"Consider your will to be the vision of your influence on earth after you cease to be a part of it. Crafting a lasting legacy means you start planning and making it possible now."

"Who are you? Where are you coming from? What are your strengths and ambitions? What makes you happy and fulfilled? What are your inherent gifts and talents? Clearly define yourself."

"So many voices are out there, both excellent and mediocre, do you have a credible solution for the needs of your target market or audience? prove the authenticity of your substance. Do you have what it takes to make a difference? Whilst some come as talents, their development to excellence and maturity will not come without passion, resolve, productive work ethic and opportunity."

"The major purpose of defining and understanding yourself is to be able to come up with an objective strategy to map your success."

"Your mind must be prepared to face some kind of 'failure' or mistakes " take the lessons, face the consequences even if embarrassing, and march on."

"Your growth and involvement must begin to show lasting footprints as you exude maximum effectiveness and significance. Your leadership influence must translate into a source of inspiration for your peers and those who look at you as a leader."

"Skills and special abilities will only grow if you practice more. You become a star-performer by doing. Let performance and production of desired results become a consistent habit associated with your personal brand."

"Roll-up those sleeves and work until you see the fruit of your labour. It takes Passion, Resolve and a Productive Work Ethic, meeting with Opportunity, for you to succeed."

"If the African stars do not rise, are not known, remain obscure, their stories are not told " who and where is the African story teller? Your challenge if you are in the media is to continually ask if you are doing enough, using the appropriate strategies and at the right platforms. Let's create and promote international and global stars with the talent and skills in our people, no one will do it for us."

"You are in obscurity when you are still needed but no one cares a lot what you say or think, or even where you are working from. You have no voice or presence that makes you relevant. Grow your voice."

"Whilst a level playing field cannot be guaranteed, one thing that is guaranteed is your fair share of challenges. It's not a matter of IF they come, but WHEN you will encounter them."

"Development of states, urbanization, mechanization and industrialisation have all brought phenomenal strides to growth and prosperity of economies and their populace. They have also brought with them the insatiable need for energy resources with the related offspring of instability, conflict, war and corruption."

"When you face challenges, threats and prospects for failure, when you are out of money or job, when health is deteriorating and death seems to beckon " any hope for success against all those odds takes a solid empowering belief system that will believe " hope is still there. You must choose to adopt positive and empowering beliefs."

"The principles of stewardship and servant leadership challenge you to look at leadership differently. Consider these values."

"Sometimes you may feel like your life is submerged in life's relentless challenges, but you can develop the kind of internal substance in you that displaces every negativity, fear and self-doubt. Even if the challenges were bigger and heavy on your soul and life, the new attitude and belief within will displace every challenge before you - then the law of buoyancy will begin to force your challenges to be ejected out of your pathway to success."

"It is amazing, the number of business executives and senior leaders who get to be appointed and elevated to positions of authority on the basis of technical competences whilst lacking essential grooming on basic good manners and customs of conduct that must come from the home training process."

"The truth is that we all have what it takes to succeed and the fact is that not everyone will attain what they define success to be."

"Now that you are a leader. Everyone will want to know what you are doing and feel at liberty to comment or scrutinize even your private life. The world will become interested in your family life, your health, your achievements but most interestingly your shortcomings."

"To succeed, with or without money, have deliberate plans to make success out of opportunity. If you are totally dependent on chance, then chances are that you will fail."

"Allow others to talk about themselves instead of being obsessed about telling them or bragging about yourself and your possessions and achievements. Show a genuine interest in others and allow them to tell their story so you can share the conversation."

"Passing the baton - Oh what a challenge this has proven to be in many societies, families, businesses, governments, religious organizations and obviously in every other relay race! Why do this? - for starters, you will not live forever " how about that? After a given mileage, even a car will need new tyres!"

"Just like watering the field will cause both the desired seed and the undesirable weed to germinate, the opportunities for your mission in life will be equally presented with real-life threats."

"Learn from mistakes and set-backs (yours and other people's), pick yourself up, make necessary changes and try again. I once came across a saying that went something like, "The wise learn from the mistakes made by fools! So at some point we all have been fools, I suppose, since we all make mistakes."

"Do not plan to die, do not plan for the death of your name or your influence - rather, plan for the resting of a life well lived. Make an eternal mark."

"As you strive for personal effectiveness and leadership excellence, there are local and global questions that you will inevitably have to face. These range from poverty, corruption, terrorism, food security, scarcity of resources and overpopulation among others. Your power and influence for significance in leadership excellence will increase in direct proportion to your ability to find effective and sustainable practical solutions to some of these real-life challenges."

"Open the door for communication and interact with your children. Provide the answers (if you don't know, look for them or get expert advice). Guide them on how to deal with other sources of information " friends, TV, other media, society or the internet. Coaching empowers them to make their own informed, quality decisions."

"Aligning your values and beliefs to your behaviour, increases your chances of being effective at living a fulfilling life without the stress of guilt-consciousness, internal strife or internal conflict."

"Everything you love, enjoy, respect or value will somehow find top priority, even without excessive conscious reminders. Show respect through the way you manage time, especially when others are involved or affected."

"Because leaders and influential people are just as human as any other person, they sometimes forget that by doing little extra things to become extraordinary means they no longer have a completely private life. You must be willing to pay this price because if you don't, the consequences can be more disastrous. Learn to plan and be deliberate in also ensuring you and your family can still enjoy quality private moments."

"Exercise must become a regular part of your day or personal effectiveness system. Do not wait to start exercising because you want to lose weight or because the doctor has given you some scary update on your health. Exercise to keep fit and stay healthy. It's not too late to start now."

"Have you positioned yourself to be reachable and accessible by those you seek to serve and make an impact on? Do they know where and how to find you, either physically or in the cyber realm? If they cannot reach you for whatever reason, then you have not done your homework, because you are supposed to have a strategy to reach them before they can even look for you! Otherwise someone else will meet them along the way as they look for you."

"Be stimulated to become significant. This might be your back-slap moment. New-born babies born with weak signs of life are given a slap on the back to "stimulate them. It is a knock to wake them up to the reality that they must now take charge. In this world, they have to do their own breathing and their own eating otherwise they will not survive. It's the same in your adulthood and your quest for success, you must take charge because no one will wake up every day to do things for you and make a success out of a life of excuses and laziness."

"The need for security and power riding on energies that should be making life better and easier for the masses remains a great error in leadership focus. Why should the discovery of uranium's potential become a curse instead of a blessing? I am sure any type of power (nuclear and leadership included) in the wrong hands has the unfortunate potential to become a curse. A lot more is involved, including greed that causes the wealthy to sponsor violence and chaos. All, in order to profit from conflict, yet disregarding the harm caused to the vulnerable majority."

"Short term interventions will call for more guns and force in affected areas, in order to protect the vulnerable and suppress proliferation of terrorism and sectarian hatred, but the forward-looking leadership driving for sustainable solutions must now promote deliberate intents to influence systems of education, belief, culture, values and attitudes to promote tolerance, mutual respect, love and hope for all to succeed. If this area was given the same kind of attention and resources that HIV-AIDS has received to date, I can promise you, the same progress made in the containment of HIV-AIDS, would also have been made on the extremism front."

"Be in love with what you do. Love wisdom. Love life. Love people. God is love."

"Realise your Stewardship role as a parent " you raise children to offer a quality gift to society. Even your spouse should not be treated as an object or possession you own; support them to be the best of what they were created to be. Do your part and trust God for the rest. If you have empowered them, trust them to be responsible."

"Everyone is a business person. You must be in the business of managing your time. Managing your time means managing your life. Good time managers are good life managers, and vice versa."

"If in this generation, you still consider yourself the only one who knows or who has the capacity to make a difference, it's a shame because you are delaying this leadership excellence train from reaching its destination. Make a decision to change your leadership philosophy and agenda today!"

"It must start by knowing Time = Life. Spending your life on impulse will lead to a broke life, just like impulse buying leads to an empty wallet! How much value you place on your time reflects in the activities that consume your time."

"The principles that guide your decisions as a leader must not be contradictory to your personal values. Your personal values must lay the strong foundation on which you build your leadership tenets. In becoming a principle-centred leader, these leadership values become your guiding principles and lenses for decision making."

"The unfairness of judging others comes in that we judge them on the basis of our own values and beliefs, yet we can never exactly stand on common ground."

"The deep desire for success must cause a dream to rise to the surface and inspire you to action. The dream must be supported in the physical and natural realm to help you believe more and more in the possibility of its realization."

"Your words are powerful containers, carrying blessings or curses depending on what is inside of you. If you harbour bitterness in you, you will speak spitefully and create hurt and hatred in those you speak with. If there is love inside of you, you will release pleasant and caring words that create appreciation, gratitude and warmth in those around you."

"We don't have the same backgrounds, we do not possess the same skills or talents, we are not from the same generation, and neither do we have access to the same platform to shine. Things are not equal and life is not constant " there will never be the so-called level playing field."

"Alignment of vision, mission, values and attitudes need to be matched between you and those you choose to surround yourself with. The cost of training or replacing will be very minimal and less painful if recruitment, selection and positioning are done well. This applies even to general employment processes, whether at leadership or staff levels."

"The key to success in any area of life is to first know and master the area of focus. Cures to disease have been found, since time immemorial, by studying how the body functions as well as how the disease affects the sick. Seek depth in knowledge and research."

"To become successful, do the little extra things that ordinary people refuse to do. The little extra hard work, little extra practice, little extra studying and the little extra positive attitude."

"As you grow and develop your talent and skill " you must begin to create a demand for what you possess as a personal brand."

"Remain aware of your weak points; not knowing or choosing to ignore them, means creating dangerous 'blind-spots' in the path to your success."

"Consistency in leadership means everyone knows what to expect from you or in dealing with you. It is the quality that draws respect and value towards a leadership brand. This also means you have the discipline to stick to your principles and values regardless of challenges or consequences, and you prove this over a long period of time."