Shhhhhh! Draw closer; Viva Naija and Mike Bloomberg reveal the secrets to financial success

By the way, secret #1: Social media aproko won’t help you. Face ya work! Except Viva Naija. Viva Naija will totally help you to be rich. Or at least help you smile while stealing your neighbour’s data to read it.

Okay, seriously. I was going to report that according to Business Insider, Mike Bloomberg, CEO of Bloomberg LP and former New York mayor, was in London recently and gave a lecture at Goldman Sachs to help small businesses, but the truth is…he said nothing new. Work hard, stop the pity party, stay focussed, have a plan, set goals.

But if I say it, I will hear weeeeehn. I know what you Nigerians are like. Common home training, you don’t have. That’s when somebody will tell me that my mates have house in Banana Island, simple, ordinary banana I don’t have and I want to educate people on success. You people are just goats.

So, here are the wise words of Mike Bloomberg. Read them…then go find somebody who knows somebody who knows Dasuki.

1. On keeping perspective:

“I’ve never had a bad job. I’ve only ever had two bad days in my life — when my mother died and when my father died. Apart from that, how bad can it be?”

Lesson: once the worst has happened, you learn to truck on. And if the worst hasn’t happened, stop acting like it has and suck it up.

2. On the value of hard work:

“If there’s only one key to success, it’s hard work. I always give the most difficult and complicated assignment I have to the most overworked person in the company. There’s a reason they don’t have time — work is a marketplace, and it’s telling you this person is good.

“When I worked at Salomon Brothers, I was always the first person in the office in the morning. The second was Barney Salomon, the managing partner. So if he wanted to know the football scores or if he needed a match for his cigar, then he’d come over and talk to me. All it was, was coming in early. If you like what you’re doing, it’s fun — if you don’t, it’s miserable.”

Lesson: Get in early, leave late, and go further than your competitors.

3. On setting realistic goals:

“None of you are going to be Mark Zuckerbergs. It’s just not going to happen.”

Lesson: stop dreaming about mansions while living in your face-me-I-face-you, manage your expectations and make the first thousand before you imagine the first million.

4. On doing something that you’re passionate about:

“It must be miserable to wake up every day and hate what you do. Go and do something else. If you hate it, how can it be worse?”

Lesson: you’ll never be great at something if you don’t like doing it.

5. On thriving in adversity:

“If you say, ‘Oh last week I cured cancer, two weeks before that I wrote the great American novel, and last month I brought peace to the Middle East,’ my eyes glaze over.”

“But if you say,’Look, my father never existed, my mum had cancer, I’m working five shifts at McDonald’s,’ that’s the person I’m going to hire.”

Lesson: no one cares about your laurels. Are you still hungry though? Do you still have the desire to change things? To deliver excellence?

6. On being the best version of yourself possible:

“There is a characteristic that all good leaders have and it’s that they’re genuine. Will this person be with you in the trenches, go over the top, or will they stay back and say, ‘You go’?”

Lesson: against all odds, be a stand-up guy/gal. Nobody likes a slime ball. Even a rich slime ball.