Lessons For The Ghanaian Youth: Attitude Is Everything

Growing up as a catholic, I was constantly bombarded with the lives of the saints. I was supposed to read about them and walk in their paths. For me, the story of the saints were exactly that-good stories- until I saw, studied and fell in love with a lady called Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, a nun who took the name Sister Mary Theresa and became known to the whole world as Mother Theresa of Calcutta.

Mother Theresa taught me a lesson about attitude, which I find very useful to date.

When she saw the poor, the unwanted, the unloved and the uncared for in Calcutta's slums she didn’t complain about what the government was doing to help the poor; She decided that she would do something about it. She began the Missionaries of Charity, which she founded with only a handful of members—most of them former teachers or pupils from St. Mary's School. And by the time she died, she had over 40, 000 members of her charity.

Delivering the acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace prize, she told a story of an experience she had with a Hindu family “I had the most extraordinary experience with a Hindu family who had eight children. A gentleman came to our house and said: Mother Teresa, there is a family with eight children; they had not eaten for so long do something. So I took some rice and I went there immediately. And I saw the children their eyes shinning with hunger I don't know if you have ever seen hunger. But I have seen it very often. And she took the rice, she divided the rice, and she went out. When she came back I asked her where did you go, what did you do? And she gave me a very simple answer: They are hungry also. What struck me most was that she knew they were, a Muslim family (Muslims and Hindus are enemies in India) and there were those children, radiating joy, sharing the joy with their mother because she had the love to give.”

This article is not about Mother Theresa; it’s about our attitude as young people. As Jim Rohn aply puts it "Learn how to be happy with what you have while you pursue all that you want." Over the past few years, I have had a course to worry about how Ghana will be like in the next few years, seeing how young people of today see themselves and the country. Many young people complain about unemployment, corruption, leadership and authority but that is all they do: complain. Most young people today are not prepared to go through the rigours of apprenticeship, they would rather device easy and quick means of attaining riches no matter how illegal it is. Many national service personnel will report to work late, leave early and in between either be on their phones throughout or on their laptops watching the latest series yet complain of unemployment when they do not get jobs at their service.

I have seen receptionists, customer service representatives and even sales agents being absolutely rude to customers just because they woke up on the wrong side of the bed and yet complain when they are suddenly out of job. A friend of mine recently went to the HR office of the Ghana Health service. She went into one of the offices and politely tells a young lady her mission. “Why didn’t you go to the regional office to find out if they have brought it here before coming?” she asks my friend “Well the lady to check if it has been brought here is not around and as you can see I’m busy so if you can wait fine if not …” this lady will complain about the government not doing anything about the unemployed if she suddenly finds herself without employment. Our attitude is everything; Each morning we wake up we have two choices.

We can choose to be in a good mood or we can choose to be in a bad mood.' Each time something bad happens, we can choose to be a victim or we can choose to learn from it. Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice. We choose how you react to situations. We choose how people will affect our mood. We choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The bottom line: It's our choice how we live life."

As mother Theresa puts it; “when you walk into a dark room holding unlit candles, and you find that there is darkness inside the room, you don’t complain about the darkness; you light the candle and ask your neighbor to also light a candle and lo and behold when all of us have lighted our candles, the room will be consumed in light. How do we spend our days? Do we spend them complaining about the things that do not work or we spend them trying in our own small way to make this country better.

Ralph Waldo Emerson says, "Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." When you go through life with an attitude to stop complaining and do something about what you would normally complain about, Dale Carnegie says even the undertaker who makes money when people die will be sorry when you die.

One example of having a great attitude is that of a young lady I met a few months ago. Nana Adjoa Sifa Amponsah, president and founder of Guzakuza. She had a dream, an ambitious dream- to train women agripreneurs. To encourage women to see the Agric sector as a business. I was very skeptical and I told her so. “The youth of today are not interested in Agriculture” I told her “Even the men are shying away from agric, how then do you expect to attract the ladies?” I added. Nana Adjoa told me her strategy and she kept drumming it until she won me over.

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor souls who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat." So says Theodore Roosevelt and the family meeting of Guzakuza where the board met the team illustrated this saying.

Her attitude is making her a winner, what about you?