PERFECT SUCCESS IS AS SIMPLE AS ABC by Oluwatidamilare Charles Og'leye

            Every rising of the sun, the signal of a new day, there witness many hope and expectations. Many successes are recorded, so also failures.

Life is both sides of the coin. A whole lot of things or factors determine success, while perfect success is determined by very few factors. This may seem foolish but we can still make it ideal with utmost concentration in analysing every unit of the detail.

            Perfect success may be as simple as ABC. Let us consider the alphabets and number each letter serially:

A      1	B      2	C    3	D     4	E      5	F      6	G      7	H      8	I       9	J     10
K    11	L    12	M   13	N   14	O    15	P    16	Q    17	R    18	S    19	T    20
U    21	V    22	W   23	X    24	Y    25	Z    26

The commonest factor of success by an average person is HARDWORK.

Recognition: Diddy awarded Honorary Doctorate at Howard University

The American rapper and business mogul was awarded a honorary doctorate at his former school Howard University in Washington D.C., USA on Saturday, May 10.

Diddy also gave the commencement speech at the graduation. He said “Howard University didn’t just save my life, it entered my soul…my heart, my being and my spirit.”

Last month, students at the university protested that he was selected to speak having drop out of the institution.

Oby Ezekwesili Disagree with Onyeka Onwenu’s Interview on #BringBackOurGirls

Former Minister for Education and Vice President of the World Bank’s Africa Division Oby Ezekwesili weighs in on Onyeka Onwenu‘s interview with Channels TV.
Earlier today, BN brought you all the clips from the interview – watch it here.
The Nigerian singer, actress and Director General of National Centre for Women Development, defended the first lady Patience Jonathan and said “There should be no name calling at this stage” as no government is perfect.
Sharing her thoughts on the interview, Ezekwesili said it “completely missed the focus”.

I love and will continue to love Onyeka Onwenu but TODAY, her interview on @ChannelsTV_NG completely missed the FOCUS. #BringBackOurGirls
— oby ezekwesili (@obyezeks) May 12, 2014

P.S There is a viral photo of Oby Ezekwesili at one of the protests. Telling everyone she is going no where.

#BringBackOurGirls: Usher Lends Support

The clamour for  the freedom of the abducted secondary school girls kidnapped by the insurgents group, Boko Haram is gaining momentum everyday. Many powerful figures and celebrities across the world are lending their support and voicing their disapproval to the animalistic behaviour of the terrorist. Latest is the Grammy award winner R 'n' B singer, Usher Raymond.

Peter Okoye: The Most Important Thing a Father can Do For His Children

There seem to be no end to the romantic adventure between Peter of PSquare and his wife, Lola as the husband takes to twitter and instagram to express his feeling towards his wife yesterday to mark this year's mother's day. See Lola's response:

Immigration replies Davido

 See the Immigration response to Davido:
“Mr. Adeleke started arguing with the officer who had to refer the case to his superiors. The verdict here too was that he can not make the trip unless he produces the said Nigerian passport. Livid with anger Mr. Adeleke in company of his bodyguards started protesting in a disorderly manner prompting the Comptroller of Immigration in – charge at MMIA to intervene. He advised Mr. Adeleke to call his bodyguards to order and comply with the lawful instruction which would not only erase any doubt as to his immigration status but also establish his claim to dual citizenship.

#BringBackOurGirls: Police Stop Protesters in Abuja

We gathered from our source in Abuja that the Nigerian police this afternoon attempted to stop protesters from gathering at the Unity fount for a #BringBackOurGirls sit-in in Abuja. The police didn't want the peaceful meeting to happen and sent officers to the location to disperse the few that gathered there and stopped many from coming to the meeting.



The above pictures indicate that former House of Rep member, Hon. Dino Melaye(in orange T-shirt) and other protesters were harangued by the police.

But despite the interruption from police, the group eventually held the meeting peacefully.
Uhmmm... Democracy

At Last! 'I have information on abducted girls' - Borno governor, Shettima

Borno State governor Kashim Shettima disclosed yesterday that he has information on the whereabouts of the 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram on April 14th. This opened the lid from the mystery surrounding the girls and will unarguably add to the speculation that Borno government has hand in the activities of the insurgent in that State.

The governor told the BBC;

"We've got reports of them being sighted in some locations – which we have conveyed to the relevant military authorities, for them to cross-check, verify and get additional information on the accurate location of the daughters.’

Will you #BringBackOurGirls ?

6 Essential and Timeless Tips on How to Build Self Confidence

Now, I hope you will find something useful in this article to help you improve and maintain your own levels of confidence.

1. Take action. Get it done.

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”
Dale Carnegie

The most important step in building self confidence is simply to take action. Working on something and getting it done. Sitting at home and thinking about it will just make you feel worse. Simple. But not always easy to do. To make it a bit easier, here are a three of my favourite ways to make it easer to take action:

• Be present. This will help you snap out of over thinking and just go and do whatever you want to get done. This is probably the best tip I have found so far for taking more action since it puts you in a state where you feel little emotional resistance to the work you’ll do. And it puts you in state where the right actions often just seem to flow out of you in a focused but relaxed way and without much effort. One of the simplest ways to connect with the present moment is just to keep your focus on your breathing for a minute or two.
• Lighten up. One way to dissuade yourself from taking action is to take whatever you are about to do too seriously. That makes it feel too big, too difficult and too scary. If you on the other hand relax a bit and lighten up you often realize that those problems and negative feelings are just something you are creating in your own mind. With a lighter state of mind your tasks seems lighter and become easier to get started with. Have a look at Lighten Up! for more on this.
• Really, really want it. Then taking action isn’t something you have to force. Taking action becomes a very natural thing. It’s something you can’t wait to do.

 2. Face your fear.

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
Eleanor Roosevelt

• Be curious. When you are stuck in fear you are closed up. You tend to create division in your world and mind. You create barriers between you and other things/people. When you shift to being curious your perceptions go SWOOSH! and the world just opens up. Curiosity is filled with anticipation and enthusiasm. It opens you up. And when you are open and enthusiastic then you have more fun things to think about than focusing on your fear. How do you become more curious? One way is to remember how life has become more fun in the past thanks to your curiosity and to remember all the cool things it helped you to discover and experience.
• Realize that fear is often based on unhelpful interpretation. As humans we like to look for patterns. The problem is just that we often find negative and not so helpful patterns in our lives based on just one or two experiences. Or by misjudging situations. Or through some silly miscommunication. When you get too identified with your thoughts you’ll believe anything they tell you. A more helpful practise may be to not take your thoughts too seriously. A lot of the time they and your memory are pretty inaccurate. 
•  
•  
• 3. Understand in what order things happen.
• The thing is, when you do things you don’t just build confidence in your ability to handle different situations. You also experience progressive desensitization. What that means is that situations – like for example public speaking or maybe just showing your latest blogpost to an audience out there – that made you feel all shaky become more and more normal in your life. It is not longer something you psyche yourself up to do. It just becomes normal. Like tying your shoes, hanging out with your friends or taking a shower.
  It may seem scary now. But after having done whatever you fear a few to a dozen times or so you may think: “Is that it?”. You almost feel disappointed of how anticlimactic it has become. You may even get a bit angry with yourself and wonder why you avoided doing it for so long.
  
  
  4. Prepare.
  “One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self- confidence is preparation.”
  Arthur Ashe
  
  
  When you know nothing of what you are about to do it’s very easy to get lost in vague, foggy fear and start building big horror scenarios in your mind of what may happen if you give it a try.
  Preparing yourself and educating yourself can be a big help here. By for example rehearsing and rewriting your speech over and over you can pretty much learn it by heart. By doing research you can find breathing techniques that can quickly make your calmer and present. Or simple visualization techniques that make you feel more confident and positive as you step out on the stage.
  
  
  5. Realize that failure or being wrong will not kill you.
  “Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.”
  Peter T. Mcintyre
  
  
  The thing is to reframe failure from being something that makes your legs shake to something useful and important for the growth of your self confidence and your overall growth as a human being. Here are four ways that failure can help you out:
• You learn. Instead of seeing failure as something horrible you can start to view it more as a learning experience. When standing in the middle of a failure, you can ask yourself questions like: What’s awesome about this situation? What can I learn from this situation?
• You gain experiences you could not get any other way.  Ideally, you probably want to learn from other people’s mistakes and failures. That’s not always easy to do though. Sometimes you just have to fail on your own to learn a lesson and to gain an experience no one can relate to you in mere words.
• You become stronger. Every time you fail you become more accustomed to it. You realize more and more that it’s not the end of the world. And, again, you get desensitized. You can handle things that would have been very hard to handle a few years back. Failing can also a have an exhilarating component because even though you failed you at least took a chance. You didn’t just sit on you hands doing nothing. And that took quite a bit of courage and determination.
• Your chances of succeeding increases. Every time you fail you can learn and increase your inner strength. So every failure can make you more and more likely to succeed.
•  
• 6. Get to know who you are and what you want out of life.  
• 
  
  “The world has the habit of making room for the man whose words and actions show that he knows where he is going.”
  Napoleon Hill
  
  
  “Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you can’t do this or that. That’s nonsense. Make up your mind, you’ll never use crutches or a stick, then have a go at everything. Go to school, join in all the games you can. Go anywhere you want to. But never, never let them persuade you that things are too difficult or impossible.”
  Douglas Bader
  
  
  To build and find more confidence in yourself you have to get to know yourself better. Go exploring. Face some of your fears. Fail over and over and understand that it isn’t really that big of a deal. Grow stronger through such experiences and also become more internally relaxed. Figure out what really excites you by simply trying a whole bunch of stuff out.
  When you know more about who you are and what you want out of life – not other people say you want – you will have more confidence in yourself and what you can do.
  What other people say or think will have less of an impact than it used to because you know who you are better than they do. And since you have had all these experiences, since you have taken time to really get to know yourself and stretch yourself you will trust your own opinion and ability more than anything outside of you. You become stable and centred in yourself.
  This will of course take time. It may be something that never really ends. So you might as well get started now.
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5 Things to Remain Positive About When All Hope is Gone

 
1. Your Health.

I love the saying ‘If there’s nothing wrong with your health, you don’t have a problem’, I’m not saying I fully believe in it (I don’t believe in problems, only situations) but it definitely makes sense. When we are born, there’s only one thing all of us having in common, we are going to die.

While that may be a grim statement, you certainly shouldn’t look at things like that. Your health is one of the most vital assets you have, in fact it’s the most vital asset you have. No matter what car you drive or how much money you have in your bank, they are completely meaningless compared to the importance of being healthy and strong.

When everything seems down, just remember that you are alive and healthy and you have the rest of your life in front of you. There’s no greater achievement than the gift of life.

2. There’s Always Tomorrow.

You’ve probably heard this a million times but the point from this statement is just as true as ever. Have you ever been stressing about something a lot, maybe through impatience, and woke up the next day and found that you don’t really care about that ‘problem’ anymore?

I know I have. There’s always tomorrow is not just a wishful thinking mindset, it’s a fact. Tomorrow will be here just like today was here, so no matter how bad things are going or how bad your day seems, tomorrow will be here when you wake up and give you hundreds of more opportunities.

That isn’t to say you should put things off and always be waiting for tomorrow, this is about realising you still have the time to turn things around and improve your situation.

3. Your Potential.

There are some people in this world who are billionaires. There are some people in this world that discovered gravity, invented electricity and even someone who came up with the internet. You know what the difference is between you and all these amazing people?

Absolutely nothing, you’re both human.

Some people never live up to their full potential, mostly because they believe that success and fame or happiness and clarity are left for people who are more fortunate than them. Do you think Tim Berners-Lee woke up and decided to create the internet? No way. But I’m sure he had an idea of what he wanted to achieve and went out there to start doing it.

You have the potential to be anyone and do anything you want, our time on this planet gives us amazing chances and opportunities, don’t waste it because you feel like you have no hope. You have as good a chance to change the world as anybody, you just have to realise it.

People made millions, people saved lives, you are a person, you can do the same.

4. Things Could be Worse.

Things could be worse, they could always be worse, at least in 99.9% of situations we find ourselves in. I recently told the story of a prostitute who was kicked out on the street by a man who had sex with her and didn’t pay. This was while being watched by lots of people with their heads hanging out of office windows to see what was going on. Imagine being in that situation.

No matter what problems you think you have right now, they could be worse. If you are struggling to pay your next bill, at least you are living in a home while doing it or have a family who are willing to support you. If you’ve just divorced your wife, it’s not like all other women on the planet have disappeared, you can still get out there and find another girl for you. Life is abundant, don’t take your current situation as the worst it could be, because more often than not, things could be a whole level worse than you can imagine.

5. You’ll Come Out Stronger.

I love challenges, I really do. I love knowing I’m scared of doing something but that I can conquer it. For example I recently did a bungee jump, I was very nervous before jumping from an 80ft bridge but I loved knowing I was nervous, I loved having the opportunity to overcome the fear.

‘Hard times make you stronger‘ or variations of that phrase are probably something you’ve heard 100 times before, that’s because it’s true. Think of any hard time in your life whether it’s:

• Losing your job
• Going through a divorce
• Getting beaten up / mugged / burgled (I’ve had all 3)
• Being financially unstable

If you’ve been through any of these and came out on the other side then you will know that they’ve probably made you stronger as a person and helped you with other aspects of your life. Be thankful for the challenges you have right now, because on the other end is a new you with a lot more strength than the old one.

#BringBackOurGirls

The protest against the abduction of over 200 secondary school girls is increasing across the world as many influential people and countries are lending their voice against the crime against humanity by the Boko Haram islamic group that has held the girls into captivity since last month. United States, UK, China and France have all signified their intention to search for the girls with their surveillance technology, while the US army has arrived Nigeria to assist the nation's military in their quest to locate and rescue the girls.
#BRINGBACKOURGIRLS

Super Dre!

Dr Dre set to be hip hop's first billionaire as Apple is set to buy Beats Electronics for $3.2bn

 
Super producer and rapper Dr Dre is set to become Hip Hop's first billionaire as Apple Inc. is close to sealing a multi-billion dollar deal to purchase Beats Electronics, the company he founded with music producer Jimmy Lovine in 2008. The company produces the popular Beats By Dre headphones and also runs a music streaming service, which Apple is more interested in than the headphones itself. If this happens, it will be Apple's biggest acquisition till date. ($3.2billion)

Apple wants a music-on-demand service to rival Spotify, which is a digital music service that gives people access to millions of songs.

It was announced today that the acquisition could be announced as early as next week.

D'banj at World Economic Forum, Abuja?

D'banj is a delegate at the on-going World Econimic Forum Africa taking place in Abuja. He's on the Agriculture panel. (He's pictured above with Tony Elumelu). This truly knows where his bread can be truly buttered. He is moving on to something great. I notice you, Banger Lee! 

Boko Haram has become a global problem, says Soyinka

Unless the international community joins forces with the Nigerian government, the 276 girls kidnapped at the Government Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State would be sold as sex slaves, Prof Wole Soyinka said yesterday.
The Nobel Laureate, who spoke to CNN’s Christine Amanpour, described the abduction of the school girls as a horrifying event, which needed rapid action from the global community.
He said the experience would traumatise the victims for the rest of their lives, stressing that services of psychological experts would be needed to help the girls recover from the pain should they be rescued alive.
He said: “The world must confront this reality. It is painful and horrifying that these girls are going to be sold as sex slaves. I used that expression deliberately; let us not beat around the bush. We are dealing with the monstrosity and an affliction, which requires that we must go in quickly and act rapidly, because these girls are going to be traumatised in a way in which it is going to …haimt them for the rest of their lives.”
Soyinka described as gleeful charade, the latest video released by the Boko Haram sect, which filmed its leader, Imam Abubakar Shekau, with four other armed militants, sending a message to the government.
“The obscenity we just watched from the leader of Boko Haram is something to be anticipated, but it doesn’t come as a surprise. That is the nature of what this people have made themselves into,” the Nobel Laureate said.
Soyinka, who noted that the Boko Haram activity should not be seen as Nigeria’s problem, said the sect was consolidating internal insurrection that had been brewing slowly in the country for a long time.
He dismissed the notion that the extrajudicial killing of Mohammed Yusuf, the sect’s leader, aggravated the crisis in the Northeast, saying the late Yusuf was a serial killer and butcher, who should have been brought to justice were he to be alive. He condemned the move by government leaders to make the late sect leader a saint, even as he denounced his extra-judicial killing.
He said: “When Yusuf was killed, a former Head of State went on a mission of appeasement to Boko Haram family, asking the people to forgive and forget. But this was a killer. But the law says those who kill must not go unpunished.”
Condemning the acts of terror against innocent Nigerians, Soyinka said: “These criminals take pride in bestiality. The issue is that of fundamentalist fascism in which you feel that…it is an act of domination in which you prove what power you have in the environment, the little pond, where you operate. It is a bad mentality.”
Soyinka said the protesters demonstrating against the school girls’ abduction have created action whose end nobody could tell. He said the abduction has ended all pretence by the government, which he said has shown indifference to the enormity of the crisis rocking the Northeast.
He said: “People coming out on the street now don’t realise the enormity the action would catch up on them. Where it would end, I do not know but one thing is certain; the president and his government cannot pretend what has befallen Nigeria. All the pretence, indifference and denial have ended; I am convinced about that. The situation is now beyond the capacity of the government…”

That is why I said it involves an international action.”

#BringBackOurGirls: Drake Voices His Support

It is amazing the level of international attention the kidnap of secondary school girls at Chibok, Borno State last has generated. Many people including world leaders and celebrities have been voicing their disapproval and joined the campaign to freed the girls from captivity. See Drizzy amazing support. #RealmenDon'tBuyGirls

#BringBackOurGirl: Angelina Jolie and Sean 'Diddy' Combs Add Voices

Music mogul Diddy posted the message above on his instagram page today, while actress and UN ambassador, Angelina Jolie spoke about the missing girls during a press conference in Paris today..

“Sadly of course there is real evil in the world, you watch the news and you see all of the people suffering and so much cruelty. It’s unthinkable cruelty like these girls that were kidnapped in Nigeria. Unthinkable cruelty and evil,” she said.

Breaking News! Another Bomb Blast in Abuja

There has occur another bomb blast at Nyanya in Abuja after two weeks of a similar explosion in that area which claimed over seventy live and left some injured. It was reported that the explosion was triggered by a Volkswagen Gulf around 8:30p.m, Nigerian time. The victims who sustained various degree of injuries have been taken to the General hospital, Asokoro, where some of the victims of the first blast are still receiving treatment. #iiconsults