if you ever want to understand the money dynamics, there are some things you need to understand. Money is spiritual but religious activities don’t generate it. You don’t command resources through fasting and prayer. True wealth is generated by alignment with God’s order in respect of the principles that produce it. Alignment is the essence of prayers in relation to prosperity. Money made outside alignment is destructive and unsustainable.  If you want to genuinely generate resources in any economy, there are four things you must always keep in mind. They are industry, ownership, gratitude and stewardship. They go together and are the four legs on which enduring prosperity rests…

Let’s begin today with INDUSTRY. Before God gave Adam a wife, He gave him an assignment, cultivating a garden called Eden.

Eden means pleasure. Cultivation is work, adding value to what already existed in creation (a planted garden).

It is inspired, intentional and focused. Ministry may not be your work but your work is your ministry. Don’t be carried away by the esoteric exclusivity attached to that word today. Ministry simply means service. Your ministry is the platform of delivering inherent value codified in a service or a product to others. Your work is what you were created to do. It can be expressed in any environment where your value code is required to solve a significant problem. Your work chose you, not the other way round.

Your work is different from your job, which may be what you currently do to serve someone else who has found and is doing his own “work.” The job merely serves as what puts food on your table and clothes on your back for as long as the employer thinks you are worth being kept on the payroll.

Survival is the essence of most jobs. Sometimes, the outcome of a job is just to keep your head above water financially, a reason why some people refer to it as “just over broke”. If you learn to bring your “work” to the job, it makes you a needed entity that the establishment cannot just throw away.

Thriving is the essence of WORK.

On a job, what you are paid or what you are paid to do is largely never your decision. The piper’s paymaster still dictates the tune the piper plays.

Only your work gives you the leeway to set your direction and outcomes – even if you are on another person’s payroll.

Life’s greatest fulfillment comes from finding a nexus between your job and your work.

ALSO READ: Bandits have no political party, Sokoto gov’s aide tells politicians

Eden, which means pleasure, is the environment where work is rewarding. Anything that doesn’t give you pleasure is also not likely to build you sustainable wealth.

Human needs are largely motivated by two key things; pain and pleasure. These two things are what everyone spends money on. Every product in the marketplace has to help remove or reduce pain and promote or prolong pleasure. Those who can identify and solve problems around both will remain successful irrespective of what “village people” do to try and stop them.

Last week, the Nigerian social media space was agog with the story of a young intern who called the Chairman of the company who is in his sixtiesby name in his interface with the prospective employees. She is probably of the same age as his daughter or younger. He.  The Chairman of the multi-billion banking conglomerate was not impressed by such brazen “wokeness” on the part of someone who was just about to be employed, and he wasted no time in putting her in her place. Conversely, in the same meeting was another young lady who, when given the microphone, asked a very germane question, fundamental to the successful operations of the bank. She didn’t stop there. She went ahead to identify a problem she noticed during their training and proceeded to proffer an immediately deployable solution. The Group Chairman was so impressed that he asked her to come forward for a hug, a rare public display of such from him. He did not stop there. He answered her question, thanked her for her observation, and told the Head of HR to place her in strategic position in customer experience with a specific instruction to be kept abreast of her progress. He also said he would take a personal interest in her development in the same company. Same company. Same environment. Same Chairman. Same gathering. But different outcomes for each of two interns. Both stood before the person who had the final word in the company! One saw an opportunity to demonstrate wokeness and ended up attracting rebuke. The other saw an opportunity to demonstrate value and attracted commendation. To one it was a job. To the other, it was work.

Pleasure has birthed huge industries like food, fashion, sexuality, entertainment, sports, healthy living, happiness, investments, building wealth, real estate, power, spirituality, etc.

So has pain. Pain is a product of unfulfilled desires or inability to pursue pleasure and happiness. Whatever helps man to come out of that bind or minimize his experience in that valley is a potential harvest field for anyone who makes it possible.

Technology is a product of the desire to minimise or avoid pain and accentuate the attainment of pleasure through facilitated function.

Issues like sickness, career or business setbacks, broken homes, mental health, poverty, failure and hunger-birth industries that address those problems/pains with a view to removing or mitigating the pain and restoring pleasure.

Wherever humans exist, those platforms will always exist and the challenges they create per time will determine the platform of prosperity at that time.

Beyond every human crisis is the pleasure and satisfaction that man seeks when the crisis or current siege of pain is over. Those who have eyes to identify those roadblocks and help him to navigate his current crisis will not only attract his attention but also his resources.

Industry or enterprise is not what happens because someone empowered you financially to open a shop or a business. Industry is what happens when an inspired idea solves a significant problem for a significant number of people in a significant way that results in significant reward. One man’s pain is another man’s harvest field. Or why do you think the “Big pharma” industry is built around sickness? If everyone had healthy teeth, how would a dentist feed his family? If everyone had a house, nobody would be enriched through real estate business or at least being a landlord.

It doesn’t take a genius to identify or analyse problems or criticize government policy. If you want the best “solutions” to national crisis, go to a beer parlor where everyone, after a few bottles of beer, begins to propound theories about “good governance” and “bad” policies. Even a village idiot can eloquently complain.

Genius is in the ability to see that problem like everyone else but interpret it differently. The world needs more Calebs and Joshuas who can see “bread” in the same creatures that their contemporaries saw as “giants”.

The principle is not rocket science.

See a problem, solve it.

See a gap, fill it.

See a need, meet it.

See a pain, heal it.Why?

In enterprise, you don’t sell a product.

You sell a SOLUTION…. Continued

Remember, the sky is not your limit, God is!