem patiently while working out a solution. Some go the next step of not even bothering to find a solution. They give up hope of life with their difficulties and live with them.
Accepting problems and succumbing to a leant hopelessness has the advantage of freeing one from conflict. When that difference between the way it is now and the way it should be is eliminated, a strange kind of peace results. Life becomes a permanent ‘business as usual’ existence with no conflicts and sleep that involves problem solving brain waves.
Problem solving usually needs one to look at things from a different angle. Experience becomes the chief enemy when one tries to look at issues in a new light. In dreams however, anything goes. While experience might provide the framework for the dream, elementals interact in a way that defies logic. New connects are made and things act in new ways. Plant talk, plates have LCD screens and jollof rice have Wi-Fi connectivity.
The unusual happens in our sleep and the pressing issues on our thoughts assume roles like actors on a stage. That seemly random interplay of odd bed fellows such as the mobile phone diving into the pot of soup and coming out as wristwatch or a bottle of Fanta getting married to bottle of engine oil might be meaningless to some but ground-breaking to others.
So it pays to have problems or maybe ambitions, for they are identical twins. The minute one aspires to have great achievements, one at the same time has the problem and burden of finding out how exactly this dream would be achieved and what will be the next step.
I once had a friend who used to ask me ‘who’s your problem?’ any time I said something which sounded unusual to them. People will find it strange when ambition is mentioned. Try telling someone you wish to swim across the French Canal and they think you have a mental problem.
Now you may have a ‘finish’ problem or a lack of experience problem and what you really need is someone to brain-storm your obstacles and make a list of possible solutions.
Now, that sounds like hard and productive work. It is easier for a friend to brandish you psychologically unbalanced than to work with you as you start to swim for three or four hours daily. People who have given up on all their dreams and are now at peace with themselves in the land of mediocrity expect everyone that associates with them to do likewise.
So, when they hear about your great ambition and call you psychologically imbalanced, they are right. But they do not know why they are right. They think you are mad for having great ambitions but you are actually mad to be hanging out with dream killers and not recognising that fact and then worse still telling them about your plans. The Eureka moment will come when you wake one morning and decide to have new friends.
The natures of problems need to be well articulated to self. Puzzles on life that are difficult to solve must be named, written down and studied for hours. The action plans for solution usually comes in steps and once a problem has been broken down to small-sized issues and then prioritised, the creativity can start to flow.
Take one who wishes to attempt a ‘Brokexit’, that is escape the clutches of lack and poverty. The first step will be to recognise the scale of the problem. How broke is broke? Is this a generational thing and has anyone in the family every escaped financial lack?
Broke people would naturally have broke friends so it might be a waste of time discussing the ‘Brokexit’ plans with current friends. It is also hard to make rich friends when you are broke so the next best thing might be to read books and what people do to improve themselves financially.
After months of reading, a Eureka moment materialises and if action is applied to inspiration success is not far away.
So many talk about doing well for themselves and that is good. The next step is to develop a very strong desire for the end destination and plot out a written path to it. Know where you are and work from there. The path might seem unclear but keep on studying and you brain will join up all the vague dots lines till one day you wake up on a clear path to success.
