11/03/2025
USE YOUR BRAIN TO MAKE MONEY
This is the story of Chinedu, who wanted to get rich, but didn't know how to.
Chinedu is a 27 year old, 5.9 feet tall, light skinned Nigerian guy of the Igbo tribe.
Growing up, Chinedu's best friends were Emeka, John and Calistus.
They all talked about what they would do if they got rich!
"I will buy jet and a house on banana island," Calistus will always say.
Among the four friends, Calistus was usually the one who had eyes for flashy things the most.
But there was a problem...
None of the four friends had rich parents or mentors to guide them along the lines of making money.
Their parents were all subsistence farmers, who worked with hoe and cutlass to farm large plots of land for food.
Their parents also hunted meat from nearby forests, and sometimes sold the animals they caught in the market for money to afford other things.
By the time he was 25, Chinedu had left the village where his parents lived, to Lagos, a very commercial city in Nigeria where Chinedu heard that rich people lived.
He was told that if he could "hustle" enough, he would also get rich in Lagos.
On getting to Lagos, Chinedu got himself a house in the slums of Lagos.
He lived in a place called, Ajegunle.
From there, Chinedu will take up menial jobs everyday, doing his possible best to survive.
He would dig pits manually, work as a labourer at construction sites, and do other energy and strength draining jobs.
Chinedu noticed one thing as he worked...
Only the bosses and managers of the sites were rich, and only they drove shiny and beautiful cars.
The rest of the labourers like himself were poor, and often struggling to afford daily bread.
One day, Chinedu approached a manager and asked, "how can I be a manager like you?"
The manager was shocked because nobody has ever asked him that kind of question.
So the manager replied with a question, "why do you want to be a manager like me?"
To which Chinedu replied, "in my years of working here, I have seen that all of us work hard, but only the managers get rich."
The manager smiled to himself and said, "finally, I have someone who wants to get rich."
"If you want to get rich like me, understand the difference between effort and value. You work by putting in effort. I work by bringing value.
"When you work with your hands only, you will only produce effort. That is why when you mix concrete or do manual labour, all you are producing is effort.
"When I work with my brain first before my hand, I produce value. I use my valuable knowledge and good, well practiced skills to produce value. The value goes in form of proper contract proposal, a good materials estimate, and a good degree of mobilization of people.
" Your brain is your center of value, and when you fill your brain with useful knowledge and valuable skills, you will use that brain to make money through that knowledge and those skills. Unfortunately, a lot of people fill their brains with arguments about how Mercy Chinwo has sued VDM to court, and never bother gaining knowledge that will be valuable to their futures."
With that, Chinedu thanked the manager, stopped following gossip about how Mercy Chinwo sued VDM for 1 billion naira, and started searching for the knowledge that will help his life.
He went ahead within the next five years to learn sales, marketing, investing, copywriting, UI/UX design, AI prompt engineering, and data analysis.
And in another five years, he was doing well for himself using his newly learnt skills.
So yes, I've given you a small idea on a few skills you should consider learning.
Buy me a bottle of coke if I tried, or didn't I try?
