What My Father Taught Me -HRH Lamido Sanusi
"I remember in 1978 or 1979, I was an undergraduate and my father had retired from the Foreign Service and we were having a conversation in the car. And at that time I was all over the place; I wanted to be a professor...
"I remember in 1978 or 1979, I was an undergraduate and my father had retired from the Foreign Service and we were having a conversation in the car. And at that time I was all over the place; I wanted to be a professor...
I wanted to be this and that. But he said to me, 'This is not how to be somebody if you really want to play a role in history, you need to define yourself; pick one or two or three things and do them constantly. And these things don't have to be big things.'
And he gave me examples. 'If you just decide that every time you give an appointment, you will not be one minute late'. It looks like small thing but it is difficult. But what happens is...
...after few weeks or a few months everybody knows you as somebody who is never late for an appointment. And if you hold on to that for the rest of your life, if you are not remembered for anything else, you will be remembered as someone who was never late for an appointment.
If you decide that you will be impeccably clean, you will be remembered as an impeccably clean person. So life is not about ambition, 'I want to be President, I want to be this, or I want to be that; 'it's about: 'What's it that I hold that is important that I want to hold on to
