What are you known for?
Chronicles of an Afropreneur
Dear ,
I'm going to tell you short story of what happened to me recently.
As you know in Nigeria, the power supply can be elliptic sometimes. I have a portable generator housed some yards from my apartment and it has come in handy especially that I now 100% work from home - calls, meetings, interviews, radio sessions, etc.
I love my comfort and detest that I have to switch on and off my generator myself when there is an outage, and I have been looking for a non-human solution for weeks. Last month, I stumbled on a young tech graduate who agreed to build an 'automatic power changeover' to solve my problem. Unfortunately, he wasn't available to help me install it, but he sent a very descriptive manual on how to install the device.
So I called my 'local' electrician, who was a cheaper option, to install the device and it turned out to be a funny story. I already asked him if he had installed something like this previously and he assured me he had. Fast forward to the installation day, we turned on the generator and half house did not have power supply. To make things worse, the generator did not automatically turn off when power from the national grid was supplied. You should have seen how my electrician kept on fidgeting and pulling wires here and there until he gave up and told me the device must be faulty.
Out of anger, I called the young tech graduate and offered to pay him some more to install the device in my house. Guess what? In 15 - 30 minutes he had remedied the problem and connected the device the right way.
What can we learn from this?
It is ok to know a lot of things and be a generalist, but you must be great at one thing. What are you know for? What is your strength? People seek specialists to solve their problems. No one goes to the pharmacist for a surgery.
Be comfortable with saying "I don't know", letting go of that money/payment will not kill you. It will make you look bad when you do not deliver on your promise.
Seek help when you do not know and recognize those that help, it is ok to share the glory.
Spend on quality. Making concessions on price and quality will make you spend more in the future.
What else did you learn from this story? Reply to this mail.
Side note: I would like to hold 10 life/business clarity sessions with 10 people in the next 3 weeks and will share details with you soon. And do not forget to forward or share this newsletter with a friend today.
Keep grinding,
Uwem