‘…And shalt pour out into all these vessels’; - the big moral behind this great story was in this statement. However, it was the way in which this articulate wise man expressed it, that stayed with me forever. He said, ‘EMPTY WHAT YOU HAVE INTO WHAT YOU DO NOT HAVE’.
Some time went by after that, and as the power of meditation would do, this epigram had come to mean something entirely and completely different to me over the years past.
At a point in time of my career in Spoken Word poetry, when I was torn between where my passion led me and the harsh realities of the responsibilities that were expected of me, what these words had come to mean to me saved my life.
One afternoon, just out of the blue, I was jolted up by this moment of epiphany, and in a clear vision I could see what in the body of knowledge of business accounting was termed a, ‘T account’. In my high school years I was taught a law in accountancy that you should always, ‘Debit the receiver, and credit the giver’.
‘Credit the giver?’ I thought to myself.
Suddenly on the left side, or debit side of the ‘T account’ in my vision, I could see a tall list of almost all the responsibilities I knew of, that I had in my life then, grievously overshadowing the right or credit side of the, ‘T account’ – this became even more vivid as the, ‘T account’ translated into a balance scale with my responsibilities far out-running its pan, whereas the credit side hanged in the air – empty!
‘Credit the giver…’ I heard a voice whisper to me, just in time before I could be transfixed to the scary sight of my accumulating responsibilities.
‘Credit the giver’, the voice repeated, and this time asked me, ‘What do you have to give?’
‘Nothing Lord’, I responded in the vision, ‘I have nothing that I can give’.
‘Take a good look again’, the voice said.
I looked and then retorted, ‘Lord I have nothing’.
Then the voice asked me, ‘What about the life I gave you on earth?’, and then emphasized by adding, ‘You have time; put that to your credit!’
Gradually, as I discerned where this voice of wisdom was leading me, I began to feel very good about myself – hopeful I should say, albeit quietly somewhere in the back of my mind, I kept wondering why something so common as, ‘Time’, had never occurred to me as a form of possession, just like many other people.
‘Could it have been that I was overwhelmed or my sight was blinded by the fact that I had so much problem to my debit?’ I wondered.
Then this voice, to my surprise fished out my thoughts and quickly interrupted by saying, ‘Responsibilities are not problems, it is a wrong mindset to carry’, and added, ‘If you learn to perceive them correctly, responsibilities can be an inspiration or springboard for your success in life’.
‘Take a look at your credit now,’ the voice requested, and then asked, ‘why do you think it says, ‘Credit the GIVER?’’.
‘GIVING is how you take care of all those responsibilities’, the voice revealed.
‘Now, I have given you time, what else can you add to it that you can also give?’ questioned the voice further.
When I looked again, the balance scale now appeared way better than it had been before, thanks to the voice, I had time to my credit, and my capacity already equaled the aggregate of my burgeoning responsibilities, almost tipping the scale in favour of the right side.
‘I have given you twenty-four hours every day’, declared the voice, and asked, ‘What can you do with twenty-four hours a day?’
‘Spoken Word Lord’, I answered, because that was all I did back then.
‘Ok then,’ responded the voice, and instructed, ‘now empty what you have into what you do not have’.
‘But Lord,’ I questioned, ‘how could Spoken Word possibly keep an eye on my clumsy little cousin at home in my absence?’ I inquired further, ‘how could it ensure that my younger sister was behaving right whenever nobody was looking?’
‘Well I have done my bit, the rest is up to you – I gave you time, and I gave you the ability for words’
The voice carried on, ‘Well perhaps you should begin to look at what you do (Spoken Word), in the new light of what it means to empty what you have into what you do not have’. ‘Spoken Word should not always mean to you formulating words into verses and presenting them to an audience on the stage’ the voice added. ‘It is the way you have viewed it all these years, and used it – according to the limit of your understanding, but I did not put those limits on it when I gave it to you’. ‘You can make that picture richer for example, by considering the various steps that constitute the creative process of formulating words into verses, and delivering them on the stage to an audience, - classify these steps into unique individual elements, and then use as ingredients to prepare the solution for any responsibility – when you do this, you will discover that there are innumerable responses to any responsibility that seem to weigh you down – that is how much answers I have placed inside of you, - in abundance!’
‘Lord, Lord!’ I exclaimed in amazement of such revelation knowledge, ‘I had never thought like that before Lord’, I said, ‘Wow Lord, thank you!’
‘You shall henceforth learn to perceive what you do differently and creatively,’ he said and added, ‘If you are going to succeed, how you view the rod in your hand is very important’.
Until that day when I listened to the voice, it had never dawned on me that all these years I had wrongfully perceived the gift of Spoken Word given me, – as just another talent, and this of course, accounted for why society also projected such reckless image unto me – just another talented guy, another untrained guy, wanting to live forever in the limelight – with no depth, just another talented guy refusing to understand, that his talent contributed only one percent to his success. Another burden to the world, who doesn’t know the value of planning, preparation, strategy, grounding one’s self, and living unselfishly through serving others first.
That couldn’t be more true, I was indeed the very image of that talented guy, living society’s expectations- going the way every talented person was expected to go – put themselves out there in the way of brute public scrutiny in the name of stage performances, jump at the beck and call to any invitation to events just to get that little piece of attention that they so craved like a drug, in order to keep them going on the high, that made them believe the lie that, ‘We all dey hustle’, just like society itself. Expend his talent at party after party, and hopefully end up in the limelight, like many today, with everything private they do always public in the media, living other people’s dreams and expectations and not really having a plan or any vision of purposeful, truthful or authentic impact – not taking time off the, ‘scene’, to recuperate what they had emptied themselves out of, until the day they just crushed and burnt and couldn’t function anymore.
‘Talent can run out you know’, the voice jibed.
‘I had no idea my Lord’
‘That is why you must plan for it, set goals to achieve within a timeline’.
‘Yes Lord, I am changed from now on’.
‘Now take a look again at your,‘T account’’, the voice admonished.
I looked, and Lord was I not excited? Time and Spoken Word to my credit, the two completely outweighed my responsibilities – which still kept coming, but with my new revelation knowledge I knew just how to stay on top of every situation.
‘So, after emptying what you have into what you did not have’ the voice said, ‘after filling up all your empty vessels with your pot of oil (what you have), next is to go for the barns, widen them – and DREAM BIG!’
At this point I just kept quiet and listened to the voice.
Have a vision, and set new goals, objectives and targets for your gift.
A vision is the practical impact of your gift – solve practical problems, don’t complain like those who do – turn situations around and make a fortune.
I was the voice that spoke through that very accomplished man who once said that if you wanted to make $1Billion, you should solve a $10Billion problem.
Does that sound too abstract?
Well think about a city like Accra for example, with over six million people living in it, if you were able to create a system of work, with time and Spoken Word for example as resources, to solve a problem on that scale so that your solution generates an impact in the city, you would be rolling in millions.
Another way of looking at this, is if what you do with what you have, currently is bringing you about a $1,000 monthly, it would then be the magnitude of the problems you are solving, and if perhaps the people that altogether exchange this $1,000 for what you do with what you have constitute between five and ten, these five and ten people would then amount to the magnitude of the practical impact you are making with what you do with what you have – which could be the equivalence of a nuclear family.
Now, if you wanted to graduate from impacting five or ten people into impacting five million people, which is the equivalence of the population of the city of Accra, what you would then need to do would be to RE-PACKAGE whatever it is that you do, in other words, re-organising the business methods or systems and structures of how you solve problems with what you do, making more room with the city in mind, and then moving on from impacting the equivalence of the size of a nuclear family to venturing towards processing the size of the equivalence of a neighborhood, which is about some 20 times the size of your current impact of a nuclear family. Now re-package again, this time with an eye for the community, the equivalence of about ten neigbourhoods, and eventually you will be impacting a city of five million people.
Now if impacting the size of a nuclear family is bringing you a $1,000 monthly, then impacting the size of a neighbourhood, which is about twenty times that of the size of a nuclear family, will then be bringing you about $20,000 monthly. Further, impacting the equivalence of the size of a community which is about ten times that of the size of the equivalence of a neighbourhood will be bringing you about $200,000 monthly. You can now do the rest of the math for yourself to see how much should be coming in after impacting a city the size of Accra, that has hundreds of neighbourhoods inside it if not thousands – this form of critical thinking and innovation is called, ‘Emptying what you have into what you do not have’.
09/17/17
Osu, Accra
