Living life deliberately

"I love paying rent when rent's due," is a line from a 2Pac Shakur song that captures the sentiment of every man who is not a crook. Men have a natural instinct to run the world; we love to have lots of money in our pockets to pay all the bills.

Chatting with British author Jane Rogers. She has lived her life deliberately.

But as living costs shoot up, as employers pay so little for so much, as banks and shylocks loot everything just a day past the payback date, men are losing their confidence and becoming mere shells of their former selves.

Gone are the days when a simple education guaranteed one a job that meant living comfortably thereafter. My father was a District Health Inspector for many years with just some post-secondary school certificates, but educated all 12 of us, his children, to university on his meager salary, without being corrupt.

He just lived life deliberately; which means planning every move, including the people you associate with. You cannot expect to win by hanging out with loafers, wasteful and pessimistic people always. Otherwise you get initiated into their philosophy that life is too tough and unfair; that one must therefore strive not but wait to die.

If W.E.B. Du Bois had had that mentality, he would never have risen above vicious racism to become the first black to earn a PhD from Harvard University, and go on to become a scholar and writer of enviable influence.

Even when Theodore Roosevelt said the most important ingredient in the formulae for success is knowing how to get along with people, he didn't mean you get along with just anybody. I grew up seeing my father kick smokers and drunkards out of his home because he could never allow anyone to contaminate his children.

He often invited successful men of integrity home to dinner to inspire us. These were the trusted friends he went to whenever he failed to raise our school fees. Living life deliberately also means saving a portion of your earnings however little, and investing it in alignment with your goals, when it accumulates. Remember a man without goals is a lost man.

In all you must become a genius, which means according to that inventive man Thomas Edison, is "one per cent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." It certainly calls for dogged strength but as it's the secret to not just paying rent when rent it due, but to greater attainments as well, it\s worth it