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I mostly hate Gary Vee. Have you ever watched his videos????

Maybe I feel this way about him because he gets too extreme about his ideas on putting the extra work to realize your dreams whether it’s a side hustle or an actual business. Maybe I don’t really hate him. Maybe it’s me that feels guilty about this his approach to ‘hustling’. Or maybe I stumble on his videos and instagram feeds around the times when I am wasting my life away reading Instablog9ja or Joro Olumofin or watching YouTube videos teaching how to make money as a ventriloquist. But most of what he says is true. A lot of what he preaches is ‘stop destroying your life by indulging in unhelpful habits most of which can be avoided in the first place’. Spending too much time on Instagram instead of working on that report, spending too much time on Twitter instead of finishing up on that tight deadline, binge watching Orange Is The New Black when you can spend the extra hours in bed. You see Gary Vee is almost always right. His passion for correcting ‘millenial’ laziness is laudable but don’t you finally get the message when you have to pay for lost opportunities because you were wasting your own time?

Have you ever played too much, knowing fully well that your exams were in a few days and then the night before the exam, you realize you have so much to study. Then regret. Then you kick yourself because you knew you needed to study earlier but you refused to ‘give yourself brain’.

Zizu(my damn parrot) has a perch in his cage where he stands 20 hours a day(parrots stand every second of their lives except when they are in flight. The remaining 4 hours spent on a separate perch outside his cage). Because parrots love to chew, he suddenly realized his perch was made of wood and his beak can drill through. So he starts chewing his own perch- the only perch he stands on to eat. His chew project lasted two days. When I noticed he had started chewing on it, I covered the spot with raffia so he wouldn’t drill all the way and fall off. Somehow, he took off the raffia yarn and continued chewing. Eventually, his perch broke(as expected) and so he can no longer reach for his food bowl. I was so mad at the stupid-intelligent bird because he knew what he was doing but out of boredom, he wasn’t thinking about long-term. Suddenly, I understand why Gary Vaynerchuk expresses frustration on video when he talks about people spending time watching Game Of Thrones, thereby sacrificing the gains of the future by indulging in immediate sensual gratification.

I once read the Warren Buffet’s famous quote, “Do not save what is left after spending. Spend what is left after saving or investing. Look at it as paying yourself.” I remember arguing with my friend Mimi about this. My counter to this was that Warren Buffet was rich after all. ‘It’s when you are well fed that you can be talking about saving’. But we forget that our needs rise to the availability of resources. We forget about the future and spend money on all those things we want now…many of which won’t kill us if we waited.

When I earned 30k a month, I thought I was broke and so I envied those who earned 60k. In fact, when I heard someone earned 60k at an entry-level job I was like ‘wow! This guy is balling’. Then I started earning 60k. The joy lasted the first month. Then when I heard someone earned 150k, I wondered why the person was being humble(or why he wasn’t starching his clothes enough to demonstrate pride, if you know what I mean). When I started earning well over that, nothing really changed for me except my taste. It was equally difficult to save- whether at a salary of 30k or more.

But it’s a big lesson for me, I hope for you too: Spend what is left after saving or investing.

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