Decade Blogs - Japheth J. Omojuwa - The Power of Purpose and Persistence

Decade Blogs

Japheth J. Omojuwa probably needs no introduction on Social Media, he is one of the few young Nigerians who has found the means of leveraging reach and platform to inform, to change or to muster.

It was when he won the Nigerian Blog Awards 2011 for the Best Political Blog that I discovered him and his influence that had a really big following on Twitter.

He comes across as passionate, engaging and forceful, sometimes almost forgetting the huge responsibility on his shoulders as his simple humanity takes to the fore in a cause, a campaign or a controversy, yet he can be as effective in raising funds for charitable and humanitarian causes or getting the ear of the powerful as he can be devastating in rubbishing positions, people or policies that appear to serve hypocritical or selfish interests.

I am honoured to have him contribute a blog to my #YourBlogOnMyBlog Series commemorating my Decade of Blogging.

Blog - To Celebrate My Decade of Blogging

Omojuwa as we know him, blogs on at Omojuwa.com which he also offers as a platform for the views and opinions of others, he tweets with the @omojuwa Twitter handle and he writes for various media organs.

Here, he writes about how time, patience, dedication, determination, purpose and persistence governs longevity and success. Please enjoy reading this piece.

The power of Purpose and Persistence

Anyone can do a thing consistently for a decade if they get paid for it, doing it for that long without pay is noteworthy; even more extraordinary if it is a venture that helps to make others better.

If there were ever anything I’d guess would keep such a person going, persistence would be my first guess. Whatever Akin Akintayo has going for him that keeps him running a blog for ten consecutive years, persistence must definitely be part of that mix.

I have a reason for thinking persistence must have played a huge part in his story, but this must never be assumed to mean his being persistent was all he needed to keep going. This is about his persistence though. There are exceptions, but the central theme in the stories of most successful people is that of persistence. There are people who have succeeded without being overly talented; there are loads of people who have succeeded without attending the best universities.

I can bet you know many people who have succeeded despite their very poor backgrounds, but if you were tasked to find ten men or women who succeeded without persistence, you’d need a bit of persistence to endure the search and even at that, you’d be lucky to find any.

Why is persistence such a crucial factor for success? It is simple enough; everything takes time. Time is one of the fundamental realities in our world. Everything we do is subjected to it. Our universal laws are a function of time. We live within time so we’d never get to succeed at anything without time as a sort of reactant in our mix.

It is a kind of limiting reality, but like Friction, it helps us in ways we may never really appreciate. If you ever do a thing that does not take time, please kindly reach me to tap into your powers. How much you are able to succeed depends on how long you are able to wait.

Stories abound of people who missed out on greatness because they left their craft just before they got the break. We all know people that missed out on being rewarded just because they were impatient to wait a day, a month or maybe even a year longer.

It takes persistence to spend 4 weeks focused on passing an examination without being distracted by anything else. Those four weeks, if wasted by some others could be the difference between a life of great success and a life of mediocrity.

Sometimes, if you are not willing to wait, you are not deserving of the prize. When next you meet a man or woman you deem successful, ask him or her how hard it was to persist at their craft. They’d tell you it never came cheap but it is what it is, if you really want it, why give up on it?

So you see, we have lessons of our own to learn in this story. We should ask him many questions about how he kept going for so long but before then we should thank him for showing us it can be done!