PERSPECTIVE

Seven laws of power

By Bayo Ogunmupe

ALWAYS dream of power by shooting higher than you can reach. Don’t bother to be better than your contemporaries and predecessors, just try to be better than yourself. This is why I am introducing you to these laws of leadership. To me, leadership, success and power mean the same thing. So, learn to use them interchangeably.

God has built laws into His universe. These laws are no respecter of persons. Often bad people harness the right laws for the wrong purposes, while good people assume that sincerity and diligence are sufficient for success. But while evil people get the right results for wrong purposes, the good fail because they aren’t harnessing the right laws. So, I want to tell you seven laws that are absolutes in the struggle for success in life. Following them assures you a tremendous adventure; you can ignore them at your peril, finding them working against you.

One, learn to be excited about your work. This is an invincible law that upholds work as the progenitor of success. This law isn’t about work as we usually think of it; it is getting excited about whatever you are doing for a living. However, work, wherever you find it, implies only one kind of thing: detail, monotony, preparation, striving, and weariness. That is what we all have to overcome, no matter what our work is.

However, the first law of leadership requires me to get excited about the miserable job I have right now. At sixty years of age, I have been learning that life isn’t doing what you like to do. Real life is doing what you ought to do. There is nothing that can make you more excited about your work than a sense of its importance and urgency.

Fires of greatness in our hearts can be kept burning only by developing this sense of urgency and importance in our work – the work we are doing now.

Two, the second law of power is use or lose. Jehovah gives everyone certain attributes – intellect, talents and then He says, “If you use what you have, I’ll increase it, but if you don’t, you will lose it.” Thus it is use or lose law of success. A way of not losing your God given talents is to be sincere to yourself in every sphere. When you have a job to do, do it. Another rule is to be loyal to yourself, your ideals and be loyal to your family and business partners, including your boss. Loyalty is something you give without getting anything back. And in giving loyalty, you are getting more loyalty. Without loyalty, nothing can be achieved. The biblical servant who multiplied the one naira given him by his master was made ruler over ten cities, whereas the servant who did not put his naira to use lost that which he had.

Yet another rule of retaining your talent is discipline. It is a quality you achieve little by little. You submit yourself to authority, a job, a goal, by discipline you gain greatness through perseverance.

Certainly, there is no other way to get more of what you need than by using what you have. The third law of power is production to perfection. This law says if you are not making something happen today, you would not know much about perfection tomorrow. He that leaveth nothing to chance will do few things poorly, only that he will do very few things.

The fourth law of power is give to get. My maternal grandfather was a practitioner of Olodumare, God in Yoruba belief. He was neither Christian nor Moslem. He taught us to give without hope of getting in return. He was more truthful than present day parents. If you give gifts to the well-to-do, you will only receive what you traded out. You will not get anything from God in return, because you are only trading with gifts. If you give to someone unable to help you, then God can repay you for your kindness. If you are giving to get, you are not giving spiritually, you are trading. Learn to give without hope of anything in return. No one was ever honoured for what he received. Honour has been the reward of what he gave. If you give to the one who can not pay back, what you get from God in return is a greater capacity to go beyond where you are. That is a law of success.

Five, the fifth law of success is exposure to experience. In the beginning, God gives everyone a psychological key ring. And He made a law that says, “Every time you expose yourself to experience, I’ll give you another key of experience for your Key ring.” Soon the key ring begins to be filled with experiences, then we begin to know how to pick the right key to unlock the situation we face. The person who has no experience fumbles around trying to find the key. As you accumulate experience you use those keys over and over again, unlocking doors into success and fortune. However, there’s no way to gain experience other than through exposure. So, in all thy getting, get experience in other to gain and retain power.

The sixth law of power is flexible planning. This is another phrase for Napoleon’s extrapolatory thinking. Since whatever can go wrong will go wrong, so plan on your planning going wrong. Be flexible by having alternative plans. A person is nothing until he is harnessed to teamwork and disciplined to guidance. Your situation may be uncongenial but it shall not long remain so if you but perceive an ideal and strive to reach it.

The seventh law of power is prayer, prayer without ceasing. Through prayer you get motivated for success. No one can fight his way to the top and stay there without exercising the fullest measure of grit, courage, determination and prayer. Everyone who wins does so by firmly resolving to succeed in life; he then procures enough persistence to transform his resolution to reality. Without persistence no one ever wins any worthwhile place among his fellow men. Finally, we need to pray so that we can prevent the devil from ensnaring us. Moreover, prayer is God’s appointed way for obtaining things. The secret of all lack is neglect of prayer. We have not because ye ask not,” James 4:2. These words contain the secret of the poverty and helplessness of the average Nigerian – neglect of prayer. Mercy is what we need, grace is what we must have or all our lives will end in failure. Prayer is the way to gain them. Prayer with thanksgiving to Jehovah and the petition for forgiveness is the panacea to winning life’s battles. Many things seem at war with these laws of power. But practice will prove their authenticity.

Our champion for today is Jose Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher and humanist who greatly influenced the cultural and literary renaissance of Spain in the 20th century. Ortega was born May 1883, in Madrid, Spain the second of four children by Jose Ortega Munilla and Dolores Gasset.

Ortega studied at Madrid University and in Germany. As professor of metaphysics at Madrid in 1910, he published Adam in Paradise; Quixotes Meditations (1923) and Modern Theme. He saw individual life as the ultimate realty, reason as a function of life and for truth he substituted the perspective of each individual. He shared the preoccupation of his generation with Spain’s political problems. He founded the periodicals, The Sun and The Review of the West. He went into exile between 1936 and 1945. He returned from Argentina to Spain in 1945 and in his Revolt of the masses (1929) he characterized 20th century society as being dominated by masses of mediocre who he proposed should surrender social leadership to the minorities of cultivated independent men. He died in October 1955.