Your Parents Worked Hard to Bring You Up! Bring them out of Darkness Today.

It was a typical weekday morning in November 2015, when Dele got the call from the hospital saying his dad was in the emergency room getting treated for carbon monoxide poisoning.

His dad had woken up with a slight headache and thought nothing of it initially. He felt worse by the minute until he was lying on the floor, dizzy and sick to his stomach. Fortunately, he was able to call the local hospital just before he passed out.

His mistake? When he set up the generator the previous night, he thought he was ventilated enough by having the doors and windows open, but with a wind blowing the exhaust into the house via the open doors and windows, he nearly died from inhaling the carbon monoxide released through the exhaust pipes of the generator.

Had Dele installed an inverter for his dad rather than bought a generator, this tragic incident that could have ended very differently would have been avoided

There are several benefits of buying inverters for our parents over other sources of alternative power like generators. These benefits include:

1. Inverters are safer: Inverters are safer for our parents compared to generators for instance.

Using a generator requires buying and storing petrol/diesel which poses a risk as these are flammable materials. Inverters don't need fuel.

Also as seen in the case of Dele's dad, generators emit dangerous fumes which are deadly to the health of our parents. Inverters don't do this.

2. Reduces or eliminates electricity bills: We can install inverters to supply some or all of our parent's power needs. As a result, the bills that would be normally incurred for electricity supply will drastically reduce or seize.

3. Inverters make little to no noise.

Generators make a lot of noise when turned on. This can be very annoying and disturbing to our parents who may be trying to catch some sleep. Being that inverters are mostly electrical products, they produce almost no noise making them a better option for our parents.

4. Inverters have lesser maintenance costs: Once we set up inverters for our parents, they are easy to run and require very little to no ongoing maintenance. Our parents don't need to worry about buying fuel, engine oil etc as in the case of generators. Generators also require regular maintenance. The cost of professional repairs and servicing, maintenance and regular fueling makes the usage of a generator very expensive for our parents who may be retired or subsisting on little. Inverters require no fuel and need very little maintenance.

5. Easily and infinitely renewable: A solar inverter uses the sunlight as the power for generating electricity. The inverter collects solar energy during daytime and stores it as usable electrical energy for use during other hours of the day. This means that our parents can literally never run out of electricity. All the electronic devices that help make our parent's lives smooth and easier are kept running leading them to enjoy a higher quality of life even into old age.

6. Inverters have inbuilt fluctuation defenses: Inverters are built to be able to withstand spikes in power. They have devices which help them resist an overload in power.

In a situation where there is a wrong connection, or there is too much electricity flowing, these inbuilt defenses will break up the power until this is fixed. The defenses also help to prevent overloading of the power source.

This guarantees us that our parents are not at any risk posed by fluctuations in electricity supply.

7. Inverters turn on automatically when power is cut: If we install inverters to supply some of our parents needs, the inverters are designed to come up automatically in the event of a power outage which spares our parents any inconveniences that may arise from the interruption in power. Generators do not have such ability, and our parents have to put them on manually before power can be restored.

8. Inverters also make our parent's homes more energy efficient and valuable. This too will continue to rise as the utilization of solar energy becomes more popular.

9. Versatile application: Inverters come in a variety of options and can be utilised in a variety of ways. Depending on our parent's preferences, we can get them specific inverters that can power only specific appliances. Some may utilize and pay for less power off the grid or otherwise. Unlike generators, inverters are versatile to suit different purposes and equipment.

Our parents worked really hard to bring us up!

The least we can do in return is to give them the power that will make their lives easier...

Let's buy an inverter for our parents, bringing them out of the darkness and into the light!

10 Ways To Make Money From Humour

Funny content is always welcome by everyone. I mean who doesn’t need a good laugh right? Regardless of what we may be doing at the moment, a really good joke, crack or humorous situation is often appreciated.

If you've got a good sense of humour, there are several ways you can leverage your talent to earn money.

Everyone enjoys smiling and laughing and if you are skilled enough to make this happen on a regular basis, then consider making money doing this via any of the following ways:-

1. Stand up Comedy: This is probably the most obvious way to make money from being funny. If you’re good with an audience, then perhaps you can establish a career as a stand up comedian. You can perform in clubs, or publicly.

2. As a Host or MC: Your sense of humour can make you an excellent host or emcee at events like weddings, parties, charity functions and many others.

3. As a writer: As an alternative to stand up comedy, you can make money writing jokes. You can write jokes for other comedians, write for TV shows or magazines.

4. You can also leverage your sense of humor to build an audience which can then sell other products or services too. You create a blog where you regularly post humorous content. In time, you will build an audience which you can then market to or sell advertising to other marketers.

5. Submit your jokes to humor websites in return for payment: There are several sites that allows writers to publish funny content, info-graphics and videos and earn money online by entertaining people from all over the world.

6. Merchandise: You can also make money by creating witty and funny shirts, stickers, mugs and other similar items. If you can't create these items yourself, you can partner with producers of these items where you make funny text, images or designs for them and get paid for doing so

7. Become a humorous copy writer: You can make money writing humorous copy for companies that prefer this kind of service.

8. Become a radio DJ: With your sense of humour, you can make money dj'ing for a radio station

9. Create/Sell Joke books and cartoons: You can distill your jokes into book formats which you can offer for sale. Cartoon magazines will also pay for contributions.

10. Create/sell humorous greeting cards: You can also use your sense of humour in greeting and complimentary cards which can be sold.

Among others!

Pretty much any talent or skill has monetary appeal to someone. Making money really is all about finding the people who will appreciate your talents for the value it gives them.

Above are several ways you can make money from humour. Everyone appreciates a good laugh, every one welcomes the comedian.

Make us laugh and get paid for doing so!

Being a Medical Doctor: Punishment or Pleasure?

When we think about medical doctors, most of us immediately picture high income, excitement, glamour and prestige. Afterall, doctors in all fields and specialties basically help to keep people healthy and fit, doing everything from comforting kids with the common cold to helping women give birth to handling emergency situations and treating terminal illnesses among others. What could be more rewarding and pleasurable than improving or saving lives on a regular basis?

However, many medical doctors will tell you that the daily realities of their profession go deeper than these. The unpredictability and bitter experiences they sometimes endure can be difficult to handle making their professions seem more like punishment than pleasure.

The pros and cons of being a medical doctor show that while this job can be highly pleasurable, rewarding and fulfilling, it isn't an easy one, it isn't always a walk in the park.

Those entertaining thoughts of making a career in medicine will appreciate a few key points and realities:

1. You will always be needed: Medical doctors are always in demand. The profession affords you a high level of employment security.

Regardless of the state of the economy, doctors will always be needed to give health advice, treat illnesses, disease, and injuries.

While robotics, artificial intelligence and automation can easily replace human functions in numerous industries, its a pleasure that the medical field is virtually immune from this impact.

2. It is not unusual to lose more people than you can save as a medical doctor: While you are always in demand, a much down played reality of being a medical doctor is that over the course of your career, you will have several unfortunate results. You will constantly deal with loss and suffering. And with some doctors, this doesn't become easier for them even with experience.

Also, since the doctor is usually the individual who notifies the family and friends of a loved one’s condition, they have the stress of this conversation to manage in addition to their personal reactions when faced with unfavorable outcomes.

3. You can make a positive impact in people's lives: While unfavorable experiences are inevitable, you indeed regularly make a positive impact on the lives of others.

It can be a fulfilling experience to nurture someone from sickness or injury to full recovery. Helping people through their worst of days back to happiness and joy via your treatments, care and concern can be a mutually beneficial experience.

4. Enormous Responsibility and Stress: Even as you positively impact people's lives, there are enormous responsibilities and stress that come with doing this. To be in a position to save lives regularly may be noble, this role can also become highly stressful very quickly. There is always pressure to make the correct decision in every situation. This responsibility can make doctors become fearful that they could make a mistake that may lead to the loss of a patient, or encounter a situation that creates an uncertain outcome.

Being a medical doctor is indeed one of the more stressful professions.

5. High Income: Though a stressful profession, doctors generally get paid handsomely for their troubles. The actual income that you can earn as a doctor depends on your experience, the specialty you practice, the setting where you work, and your geographic location.

Even though some specialties pay more than others, a career in medicine generally is one of the more lucrative options that are available today.

6. Long and unpredictable work hours: Although being highly paid, many doctors find themselves working long hours each day and not having enough time to spend with their family and friends.

On-call responsibilities are frequent, emergencies can force you to respond at all hours of the day regardless of what your "normal" work hours are supposed to be.

Even though you get compensated for this time, the long days can quickly lead to significant stress levels if not managed carefully.

7. Intellectually Stimulating: Medicine is a moving field and if you love to learn, pursuing a career in medicine will be an excellent choice.

Many doctors will tell you that your medical school studies is just the beginning of your education. As you practice, you will regularly encounter unique situations, new treatments, and evolving technologies. Its intellectually stimulating and can lead to higher job satisfaction.

These realities reveal that the rewards of being able to successfully treat an illness or even save a life are sometimes contrasted by the stresses of performing emergency medical interventions or losing a patient. Although the income is generally lucrative, the long hours and time away from friends and family can lead to an inability to enjoy the lifestyle said income is supposed to afford you.

Being a medical doctor:- Is it a punishment or a pleasure?

In the end, I think that decision lies with the individual....

8 Reasons You Must Have Flowers At Home

Flowers are mostly associated with beauty. Most of us know how beautiful flowers are to look at and their effects in improving the aesthetic appeal of the environments they are placed in.

However, not only do flowers beautify, there are also an incredible amount of surprising benefits to keeping flowers in your home.

A lot of research have proved that flowers are more than just something pretty for the eyes or environment, but they can offer benefits to our health and mindset among others.

Below are 8 solid reasons why you must have flowers in your home:-

1 Pleasant scents: A few flowers in our homes and we are guaranteed to be treated to a continous stream of pleasant scents and sensations. Scents from flowers can be a powerful mood booster. When you are feeling down or out, the smell of flowers can make all the difference to your mood.

Keeping fresh flowers in your home is a great way to add natural scent.

2 Visual Appeal: As mentioned earlier, flowers add color and visual interest to our homes. Flowers beautify personal spaces, and create a warmer, more welcoming vibe in our homes.

Rather than spending tons of money on abstract art, interior decorators and decorations, get some flowers and watch as they aesthetically transform your homes in wonderful ways.

3 Boosting Creativity: It is a well-known fact that different colors can symbolize many meanings and evoke different feelings. Flowers, which are available in a variety of colors are no different and have been proven to stimulate the mind, increase creativity, and improve concentration. Having flowers in our homes also helps memory retention and productivity. If you are looking to work harder and better this year, adding a few flowers in your home could be a great way to get you started.

4 Cleaner Air: Flowers have been proven to remove pollutants from the air. They play an important role in detoxifying the air we breathe. These pollutants in the atmosphere result from activities of man kind and may impact our health negatively. Fortunately, flowers has its ways of bringing balance to the ecology. During the process of photosynthesis, the flower's leaves absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen. Indoors, flowers absorb the toxic gases released into the environment by some of the products we use in our homes. When we breathe clean air, we are less likely to suffer from infections of the respiratory system, and there are fewer incidents of nasal congestion.

5 Aids Recovery: Flowers are given as gifts to patients in a hospital for a reason:- it may help a patient heal faster. Hospitals encourage this because they know flowers are therapeutical. Flowers provide psychological healing. People suffering from anxiety or mental stress can get relief for their condition by being around flowers. Beautiful to behold, they have the ability to affect our minds by bringing greater joy, happiness, and delight to our lives.

6 Good for the skin: Flowers naturally contribute to a radiant and healthy skin. When you keep flowers in your home, they release moisture to the environment. The moisture protects your skin from excessive dryneness.

7 Introduces humidity: Additionally, flowers help add humidity to the air in our homes. Why is this important? Because humidity in an otherwise dry space can help with dry throats, coughs, and sneezes. If dry air is an issue in your house, keeping fresh flowers around can help.

8 Good Exercise: Tending to flowers in our compound gardens also benefit us physically. This is because doing so entails you use many different muscle groups while increasing flexibility. As you dig and plant you burn calories and engage muscles while reaching and bending stretches the body thereby increasing elasticity in those muscles

Among others!

Obviously, there are many benefits of flowers, all of which should encourage you to keep a bouquet or fresh plant on hand in your homes. They beautify, give pleasant fragrance, look lovely, are soft to the touch, and do wonders for your  mental health and stress levels.

You may not be able to buy happiness, but you sure can buy some great flowers. Go do that!

16 Ways Kissing Benefits Your Health

Kissing has loads of mental and physical benefits that make getting your smooch on totally worth it. Here are some health benefits.

1. It boosts your ‘happy hormones’

Kissing triggers your brain to release a cocktail of chemicals that leave you feeling  so good by igniting the pleasure centers of the brain.

These chemicals include oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin, which can make you feel euphoric and encourage feelings of affection and bonding. It also lowers your cortisol (stress hormone) levels.

2. It helps you bond with your partner.

Oxytocin is a chemical linked to pair bonding. The rush of oxytocin released when you kiss causes feelings of affection and attachment. Kissing your partner can improve relationship satisfaction and is especially important in long-term relationships.

3. It has a tangible impact on your self-esteem.

In addition to boosting your happy hormones, kissing can reduce your cortisol levels potentially improving your feelings of self-worth. Researchers in one 2016 study found that participants who were unhappy with their physical appearance had higher cortisol levels. 

4. It also relieves stress

Speaking of cortisol, kissing also lowers cortisol levels and stress. Kissing and other affectionate communication, like hugging and saying “I love you,” impacts the physiological processes related to stress management. Kissing naturally relaxes you. Scientific reports say kissing increases the levels of oxytocin, the body's natural calming chemical and also increased endorphins, the body's feel-good chemicals. Swapping spit is also noted to increase dopamine, which aids in feelings of romantic attachment.

5. It reduces anxiety

Stress management includes how well you handle stress and anxiety. There’s nothing quite like a kiss and some affection to help calm you. Oxytocin decreases anxiety and increases relaxation and wellness.

6. It dilates your blood vessels, which helps reduce your blood pressure

Kissing increases your heart rate in a way that dilates your blood vessels. When your blood vessels dilate, your blood flow increases and causes an immediate decrease in your blood pressure. So this means that kissing is good for the heart.

7. Kissing also helps relieve cramps

The effect of dilated blood vessels and increased blood flow can help relieve cramps a boost in feel-good chemicals and relief from period cramps. Getting your smooch on when you’re in the throes of a bad period might just be worth it.

8. Kissing soothes headache. The dilation of blood vessels and lowered blood pressure can also relieve headaches. Kissing may also help you prevent headaches by lowering stress, which is a known headache trigger.

9. It can boost your immune system

Swapping spit can boost your immunity by exposing you to new germs that strengthen your immune system. A study found that couples that kiss frequently share the same microbiota in their saliva and on their tongues.

 Another study reported in the journal Medical Hypotheses says kissing may increase a woman's immunity from Cytomegalovirus. Cytomegalovirus, contracted through mouth to mouth contact, can cause infant blindness and other birth defects if the mother is a carrier during pregnancy. Otherwise, the bug is relatively harmless in adults. Kissing has long been thought to be a way to pass along bugs and thus strengthen the body's defenses.

10. It reduces allergic response

Kissing has been shown to provide significant relief from hives and other signs of allergic reaction associated with pollen and household dust mites. Stress also worsens allergic reactions, so kissing effect on stress may also reduce allergic response.

11. It’s tied to improvements in total cholesterol

A study found that couples who increased the frequency of romantic kissing experienced improvement in their total serum cholesterol. Keeping your cholesterol in check lowers your risk of several diseases, including heart disease and stroke.

12. It even helps prevent cavities by increasing saliva production

Kissing stimulates your salivary glands, which increases saliva production. Saliva lubricates your mouth, aids in swallowing, and helps keep food debris from sticking to your teeth, which can help prevent tooth decay and cavities.

13. It’s a solid barometer for physical compatibility with a romantic partner

A study found that kissing may help you assess the suitability of a potential partner. According to women surveyed, a first kiss can basically make it or break it when it comes to her attraction.

14. Kissing a romantic partner boosts your sex drive

Romantic kissing leads to sexual arousal and is often the driving force behind a woman’s decision to have sex with someone. Saliva also contains testosterone a sex hormone that plays a role in sexual arousal. The longer and more passionately you kiss, the more testosterone gets released.

15. The more you kiss, the more you tighten and tone your facial muscles

The act of kissing can involve anywhere from 2 to 34 facial muscles. Kissing often and using these muscles on the regular acts like a workout for your face and neck if you’re really into it!

This may help firm up your facial muscles. Working out your facial muscles can also increase collagen production, which contributes to firmer, younger-looking skin.

16. It even burns calories

Using those facial muscles also burns calories. You can burn anywhere from 2 to 26 calories per minute depending on how passionately you kiss. This may not be the best workout regime if you’re trying to lose weight, but it sure beats sweating on the elliptical trainer!

We know kissing as a social pleasantry, the appropriate ending to a date and a means of connecting with our main squeeze. The collision of lips and tongues that we often take for granted has a whole lot more bubbling under the surface than what meets the eye.

Kissing, regardless of whom you’re kissing, can have a positive impact on your emotional and physical wellbeing.Kissing makes both parties feel good about themselves and can help strengthen relationships of all kinds, so kiss and kiss often. It’s good for you!

7 Strategies To Expand Your Influence

Two main factors determine your success.

First of all, is your motivation, your work ethic, your drive, your determination and will. How badly do you crave success? Do you want it so bad you can taste it in your mouth? Are you ready to make the required sacrifices to achieve your goals? To recover from setbacks and attempt pursuing your goals again?

In your journey, you'll definitely encounter your fair share of setbacks, challenges and obstacles. Without strong internal motivation, it is nearly impossible to overcome these and finally achieve success.

Secondly and just as important is your sphere of influence. Your audience, your ability to effect the decisions, development, or behavior of people. With considerable influence, you can achieve your goals faster, you can be more effective and create longer lasting values.

Your influence is like a muscle. Just like muscles can be developed and built with regular exercise, there are also certain actions that expand your influence. Being conscious of these actions and taking them on a frequent basis will result in increased influence with others.

Below, we are going to highlight a few of these actions that expand your influence if engaged in on a regular basis:-

1. Acting with Integrity: Influencing others is easier when they trust you and a reputation for integrity expands your influence. When you define your values and principles, let people know these and take actions or make decisions in ways that show you as consistent with said values and principles, you are deemed as someone who can be trusted. People have increased confidence in you making them more open to your suggestions and influence.

2. Regular Communication and Engagement: Frequently communicating with your audience, mentees or students also expands your influence. It is a basic of human psychology that we are most susceptible to the influence of those we spend the most time with and make the most communication with. Knowing this, you want to increase the frequency of your communications and engagements with those you intend to expand your influence on.

3. Regular display of Skill or Expertise: This has to do with credibility and authority - two critical enhancers of influence. When you are recognised as being truly skilled in your craft or as an expert in your field, you are seen as the go to figure for advice and suggestions. Your influence expands as a result. Therefore, you want to make displays of your skills and expertise a regular part of your operations and communications.

4. Self-Improvement: If being recognised as truly skilled or an expert in your field expands your influence, then it follows that you want to be truly skilled or an expert in your field.

As a skills based influencer, you want to continually work on mastering and sharpening your skill set. Constantly honing your skills will make regular displays easier and more effective.

Constantly reading and educating yourself also improves expertise. This process should include and exceed your particular field. Take classes, read books, do training and anything else possible to round out and expand your life experience, and thus expand your influence.

5. Working with other Influencers: Working, partnering or collaborating with other Influencers also expands your influence. This is a form of leverage. You can gain influence if these other influencers use their influences to promote your cause, business, product or service.

Since these other influencers have the trust of their audiences, you are perceived as trustworthy by these audiences since the people they follow are endorsing you. Extending your influence in this manner ultimately expands it.

6. Understanding People and their Proclivities: Your influence expands as your understanding of people, their motivations and proclivities deepen.

Everyone has a unique perspective on things. You increase your influence when you make it a point to understand others  – how they think, what they feel, what they want and need.

Using these knowledge as a basis, your ability to influence them in various ways expands.

7. Constantly Taking Action: The very act of expanding your influence entails constantly taking action. You can't be slow to act and expect your influence to expand, you have to continue making the moves that lead you closer to your goals.

Your influence cannot be expanded if you remain in the same patterns and habits that you currently have, or surround yourself with the same people. Being deliberate and proactive about trying new things, forming new connections, and meeting new people are all key if you are to become more influential.

Regardless of if you are leading, following, and/or collaborating, you need to influence others to be successful. And the more influence you have, the easier it will be to achieve this success.

By taking daily action on these strategies, you will experience a steady increase in your influential power and expedite your journey towards whatever destinations you desire.

4 Essentials of E-commerce

The discovery of the internet revolutionised mankind. Forging a link globally, it brought incredible and unprecedented changes in many aspects of our lives.

For the first time in human history, people could communicate with and receive feedback from others millions of miles away in seconds. Previously reliant on mails which took days, even weeks and was often cumbersome for long distance communications, the ability to distill this to a real time process via the internet, to now communicate "digitally", represented an advancement of the highest levels.

Business wise, all we had prior to the advent of the internet was the "brick and mortar" businesses. As a business owner, you were limited to doing business physically. Customers had to personally visit your ships or offices to transact with you. You weren't visible or able to transact with someone in another state or country. You were constrained by space and distance.

The internet blew these constraints out of the water. Now a business owner can advertise and conduct business with customers halfway around the world in automatic fashion. Persuasion, receiving payment and delivery of products or services would all take place without "active" interferences from humans. Obviously, this was a vast improvement in business.

E-commerce, short for electronic commerce entails any kind of business transaction that takes place online.

The potential of e-commerce is limitless. But getting your e-commerce business up and successfully running requires certain steps and decisions from you.

In this article, we are going to examine 4 essentials of e-commerce - important tasks you’ll face when researching, launching, and growing a profitable ecommerce business.

1. The Product: Though e-commerce doesn't demand you have a physical store to do business, you still have to do business and business involves the exchange of products or values for payment. So obviously, one of the essentials of e-commerce is deciding what your products will be.

You want to identify the needs of the market through research before deciding on what your product or services will be. This ensures that you give your business the best chances at achieving success.

2. Pricing: With your product or service available, you are also to determine its price. This is the amount you charge your potential customers in return for delivering said products or services.

Obviously, you want to set a price that is both profitable for you and affordable for your customers. You also want the price to be commensurate with the value that the customer will derive from your products or services.

For the affiliate, this means selecting the businesses that pay the most commissions per sale you generate from your efforts.

3. Promotion: Promotion entails all efforts aimed at advertising and getting the word out about your business, products and services. "Traffic" is the term used and refers to all visitors to your business websites or blogs.

Just like an offline business will want to be located on a high street or busy district to ensure the most visibility for their business, an e-commerce business will also have to take steps to market itself. Though the internet offers a global audience to all e-commerce businesses, competition is still present.

These promotional efforts could be made in a variety of ways some of which include:

Search Engine Optimisation(SEO): This involves tweaking your sites or blogs to get higher rankings on search engines. Since search engines are the default tool used by customers to search for solutions and products, you want your sites to be ranked as high as possible on these engines to improve the chances of its display when searches are made.

Paid advertising: Where you pay other businesses, influencers or websites to advertise your businesses. This in itself can be done in a number of ways ranging from email blasts to facebook ads to pay per view.

Article writing: where you regularly contribute content and articles to highly trafficked article directories in a bid to attract interest to your sites

Among others.

Essential to e-commerce success, its importance can not be underestimated.

4. Placement: This refers to how your e-commerce business delivers its product or service to its customers. It refers to how the business makes its products or services accessible to customers after they've placed their orders.

Placement is directly linked to the nature of your product. Your product may vary but are mainly available in four forms:

Physical Products: which are hard, tangible products. The placement of products of this nature entails that you ship to customers after receiving their orders

Digital Products: which are not hard objects requiring shipping but can be delivered digitally or across the web. These could be e-books, online courses etc.

Services: Your e-commerce business could also be service based where you are not delivering any actual products physically or otherwise but offering services instead. Services could range from consulting knowledge in several fields to programming skills. The placement of services entails some form of communication previously agreed upon. If it's a consulting service, what media are you employing to communicate advice? Email? Skype? etc.

Affiliates: Your e-commerce business can also be completely built around promoting the products or services of other businesses for a commission on each sale you generate. In this case, the placement of the product or service lies with the real product owner or service provider and not the affiliate.

Starting an e-commerce business really is feasible for anyone. With the above mentioned essentials in place, you can easily build, launch and grow your ecommerce business to successful levels.

6 Incredible Advantages of Teamwork

It is often necessary that we handle some tasks independently...

Others though, simply can't be done alone, irrespective of ability, skill or talent. They demand teamwork and combined efforts if they are to be accomplished successfully.

Whenever you think of any extraordinary achievements - extreme business success, inventions, great scientific discoveries, brave expeditions or cutting edge technological advancements, you can be dead certain that at the very foundation of it all, was some incredible and amazing teamwork.

When we look around ourselves, we are constantly reminded of the products of incredible teamwork. The cities we live in are a product of teamwork. The companies we build or work for are a product of teamwork. The sports we watch are a product of teamwork. Pretty much every aspect of our lives is permeated by team work.

In this article, we are going to highlight 6 incredible advantages you get to enjoy by employing team work in your endeavours:-

1. Multiplied creativity: Perhaps the most incredible of all advantages is the sheer increase in creativity generated by team work.

It is a fact that getting people to work in teams enables them to be better outside of the box thinkers. They also produce more creative, innovative and practical solutions to problems than when they work individually.

A team of people working together on a particular issue or task, brainstorming, inputting their thoughts and rubbing minds usually results in a vast range of ideas and a greater chance of varied, cutting edge, creative, unusual, and innovative solutions.

2. Increased Productivity, Efficiency & Faster Solutions: With more people sharing the workload and applying his/her skills and strength, productivity is greatly boosted. Also, a direct implication of increased creativity is increased output and a shorter time needed to arrive at solutions.

By generating multiple solutions in a short period of time and through the effective leverage of human resources, teams can increase efficiency and solve problems more quickly than individuals.

3. Faster Learning and Development: A team usually entails people of different skills, talents, knowledge and skills. As these people work together, it is inevitable that they'll influence each other. Learning by osmosis is introduced. People are exposed to other perspectives, fields and spheres of knowledge by their teammates, enhancing their development.

An atmosphere is created that presents a continuous opportunity for people to learn from each other – professionally and personally even as they work together.

Further, new employees, partners or team members are able to get acquainted with operations and hit the ground running faster if they are teamed up with more experienced members who will put them through.

4. Improved morale and enthusiasm:

Team efforts build expectation for a project or task as teammates feed off each other’s enthusiasm. It’s difficult to remain unengaged when your teammates are excited about a project. Such attitudes are contagious.

Effective teamwork is a positive experience for the people involved. The feeling of accomplishment teammates feel when a particular task is completed or issue is solved is great for self esteem and morale.

And this goes even more if its a task or issue that may not have been resolved had everyone worked independently

5. Improves Understanding of Others Proclivities: Because a team is made up of people from different backgrounds, upbringing and beliefs working towards a common goal, team mates sometimes find themselves at odds with each other.

However, because each member of a team collectively works towards achieving a common goal, perhaps under the constraint of a deadline, differing team mates understand that they need to quickly resolve their differences and get on with each other if they are going to meet their targets.

As they get to work and function harmoniously regardless of differences, a better understanding and tolerance for each other's proclivities is achieved....

6. Improves Customer Service: Some businesses are such that excellent customer service is a unique part of their proposition. An example is a restaurant. Businesses like this can gain several incredible advantages by employing team work.

A restaurant business is arguably an extremely time sensitive business where fast responses are of the essence. A team of people can speed up the process of getting orders and delivering back to the customer, making it more efficient.

In other areas, team members can share their experiences and best practices:- knowledge that can be leveraged to improve subsequent customer service executions.

Among others.

Teamwork is about effective human leverage. It is crucial to scaling operations and achieving success at the highest levels. Without it, it is practically impossible to reach the heights of exploration or grow your organisation to world beating status.

Make team work a vital part of your business and reap the incredible, practical, psychological, and morale-boosting benefits thereof!

6 Ways To Execute An Effective Human Leverage

Regardless of how smart, talented, knowledgeable and resourceful you think you are, there's only so much you can do or accomplish by yourself.

The real vehicle behind incredible growth and success at the highest levels is your circle of influence, your connections, your audience. People you work with, partner with and team up with. People who have the resources, talents, skills and knowledge to compensate for your shortcomings....

Being able to connect with and maximize the benefits you get out of these people is what effective human leverage is all about.

Often, effective use of human leverage really means that you are able to efficiently use other people's time, money, resources, ideas and experience to achieve your goals.

In this article, we are going to highlight 6 ways this can be accomplished:-

1 Feedbacks, Reviews and Testimonials: A very powerful but often overlooked way of effective human leveraging is the request for feedback, reviews and testimonials.

You are in business to provide products, services and values to your audience.

By implication, your customers and clients, in addition to buying from you, are an excellent resource to provide you with valuable feedback you can use to improve your products and services OR reviews and testimonials you can leverage to even get more business.

2 Affiliate Relationships: Another way you can effectively employ human leverage is through affiliate relationships.

In marketing, an affiliate is a person who helps you promote your products or services usually in return for a commission on sales he/she generates from his efforts.

If you understand the ramifications of that, then you can see how having an affiliate or army of affiliates spend their time, efforts and perhaps money promoting your business is an efficient human leverage to accelerate achieving your goals/targets.

3 Influencer Marketing: An influencer is someone with an audience, a following. He has established himself as an expert or authority figure with this audience. As a result of his credibility with them, he has the ability to influence their purchasing decisions.

Getting an influencer to use his influence on his audience for you is an extremely effective form of human leverage.

Companies, products and service providers understand the tremendous power of this sort of influence. That's why they spend huge amounts partnering with celebrities, famous figures and influencers to pitch their products or services.

4 Viral Sharing: Getting your contacts on social media to virally share your contents, blog posts or communications is also good human leverage.

Through these contacts, you are reaching potentially millions of others who you couldn't possibly reach in any other way. The key to a good viral sharing strategy is really good/unconventional content / message along with an encouragement or incentive to your contacts to share.

5 Asking for Referrals: You would be surprised how easy it is to get a referral just by asking.

Similar to feedbacks and reviews, this is also a way to leverage your current customers and clients for growth.

This is accomplished by giving your customers and clients as many avenues as possible to refer your business to their networks.This can be done through encouragements in emails, on your website, and even built directly into your product if you have an online tool.

As referral business doesn't cost you anything, it is indeed an incredible form of leveraging.

6 Outsourcing: Running a business entails a lot tasks. A lot of these tasks are required and must be done, but don't ever increase sales, income and profits. Examples of these tasks could be customer service, checking email, and working on the technical aspects of your website.

Outsourcing means getting third parties to accomplish these tasks so that you can concentrate on the tasks that actually increase sales, profits and income like marketing, product development, service improvement, building strategic relationships with other businesses and so on.

All these are highly effective ways to employ human leverage. It is also important to note that these techniques need not be used in isolation. In fact, a business that's on the fast track to extreme success regularly uses several of these methods simultaneously.

Effective use of human leverage enlarges you. It multiplies you. You can access the strengths of all the resources you need around you. You can vastly increase the scale of your operations. Through this leverage, systems of production and sales can be made to run and grow independently of the business owner.

Effective use of human leverage is critical if you are going to maximise your freedom, happiness and wealth. It is through leverage that you can eventually remove yourself from the flow of work.

Embrace these techniques to effectively utilize human leverage and fasten your journey towards extreme wealth.

The Dr Musa Peter Omale I Know

Many years ago, the Dr Musa Peter Omale as we know him today was just another village boy who hawked vegetables, raised poultry locally and hunted wild game to make ends meet. Always in debt, with so many bills to pay, never having enough money and stressed out - the typical lower class citizen. Right from a young age, he was motivated and determined to turn his fortunes around, to create a life of maximum freedom and happiness.

Having completed his Secondary School Education in Lokoja, he emerged as the best student in external exams state and nationwide. Positive that a university degree will perhaps become his ticket to a better tomorrow, he sought and was easily given admission to study Medicine and Surgery at the University of Nigeria Nsukka. But as he pursued his medical studies, his thirst for entrepreneurship did not come to an end. He continued to be passionate about business, transforming and consolidating the entrepreneurial mindset he had developed from his earlier years.

After graduating from the university, he thereafter did a residency program at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria specialising in cardiology and soon qualifying as a consultant in that field. He also studied and amassed qualifications in so many other fields such as immunology, theology and virtual closing to mention but a few.

A lot of people reading these will conclude that Dr Musa Peter Omale is just another brainy academician who knows all the book knowledge and not much else.

They'd be wrong though.

Dr Musa Peter Omale at heart, is a creature of business. Always has been. He's an unrepentant entrepreneur and investor creating values in ministry, cardiology, Embedded Systems Engineering, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Programming and Farming. His vast range of products and services are sought after and utilized in over 13 countries world wide.

He has founded and owns 3 profitable businesses:- a hospital (Xabat Specialty Hospital), a farm (M.P. Omale Global Farms Nigeria Limited) and a full Solar and embedded systems engineering company  (Xindel Nigeria Limited). He also has a startup church - Peter Family Church

Freely giving of his experience and expertise as a business strategist and free lance billionaire coach, Dr Musa Peter Omale mentors a lot of people from all walks of life ranging from Doctors to Pilots to Bankers to Military Officers among others. He has produced an average of 2 millionaires yearly for the past seventeen years. One of his students recently won a national award for excellence in Ghana.

A significant part of his mission is based on adding values to people, systems and materials. He also celebrates and encourages novel ideas and suggestions. As a man of many interests, he needs knowledge and passes it.

Dr Musa Peter Omale's dreams though are bigger than his successes till date, however impressive and unusual they might be. His ultimate goal is to create values, systems and actionable strategies for making a billion USD daily in or from Nigeria.

He understands too that he can't achieve these lofty goals by himself. To do so, he needs the right team, the right partners and the right investors.

Integrity is the real currency of business and Dr Musa Peter Omale is a firm believer in this philosophy. It is his experience that if one acted with integrity and focused on creating values rather than chasing wealth, one would indeed end up very wealthy and he's eager to explore these notions to the extreme by aggressive value creation.

Dr Musa Peter Omale will be the first to tell you that two main factors determine success. First of all is your motivation, your drive, your determination and will to succeed. Are you ready to make the required sacrifices to achieve your goals? Are you prepared to leave fear and live audacity? To recover from setbacks and attempt pursuing your goals again?

Having had and overcome his own fair share of setbacks, challenges and obstacles, he'll definitely advise that without strong internal motivation, it is nearly impossible to become successful.

Equally important is your circle of influence. People you surround yourself with. People you work or partner with. Being determined to succeed does not mean alienating everyone and trying to do it all alone. On the contrary, success comes from recognizing your shortcomings and seeking support from the right people to mitigate these limitations.

Dr Musa Peter Omale understands that surrounding himself with the right people who will assist him achieve his goals and ambitions is crucial even as these people benefit from his experience, expertise and successes. A win win. He therefore has made himself very accessible, and has created an atmosphere that encourages communications from those who share his values.

Arguably an Icon in his own right, you couldn't possibly want a better person to get acquainted with.

10 Ways Robots Can Transform Your Farming

In a world with rapidly increasing population and technological advancements, conventional farming operations are quickly becoming oblivious and inadequate.

Traditional farming methods are struggling to keep up with the effectiveness required by today's market. These struggles are as a result of various factors ranging from an aging workforce to rising costs of labour, to harsh climates to mention but a few.

Farming is becoming more sophisticated. Farmers want to register increased production yields even as they keep their costs down. This has led to the advent of automatic farming and use of robots.

Robots have significant roles to play across all sectors of a farming operation. In this article, we are going to examine 10 of the ways robots can transform your farming.

1 Weeding and spraying: Manually removing weeds can be a very costly and time consuming process. And the use of chemical weed killers can be dangerous for the operators, environment and actual plants. Robots provide a more effective method.

Robotic sprayers could limit the amounts of chemicals used hence reducing the damages. Usually equipped with highly efficient computer vision, they can be programmed to detect weeds and spray certain amounts of herbicides on these weeds.

At the current rate of advancements, we would soon have robots not needing chemicals at all. These robots would mimic manual workers, and would be trained to identify weeds and uproot via a variety of ways.

2 Harvesting: A similar operation which consumes a lot of labor and time if done manually is the harvesting of mature fruits and crops.

Robots can of course improve the size of yields and reduce waste from crops being left in the field.

3 Automatic operations of other machines: Robots can now operate machines like tractors in place of humans. Using remote controls, farmers can now enable their tractors and other farm equipment to automatically run.

Usually embedded with tracking devices, the farmers can monitor the locations and progress made by the robot controlled machinery via various methods.

These robots can do a highly efficient job even as they reduce the possibilities of accidents in the field.

4 Nursery planting: A lot of plants begin their journey in the nurseries where as seeds, they are nurtured into young plants, which can then be transferred into the fields.

This is a process that can be automated too. Robots that offer solutions to manual maintenance of nurseries are being invented and introduced to the agricultural industry.

5 Fertilizing and Irrigation: Conventional ways of irrigating and fertilizing crops have become ineffective, wasteful and costly.

Robots used during irrigation or fertilization can significantly reduce these wastes. They reduce waste of water and fertilizers by targeting specific plants. These robots are intelligent and can carefully navigate between rows of crop and pour water directly at the required plants or apply fertilizers.

6 Seeding: While some plants begin their journey in the nurseries, others are seeds planted in the fields. Depending on the nature of the plant, the traditional methods for sowing seeds is to either directly sow them into grounds of heaped soil or scatter them using tractors across fertilized fields. Either of these methods aren't efficient ways as they involve lots of manual labor like in the first case and possible waste in the second case.

Robots are available to combat these drawbacks. These programmed robots may be attached to the tractors and they place the seeds in certain desired locations greatly reducing waste of seeds that may have been acquired at considerable expense.

7 Farm Monitoring and Analysis: Often, farmers are deterred from increasing the scale of their operations in terms of farming bigger portions of land simply because monitoring these vast farmlands is beyond them.

Monitoring can be automated though. Robots employing sensor effects can help farmers monitor and acquire data on vast farming lands which they may otherwise have been unable to.

8 Animal farming: Most robotic functions in agriculture are applied to crop farming, the roles of robots can be expanded to animal farming.

Robots could be programmed to guide or direct cattle across grazing lands or certain terrains.

9 Thinning and plant adjustments: Oftentimes after planting, adjustments need to be made to plants to boost their chances of developing properly. In some cases, plants need to be removed totally.

Conventionally a manual operation, robots can now be used to make these adjustments.

10. Robotic suits/ Exoskeletons: With rapid advancements in robotics and automation, robotic suits and exoskeletons will soon be available. These suits are lightweight, easy-to-use cloth like devices that ease physical pressure on a farmer.

Farmers will done on this devices before taking on their daily duties. These devices function to reduce the proneness to injury, stress and tiredness the farmer feels as he performs these duties.

Among others!

Farming has quickly become a high tech operation. The increasing demands for food has forced farmers to turn to robots to assist them meet these needs

It looks obvious that robots will continue to play an increasing role in both agriculture and other industries going forward.

As a farmer, the earlier you embrace these trends, the better equipped you'll be to stay ahead of the curve.

5 Ways To Identify A Need Through Research and Fill It by Strategy

One of the most important things to do when contemplating your business, arguably the most important is determining if there's a genuine need for your product or service.

Most business owners struggle because they get the process backwards. They first create their products or services, then try to find the market for these. This isn't necessarily bad. You may discover a market for your products or services after you've created them, especially with the help of the internet but this isn't the best strategy.

A smarter approach, one that guarantees far better results is to first determine via careful research the needs of the market. Once you've done that, then proceed to create products or offer services that satisfy that need.

In this article, we are going to highlight 5 ways to identify needs by research as well as a really efficient strategy to fill these needs.

1 Surveys and Questionnaires: One of the ways you can research needs in the market is by utilising surveys/questionnaires. These are tools that allow you to gather information by inviting your prospects to answer a series of questions. If structured properly, the feedback you get via these can be very valuable in assisting you make your business decisions.

These surveys can be administered in a number of ways and the form you adopt will depend on the methods most convenient to you and your prospects. You may conduct surveys online via simple web pages which you create and send to your prospects inviting responses. You could do it in person where you physically approach and ask questions. It could be done over the phone, via text messages or chats.

2 Free Trials: Another way of identifying needs is by giving out free trials. You may introduce a small batch of products into a particular market to test the response and determine its viability. Depending on the results, you may then access if there's sufficient need for the product.

3 Observation: This form of research involves simply observing prospects. The focus of observation may vary depending on your goals. The information gathered via this research method is very reliable as they report actual behaviour and tastes.

4 Focus Groups: Focus groups involve getting a group of prospects pooled according to certain criteria in a room or similar setting. These prospects are usually fairly representative of the people who would buy your products or services.

Your research would then entail presenting this group with product concepts and listening to their opinions. You may inquire as to what improvements they want made on products they are already using.

Since focus groups obviously involve a small, concentrated number of prospects, you can employ focus groups just before administering surveys to a larger pool of prospects for better results. With the feedback you get from the groups, you can then modify your survey questions to be more specific and targeted.

Alternatively, you can employ focus groups after you've already conducted surveys as a way to further explore recurrent issues that came up during the survey.

5 Interviews: Though similar to focus groups, this is a more narrowed down approach to identifying needs. This can be used to glean individual information that would be otherwise difficult or impossible to get when observing large numbers of prospects at a time.

Once you've identified a need via any of the above research methods, how do you proceed to satisfy these needs?

An excellent strategy to do just that is by niching.

What's a niche?

A niche is a market within a market.

To demonstrate this, let's look at the guy who wants to start a consultancy offering his services as an analyst. If he simply sets up a site or blog posting content and trying to sell his services, he has a big problem.

And the problem is that he has instantly gone into direct competition with thousands of other analysts globally, across several sectors. Analysts who have been in business before him, have built huge audiences and perhaps boast more credibility.

Facing these obstacles, this analyst may find himself several months or years down the line making little or no money. It doesn't mean that there was no need for his services or that he's not good. He may in fact be an excellent analyst. It's just that by not niching himself properly, he found it difficult to distinguish himself in a very competitive market place.

Compare him to the other analyst who also intends to market his services. However before taking any steps, he does a few things:

1 First, he specialises his service. Instead of offering services as an analyst. He offers his services as an analyst specialising in developing patterns yielding 100% returns on investment in the sports sector.

This analyst has achieved several things by doing this, mainly, significantly narrowing down the competition and hence, boosting his chances of success. He's no longer competing with analysts across all fields - business, policy, security etc. He's now competing with only analysts in the sports sector.

What's more, he's not competing with every analyst in the sports sector, he's only competing with analysts who also develop patterns yielding 100% returns on investment. An analyst developing patterns yielding 20%, 50%, 80% returns can't compete against him. No. Its strictly analysts whose patterns yield 100% returns.

2 Having done this, instead of offering his services as an analyst to every investor/client in the sports sector, he further specialises the niche he can operate within. He wants a niche, however small it may be that he can get his teeth into and focus on.

So he decides to offer his services as an analyst developing patterns yielding 100% returns to only investors who are investing a certain amount - X naira. If you're investing Y naira or Z naira or any other amount apart from X naira, his services are not available to you. It must be X naira.

He modifies all his messages, content, adverts, marketing materials, sites/blogs and services information to reflect ONLY these terms and people. He doesn't work with anybody else or under any other conditions. No. Just these. He totally immerses himself in that niche.

Now, he's really in a good place to start making money relatively quickly. When an investor in the sports sector needs patterns yielding 100% returns and who's investing X naira comes across this analyst's blog/site/advert, his interest is immediately captured. His attention is gotten. The analyst is instantly distinguished. His expertise is obvious and the chances that he ends up doing business with this investor are excellent.

He signs up this client and does good business. His charges are a bit on the high side but the investor isn't bothered since he seems to be the only one available to address his specific needs.

The process of doing this means that this analyst's market is smaller than that of the analyst in the first instance. But he finds it far easier to get business and charge handsomely from his narrowed market which offsets the perceived disadvantages of a smaller marketplace.

Having identified the need via research, the more you niche, the better. You will deaden the competition, get business far easier, make more money quickly, get more referrals and hit your goals faster.

Understanding The Proclivities of Others

There are several factors that affect people's tendencies to act in certain ways or make certain choices. If a child was raised in a family where a parent or both smoked cigarettes, chances are that this child will develop a proclivity for smoking cigarettes. Similarly, the circumstances surrounding one at a particular point in time influence one's proneness. Inhibitions may be reduced by substances like alcohol leading one to make choices one may otherwise not have made.

A key to successfully dealing with people is having a good understanding of the various factors that affect their proclivities. Factors that make them develop certain habits and make certain decisions.

In this article, we are going to highlight a few of these factors that inform people's tendencies.

1 Background and Upbringing: As shared in the first paragraph, the upbringing one has contributes to one's proclivities. If one is raised in a family where parents, siblings and other family members used alcohol liberally, one develops a proclivity for alcohol. This is also the case for other lifestyle choices like gambling, violence and spirituality. If one's parents placed emphasis on being spiritual and/or morally sound, one would be prone to this way of life.

Of course this doesn't always actually turn out to be the case. One may indeed develop proclivities totally opposite to what one was regularly exposed to in one's background and upbringing. But we're talking about tendencies here and in that regard, these play a significant role.

2 Genetics: Genetics too affect one's proneness to certain issues. Medically, if one's got family history of conditions like diabetes, heart attacks or sickle cell anaemia, one's more prone to developing these conditions than the other party without these genetics.

Similarly, one may have a proclivity for violence if one's got a family history of members with violent tempers.

3 Situations and circumstances: The situations and circumstances under which one finds oneself at a particular point in time also inform tendencies. In the field of deductive analysis, deductions are based on how people behave when subjected to certain situations. These behaviors have been observed and studied over long periods of time and shown to be consistent with the particular situations at hand. Such that, when these situations present themselves, analysts can predict, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, how people will react.

This is a practical application of the knowledge that certain situations and circumstances make people prone to certain lines of action.

4 Advertisements and Media: These also contribute to people's proclivities. Some people are more susceptible than others to influence from advertisements they are regularly exposed to and the media. Perhaps a certain choice, belief or trend is being endorsed by someone who's respected greatly. This can shape the proclivities of followers of this person.

This factor has a practical application in marketing. Companies and service producers understand the tremendous power of adverts and media in shaping people's tendencies. What's more, they also see how the use of celebrities, authority figures and influential people to endorse or pitch their products or services could be profitable.That's why they allocate huge budgets towards getting these people to do just that.

5 Drugs, Alcohol and Substances: Being under the influence of drugs, alcohol or other substances may also affect one's proclivities. Alcohol for instance has been proven to lower one's inhibitions which may lead to one engaging in certain actions or making certain choices one may not otherwise have made.

6 Personality: One's personality directly impacts one's proclivities. An extroverted personality for instance is prone to seeking out social activities and occasions while the reverse is true for those who are introverted.

Among others.

It is also important to note that a person's proclivities aren't always solely shaped by just one factor. Often, several of these factors combine simultaneously to impact these tendencies.

Life mostly demands that we interact with others on a regular basis - be it for professional or personal reasons. As a result of differences in opinion, personalities, upbringing and such, we often find ourselves at odds with others.

To navigate these, and generally improve our relationships with others regardless of the nature, it is necessary we have an understanding of the various factors shaping one's tendencies and take these into consideration when dealing with them.

At the end of the day, we want to be able to function harmoniously and productively with others regardless of our differences.

MANAGEMENT OF SEXUAL ENERGY

UNIVERSALITY OF THE NEED FOR SEX

Right from the moment God created man, the need to procreate and fill the earth was inherent. Genesis 1:27-28 says “So God created man in His own image; He created him in the image of God; He created them male and female. God blessed them, and God said to them, 'Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth...’” (emphasis added) and so everyone is born with the drive to have sex. 

ADAPTABILITY TO ETHICS

With the drive to have sex, came the need for control. As man is a highly intelligent and civilized being, we can not afford to run around having sex like animals. Therefore, rules guiding this were derived from various religions such as the need for consent between the two individuals before they can have sex, gradually some of the rules were codified and made into laws with certain variations depending on the country or region. For example, only some regions regard adultery as a crime while others regard it as a question of morality but not something punishable by law. 

UNHOLY AND UNNATURAL SEXUAL ACTS CONDEMNED

1 Corinthians 6:18 “Flee from sexual immorality!...”

1 Corinthians 6:9-10 “...Do not be deceived: no sexually immoral people, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, homosexuals...will inherit God's kingdom” (emphasis added)

Romans 1:21,26-27  “For though they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became nonsense, and their senseless minds were darkened... This is why God delivered them over to degrading passions. For even their females exchanged natural sexual intercourse for what is unnatural. The males in the same way also left natural sexual intercourse with females and were inflamed with their lust for one another. Males committed shameless acts with males...” (emphasis added)

Leviticus 18:22 “You are not to sleep with a man as with a woman; it is detestable”

Exodus 20:14 “Do not commit adultery”

Leviticus 18:23 “You are not to have sexual intercourse with any animal, defiling yourself with it...”

Fornication; Fornication is consensual sexual intercourse between a male and female who are not married

Adultery; Adultery is consensual sexual intercourse between a married man and a woman who is not his wife or between a married woman and a man who is not her husband. 

Rape; Rape is sexual intercourse in which one party either does not consent to the act or is an underage person (below 18). In the first instance, it involves the other party forcing the non-consenting party to have sex with him/her. While in the second instance, it involves the other party having sexual intercourse with a minor even if the minor consented to it.

Masturbation; This is an aberration of how God intended sex to be. Here, a person stimulates himself/herself sexually either by manipulating his/her sexual organs with his/her fingers, or with the aid of sex toys.

Non-natural sex—same sex; Another aberration of what God originally intended sex to be. Here, a man finds himself sexually attracted to another man or a woman finds herself sexually attracted to another woman and they engage in sexual intercourse. 

Sex with objects (sex toys); God intended a man to satisfy a woman sexually and vice versa. The man's body was created to bring pleasure to the woman and vice versa. And God saw that it was good. As such, there is no need for foreign objects to be used either as a replacement or as an aid to providing sexual pleasure. It is like saying “we’re not enough for each other and so we need help”.

Sex with animals; Another aberration, where a human being, either male or female engages in sexual intercourse with an animal such as a goat, dog, etc.

Phone sex; With the coming of technology came more ways to distort sex. Phone sex includes having conversations over the phone targeted at arousing; sexting which is sending texts or chatting with sexually arousing words; video sex which is people exposing naked body parts to others on video call such as Skype, FaceTime or WhatsApp video call; and sending and/or receiving nudes (naked pictures).

Pornography; This involves visual arousal. That is, deriving sexual pleasure from the watching of videos of people having sex.

Threesome/Foursome/Orgy; These are all types of group sex—threesome involves 3 people having sex at the same time, foursome involves 4 people having sex together and an orgy can have as many people as possible engaged in various forms of intercourse with each other at the same time. These are all unnatural and disgusting in the sight of God.

HOW CAN YOU CONVERT SEXUAL ENERGY TO WEALTH?

You will need to learn to channel your thoughts towards positive and productive alternatives, especially if you are unmarried. For the married, of course sex is a very important part of a marriage and there is nothing wrong in regularly having intercourse with your spouse.

Whenever you find yourself dwelling on sexual thoughts, you replace them. The mind cannot be totally free of thoughts so if you want to get rid of a thought, you must replace it with something else. Spend less time dwelling on sex and channel that energy to something productive—think of new strategies to expand your business, new or improved products or services to offer, ways to expand your clientele, ways to proffer solutions to specific problems, better ways to ensure more output from your employees, begin to research on more business ideas, write, make plans for your future. 

Replace unhealthy habits that fuel your sexual desire, with healthy ones. For instance, instead of spending a certain period of the day watching or reading pornographic material, spend time with books on business, grammar, networking, and of course the Bible. 

I must comment here that the Bible is the most powerful replacement for unholy sexual thoughts. Use the opportunity to build yourself spiritually by studying the Word of God. When your mind is infused with the Word, you won’t be able to dwell on unclean thoughts.

Replace time spent on the internet or television watching sexual shows, with exercise, to keep your body fit and healthy. Get rid of that expanding waistline or the double chin or the flabby thighs. Remember, health is wealth.

Use those moments spent dwelling on sex to improve yourself. 

CONCLUSION

God has blessed us with sex drive to use only when the time is right and in a way that pleases Him. Misusing it will amount to sin. Don’t convert equity to iniquity.

All Scripture quotations are taken from the Holman Christian Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. Holman Christian Standard Bible®, Holman CSB®, and HCSB® are federally registered trademarks of Holman Bible Publishers.

4 Ways to go from No Money to Plenty Money

Musa was raised in a financially strapped family. His dad worked as a lecturer at a state polytechnic at low income and then started a few businesses which all failed to pick up. He supported four children of which Musa  was the third plus his mom, a teacher at an elementary school.

Things were tight. Apart from the basics - food, housing and education fees, there was simply no money for anything else. Toys, clothes, games etc. Musa hated not having money to buy these things and determined from an early age that if he wanted the freedom that financial success afforded, he was going to have to get it himself. So, at age 17, he left home, travelled to a different state where he rented a single room in a rural area. With no job, little money, and sub-par people skills, things quickly became tough.

Musa  though was determined to succeed. He sat down and wrote out all of his financial goals, both short, medium and long term. He knew that since he had no university education and had no interest in acquiring one, he needed to find alternative ways to make himself valuable to people. This entailed having a skill. But Musa  understood that if he was going to get to the big bucks relatively fast, he couldn't learn just any skill........it had to be a high income skill.

Which brings us to lesson number one:- The first step to going from no money to plenty money relatively quickly is learning a high income skill. Examples of high income skills include investing, analysis, programming to mention but a few.

Musa also knew that learning this high income skill was going to take a while, possibly years. Meanwhile, he had left home! He had to stay somewhere, feed, cloth, pay bills and generally maintain himself. These obviously involved money which he didn't have saved up. So he planned to get a job - any job that paid his bills while he learnt his skill. He looked around and got a job at a betting shop. He worked there even as he applied himself to thoroughly learning the ins and outs of analysis.

Fast forward 7 years and Musa was now a skilled analyst/consultant operating independently and specialising in the sports sector. He developed patterns, made deductions and advised clients on outcomes they could invest in and be sure of making profits. Soon he was making a decent income monthly from his efforts.

Remembering the financial goals he had laid out several years back, he knew that totally relying on his skills as an analyst wasn't going to be enough. He was going to have to step up his efforts if he wanted to scale up his income and status. He was making money now and after extracting the little he needed to meet his basic expenses, he vowed to make the rest profitably work for him. In other words, he had to invest wisely......

Around that time, a new form of currency hit the market. Known as cryptocurrencies, these currencies served as alternative means of payment to normal money. What's more, they had fluctuating values in relation to other forms of money making them prospective investments for the investor. Being an analyst, Musa did his research and discovered that the value of cryptos as they were called was going to shoot up in the near future.

He invested a portion of his savings, watched trends for a bit and soon enough, the values shot up just as he had predicted. He converted his cryptos back to cash, making serious profits in the process.

Which brings us to lesson number two:-

Once you're making decent income from your high income skill, the next step to going from no money to plenty money is by making wise investments. These could be one-off investments like Musa's above or ongoing. They could also be in any industry - Real estate, Precious metals, etc.

A big part of financial success is passive income. That is income that comes in without you having to regularly work for it. You do the work once, setting up the income stream and you get paid over and over.

Musa understood the importance of this to his financial goals and had begun making plans to achieve it. He had discovered certain secrets and tricks to skilled analysis in the sports sector. He rightly deduced that this information was worth money to others, so why not sell it to them? He created a course where he distilled these knowledge and made it available for sale. He set up a blog online where he regularly posted content displaying his expertise as a skilled analyst even as he marketed his course.

With time, his blog attracted traffic who quickly realised that they were reading the contents of a truly skilled analyst and several ended up buying his course. Musa was now an entrepreneur, another milestone achieved.

Entrepreneurship is the third step to going from no money to plenty money. What do you know? What are you good at? Regardless of how trivial you think this knowledge might be, it is worth money to others. Look for these people, make this information available to them and be surprised at what happens.

Musa wasn't surprised though. In fact, it was a no brainer to him. Accurate as ever in his deductions, the success he was seeing selling his course as an entrepreneur had been long predicted and even expected.

Now making a very high income monthly from his skills, investments and entrepreneurial ventures, Musa was truly free. He lived life on his terms, travelled wherever and whenever he wanted to and generally had a lifestyle unthinkable to many.

While this success might get to the heads of others, Musa didn't let his success do this. He prided himself on being spiritual and firmly believed in giving back out of his abundance. He researched charities and missions whose causes he resounded with and donated significant sums to them. He also set up foundations to assist the gifted who had limited means of harnessing their talents.

Sitting in his home office, reminiscing and looking around at how far he had come in life, he had confirmed for himself that indeed no one had any excuses for not succeeding in life. Given the right drive, determination and strategy, anyone can go from no money to plenty money.

Location Independent Consulting

A lot of consultants operate conventionally. This means the consultants only work with clients in the city or country the consultant lives. And a good portion of their consulting work involves they personally going to the offices, homes or domains of these clients to conduct their work. For this reason, they are unable to get or work with clients who are very long distances away such that travel may not be feasible. And even with their current clients, they are unable to consult if they or the clients leave the vicinity for some reason. In other words, these consultants are location dependent.

There’s a different type of consultant though, known as the location independent consultant. This consultant has built systems and structured his operations so that he is able to land and effectively work with clients globally regardless of where he or the clients live.

Thanks to the internet, a consultant in pretty much any field can achieve location independence with his work just by implementing a few changes.

Of course this doesn't mean you can't visit distant clients. If for some reason you choose to travel the world visiting clients regardless of the fact that you don't have to, that's fine. And that's the point! You don't necessarily have to. As a result of the systems you've put in place, you could easily have worked with said clients without actually having to personally meet.

What are the requirements for a consultant to achieve location independence? Frankly, they vary depending on the actual type of work the consultant does. Generally though, the consultant needs to:

1 Have consistent and reliable internet access: The consultant has to convert a lot of his interactions with clients from a personal nature to a digital one. This in most cases relies on consistent and reliable internet.

2 Create suitable online communication platforms: This is the actual medium through which a client conducts his work with clients. If you're a medical consultant dispensing advice to patients, how are you doing so? Whatsapp? Skype? Phone? Facetime? Email? You need to set up channels of communication that are convenient for both you and the clients.

3: Credibility Tools: Since you'll be marketing to potential clients globally, most of whom don't personally know you and possibly never will, you need to setup platforms that display your credibility and convey you as an expert in your field. This could be a blog where you regularly post content and valuable information about your expertise. As a medical consultant, obviously your qualificafions, awards and accomplishments would be prominently displayed on the blog. It could be a youtube channel where you create videos showing your clinics, state of the art lab and facilities, patients being tended to etc. You would also contribute knowledge to popular medical journals, forums etc.

Testimonials from clients/patients are valuable as a marketing tool. You would of course display this as frequently as you can across all platforms you employ for your marketing.

4 Shipping systems: Depending on the nature of your work, you may have to ship or received shipped stuff from clients. This applies if there are things you need to work on handily.

As a medical consultant, perhaps there are certain physical products you'd want to ship to your patients. Then its imperative that you have systems in place that facilitate fast and effective conveyance of these products to the clients.

You should also make it easy for the patients to order these products themselves. An "online store" showing where patients can take inventory of what they need and place orders may be necessary.

At the end if the day, location independent consulting is all about remotely delivering an experience that is equal or even superior to one clients and pateints would have had had you consulted conventionally. That's the essence of these systems.

Initially, it may feel unusual working this way especially if you've been used to the "normal" ways of consulting. Once you get the hang of it though, you'd quickly discover its actually quite easy and enjoyable.

Location independence can be achieved by a consultant in any field. It only takes a few steps and some imagination!

Celebrating 10 Years of Constant Power Supply

My name is Dr Musa Peter Omale, I'm based in Nigeria and as I write, I've enjoyed 10 straight years of uninterrupted, constant power supply.

Yeah. You got that right - 10 consecutive years in which I've not had power outages in my homes, and domains.

How did I manage this in a country with subpar electricity supply?

I did so by utilising solar energy.

Do you know that the energy the sun provides the earth in one hour can satisfy global power needs for a year?

I bet you didn't know the sun was that powerful.

Unfortunately, despite our level of technological advancement, we've not been able to tap into even the tiniest fractions of this tremendous power. Yet the little we can harness by use of solar utility products are still significant enough for our needs.

At Xindel Nigeria Limited, we understand that harnessing solar energy can be extremely beneficial to the industries, companies, individuals and environment in general. As a result, we have made it very easy for solar energy to become the main source of energy for industries and families via our solar power product lines offered at affordable prices.

But what are some of the benefits of solar power over alternative sources of energy: These include:-

1 Easily and infinitely renewable: Unlike other sources of power, you can never run out of solar energy. As long as the sun shines which it will for infinity, its energy will be available to the user of solar power.

2 Little maintenance: Once your solar panels or inverters are set up, they need very little ongoing maintenance and will usually operate for long durations without services of any kind.

3 Reduces or eliminates electricity bills: You may choose to utilise solar energy for some or all of your power needs. As a result, the bills you pay for normal electricity supply will drastically reduce or seize. What's more? If your solar panel is connected to the grid, you may receive payments should you generate more electricity than you use

4 Environmentally safer: Compared to a power source like generators or plants for instance, solar energy is safer both for the environment and the individual. It doesn't produce as much poisonous residues and presents little operational hazards.

5 Versatile application: Solar energy can be utilised in a variety of ways. It may be used to generate electricity or heat. You can generate energy with or without access to the main grid. It can be used to purify water for domestic uses and power machines requiring heavy charges.

6 Innovative potential: The solar power industry is vast and constantly changing as technological advances are made. Scientists in the field are forever researching ways to improve the efficiency with which we can harness the sun's energy. Utilisers of solar power therefore are better positioned to take advantage of these improvements.

If you're interested in knowing more about solar power, you are invited to contact us at Xindel Nigeria Limited.

At Xindel Limited, our core mission is to ensure your transition to solar energy utility in whatever capacity is effortless. We offer installations of solar power systems at:

* Homes

* Offices

* Factories

* Farms.

We also install:

* Solar boreholes

* Solar security cameras 

* Hospital solar power system 

* Solar incubators

* Solar home automation

Determined to ensure this experience is as smooth and seamless as possible, we have excellent post- installation services including full technical support and follow up. We will coach, train, and offer tutorials for newbies and intermediate users.

Xindel Limited isn't just your average solar power company though. Active in research and innovation, we are proud to inform you that we've succeeded in taking solar power utility to extended levels. Our dedication to improving the efficiency and diversity of solar power has led us to offer services not common to the industry such as:

* Fabrication of inverters, solar charge controllers, home monitors, and digital displays

* Creation of adaptive, social or swarm security non humanoid robots with advanced deep learning capabilities - all automatic, robotic, intelligent and home programmable.

* Building of solar fish hatchery and solar vegetables dehydrator

And much, much, more!

With our expanded services and product line, we've assisted thousands around the world improve their businesses, operations, homes and personal happiness by utilising solar energy.

Join us! It's a very good place to be in and it all starts with you getting in touch today (Whatsapp +2347030200372).

Understanding Influencer Marketing

Chances are, you have at one time or the other, bought a particular brand of something - clothes, phone, cream, toiletry, etc for no real reason apart from the fact that your favorite musician, actor or leader endorsed that brand. Perhaps, you saw adverts where the cream was being applied by this favorite musician of yours. Maybe you saw that brand of clothes being worn by your favorite actor or someone you respect greatly. If you hadn't seen that advert, maybe you would not have really gone for that particular cream or cloth. You may have bought another brand or simply not bought any at all. But buy you did and that was majorly because these people you liked, trusted and respected also seemed to be using those products. In other words, you had been influenced....

Companies, products and service providers understand the tremendous power of these sorts of endorsement in influencing decisions. That's why they spend huge amounts getting celebrities and influencers to pitch their products. Endorsement and influencer marketing are quite similar in method and operation with only a few differences.

For us to really grasp the meaning and power of influencer marketing, it is necessary for us to know who an influencer is. 

An influencer is someone with an audience. The influencer is capable of affecting the purchasing decisions of this audience because of his or her skills, authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with these people.

The influencer isn't necessarily a celebrity or famous in the general sense. He may be your average, everyday Joe. What makes them unique though is the followings they've built via various means. The size of the following doesn't really matter, what matters is that he has a reputation with these people. They may see him as an expert in his field or as the most engaging in a particular topic. The followers come to know, trust, like and respect the influencer.

If we understand who an influencer is, then influencer marketing is the strategy of attempting to market your products, skills or services by leveraging the relationship and power an influencer has over his audience. It also refers to efforts to gain credibility, improve brands and generally get more exposure through collaborating with an influencer.

This type of marketing encompasses a broad spectrum of techniques, strategies and approaches. Generally though, successful influencer marketing involves:

1 Careful research: A successful influencer marketing campaign begins with research. You first have to locate the influencers you need for your particular products, skills and services.

You also want to tailor the nature of your influencer's audience to the industry you're in. Influencers with audiences built via a particular platform may be more suitable for certain products and services. Again, careful research is the key to finding out these nuances.

2 Smart budget allocation: Influencer marketing is usually paid advertising. If you're going to pay for the opportunity to leverage an influencer's audience, then you want to be smart about your spending. You want to deal with the influencers who offer you the most value for your money. You want to create an ongoing relationship with the influencers whose audiences are profitable even as you cut off those whose aren't. How do you differentiate between these influencers? You do so by:-

3 Tracking: If you don't track your influencer marketing campaigns, you have no way of knowing what campaigns or influencers are yielding and those who aren't.

There are several ways of tracking your influencer marketing efforts. If you're directly pitching your products or services to the influencer's audience, then you may want to track the average no of sales you get per campaign. There are several good tracking services that can assist you do this.

Or maybe you're not selling anything directly but just building your network or email list which you can market to subsequently. Then the number of people who opt in or subscribe to your newsletter per campaign will be the yardstick for gauging how effective the campaign is.

4 Scheduling, Frequency and Mode of contact: The scheduling of your marketing to an influencer's audience is also a factor affecting its success. You want to work closely with the influencer to find the best times to engage his audience.

You also want to employ the most effective forms of communication. Some audiences prefer e-mail. Others prefer webinars or podcasts. Still, some want to watch videos. The influencer should be able to inform you on these matters.

Once you've done this, then determine the frequency. Does the influencer's audience prefer communication once a day? Twice daily? Weekly etc. Once you find an influencer whose audience is profitable, make it a point to engage as frequently as the audience prefers even as you do so within budget.

The biggest issue marketers face is that of credibility and trust. In a world where people are being pitched to at all times via various methods, a lot have become understandably defensive.

Influencer marketing neutralizes this obstacle effectively. It is a bit psychological in nature. Often, influencers are perceived as having better health, choices, tastes, quality of life or status by their audiences. And these audiences come to believe that by imitating these influencers, they too will enjoy these benefits. This in essence is what influencer marketing is all about. With trust, credibility and authority already established in the minds of the audience, marketing of products or services becomes easy.

Integrate influencer marketing into your business. It really works!