I use a lot of cusswords when I’m angry. It’s so terrible, I find it really difficult to hold myself back.
You see, I’m a Christian, not just a Christian, a believer. For me, those things are wrong and I’m working really hard to stop doing them.
You needed to see me last month when I was giving a guy a piece of my mind, all the cuss words came flying out.
I really wouldn’t blame me, it’s what happens when you deal with the mainstream.
We’ll talk more about that later.
Someone said something that got me smiling at myself in the mirror a few days ago.
We recently finished an event at Sheraton Lagos Hotel, and we were both part of the planning committee.
Our host had invited everyone on the planning committee to dinner that evening and most of us were meeting for the first time because all our meetings were done virtually.
I got there before everyone else. So while waiting for them, others started to troop in and we sort of formed a small group outside the dining hall at Sheraton.
As we were shaking hands, this man walked up to me and said something that caught me off-guard.
He was meeting me for the first time but we had spoken over the phone a few times, and I knew him before we even joined the committee.
He said “So this is the legendary Fisayo Patrick”
Mind = Blown***
I was shocked. Legendary? Someone must have said something.
He went on to say he had heard so much about me and they were great things. I smiled and nodded my head in acknowledgment, but you could ride a horse on the inside of me.
You see, I made up my mind a few years ago that I wanted to be different. That I wanted to think, speak, and act differently from the average person.
All my life,I basically lived an average life, and I wasn’t the brightest kid in class. Until now of course.
Let me take you down memory lane.
When I was in primary 3, our class teacher had this idea of segregating the entire class into 3 rows.
Role C was the first row as you entered the classroom and it was popularly called “Olodo row”
Olodo is a word in Yoruba that means a numbskull, a dunce, a stupid person, someone who wasn’t bright. Yes, I know, it’s weird.
This row was filled with pupils who couldn’t read or write, pupils who couldn’t even speak English or spell their names.
Row B was the one in the middle. This row was for the average pupils. The ones who could read, write, and spell, but who didn’t know Arithmetics.
Row A was the one at the extreme and it comprised the brightest pupils in the class. The readers and writers, the ones who knew arithmetics and could recite the multiplications table off-hand, the ones who had the best handwriting.
These were the ones who got the attention of the teachers and the rest of the class.
By now, you could have guessed what row I fell into. No not row C, dude! Row B.
I could read and write, I also had good handwriting but mathematics and the multiplication table weren’t my friends.
We were told to our faces countless times that we were average.
And that average feeling became rooted inside me. It continued even till my University days.
I had a lot of Cs in my grades - Average
I finished with a second-class lower - Average.
I got tired.
One day, during my youth service, I decided that I could change that for myself, that I could stop feeling like an ordinary and start feeling like an extraordinary.
I figured that I could start living like the alpha female that God created me to be, so I changed my lifestyle.
You see, bankruptcy of the soul happens when more is going out of you and very little to nothing is coming inside.
When you disperse a lot of mental energy through your actions and conversations but you do not replace them by reading and acquiring knowledge.
So the first thing I did was to start reading books. The first book I ever read, I borrowed it from a fellow corper and it took me 2 weeks to finish reading it. After that one, I borrowed another and yet another.
Before I knew it, I was beginning to flow in the wisdom of ages. I was having conversations that I originally wouldn’t be involved in.
I would sit outside on the field and read read read into the night while other corpers engaged in interesting arguments that I would have normally loved to be a part of.
I would wake up, read, eat, read, read, sleep, wake up, read. Literally.
In October 2016, I sat down to read 13 different books from start to finish. All of them borrowed.
I was borrowing because I had never bought books with my money, except crime novels, in my entire life.
I read countless spiritual books that month and I will be honest with you, my life changed. Once I came across a confession and I recited it and that was how my spiritual journey began.
This was after I had gone out for altar calls more than 12 times in my entire existence. (It took a while for me to learn that you only go out for altar call once).
I also picked up the habit of listening to sermons, podcasts, and audio messages of very disruptive preachers and teachers.
I intentionally made that decision to be different, to be disruptive, to look at things from a better disposition.
I carried that habit from my youth service year to my 9-5 days, reading at work, reading on the bus, and reading before bed.
I had the most apt answers to every question and I could learn new things fast.
No wonder the gentleman called me the ‘Legendary Fisayo Patrick’
Did the segregation in primary 3 produce any great results? I don’t know, all I know is that it took a lot of effort to break down the fences that I had set up around me.
Even though I read books, I still had insecurities and a bit of low self-esteem, but they were beginning to wane very drastically.
Let me quote the words of T.D. Jakes in his book Disruptive Thinking: “Knowing what your fence is made up of determines how high you have to climb or to jump in order to get over it”
Could I have sat down there and continued to remain average because I was deemed a semi-olodo in primary 3? I could have, but I decided to drop every banal of unseriousness and get a grip on my life.
These days, I feel as if there’s something that has been deposited inside of me that is waiting to be birthed.
I feel like there’s so much hidden inside me that will come out to shine in the next few years.
Now, don’t get it twisted, becoming extraordinary comes with its own challenges.
One of them is being surrounded by people who are not on the same intellectual level as you and this can cause a lot of friction, trust me.
The other challenge is like unto it, being surrounded by people who don’t know and who have refused to know, and who hate you for knowing more than they do.
And maybe this is why the cusswords fly out of my mouth every time I have to deal with the undistinguished, uninspired, and mainstream.
Fellow ‘extraordinarites’ it’s crazy out there.
But continue to be disruptive and challenge the status quo.
I know there’ll be a sequel to this, but maybe not anytime soon.
Have an exceptional day every day.