Tested Man

You can read all the books. Pray all the prayers. Attend all the seminars. Watch every motivational video on YouTube. Memorize every quote from every successful person that ever lived.

But if you are in the wrong location, your life will remain small.

I said what I said.

And before you come to my comment section to fight me, sit down and think about this carefully. Because this is one of those things that nobody will tell you to your face. They will keep selling you the idea that if you just believe harder, work harder, pray harder, everything will change. But they will never tell you that the ground you are standing on matters just as much as the seed you are planting.

Let me explain.

A mechanic in Nnewi and a mechanic with the same skill in a small village in Ebonyi State are not earning the same money. Same hands. Same knowledge. Same number of years in the trade. But one is eating and one is managing. Why? Location. Nnewi is a motor parts hub. The exposure is different. The customers are different. The competition forces you to sharpen yourself. The demand is constant. In that small village, you can be the best welder or the best panel be**er in your whole local government, and still not have enough work to feed your family properly. Not because you are not skilled. But because the environment cannot carry the weight of your potential.

I grew up in Arondizuogu. I know this feeling personally. I know what it means to have skill that your environment is too small to reward. Arondizuogu is a good town, our people are sharp, our culture is strong. But the economy of a town like that cannot pay you the same way Lagos will pay you, or Port Harcourt, or Nnewi, or Onitsha. The volume of money moving in those places is different. The kind of people passing through those places is different. A man who owns ten buses drives through Onitsha motor park. He will never drive through your village. So even if you are the best mechanic in your bloodline, you will never meet that customer, because your location denied you that meeting.

This is the part that breaks my heart when I see young artisans.

A boy learns tailoring for five years. He sews well, genuinely well. But he sets up his shop in a dead street in a quiet town where people barely buy new clothes. He waits. Nobody comes. He reduces his price. Still, nobody comes. He starts to think something is wrong with him. He prays more. He fasts. He reads books about success. And nothing changes, because the problem was never his faith or his skill. The problem is that the street he is sitting on does not have traffic. You cannot catch fish in a river that has no fish. No matter how good your net is.

Now let me go deeper, because some of you think I am only talking about physical movement.

I am not just talking about packing your bag and relocating, though sometimes that is exactly what needs to happen.

I am also talking about the location of your mind.

Some people have physically moved to Lagos, to Abuja, to Port Harcourt, but their mind is still in the village. They carry village thinking to a big city environment. They are afraid to charge correctly because in their head they are still pricing for village customers. They refuse to learn new things because back home, nobody expected them to know new things. They cannot network because where they come from, networking was not a culture. They are physically present in a big location, but mentally they are still in the wrong place. And so they waste the opportunity that the new environment is giving them.

Location of the mind is as powerful as location of the body.

But here is where I want to really talk to the people who cannot move right now. Maybe you have a family. Maybe you have responsibilities. Maybe the money to relocate is not there yet. Maybe your situation is genuinely complicated. I hear you. But let me tell you something that changed the game for many artisans in this generation

The internet gave everyone a second location.

For the first time in history, a tailor in Auchi can reach a customer in Lekki. A furniture maker in Aba can show his work to a client in Abuja who is willing to pay Abuja prices. A photographer in Enugu can build a reputation that travels before he does. The internet is a location. And the people who understand this are using it to escape the trap of their physical address.

But, and this is a big but, most Nigerian artisans are not using this second location properly. They are online but they are invisible. They have a phone but they are not building anything with it. They see the tool in their hand and they don't know what to do with it. So the location advantage the internet offers them is wasting. Because having a phone is not the same as having an online presence. Just like living in Lagos is not the same as taking advantage of Lagos.

You have to be intentional about your location. Physical or digital.

The question I want to leave in your mind today is this,

Where exactly is your business located right now? Not your shop address. Not your street. I mean, who can find you? Who knows you exist? How far does your reputation travel? Because if the only people who know your name are the people on your street, then your location is still too small for the level of success you are praying for.

Drop your trade in the comments. Let's talk about where you are and where your business needs to be.

DAILY LIGHT