John worked at a meat distribution factory. One day, after he had finished with his work schedule, he went into the meat cold room (freezer) to inspect something. In a moment of bad luck, the door closed and he was locked inside with no help in sight. Although he screamed and knocked with all his might, no one could hear him. Most of the workers had already gone and outside the cold room, it was impossible to hear what was going on inside.

Five hours later, whilst John was on the verge of death, the security guard of the factory eventually opened the door and saved him.

John asked the security guard why he had come there as it wasn’t part of his work routine.

His reply: “I’ve been working in this factory for 35 years. Hundreds of workers come in and out every day but you’re one of the few who greets me in the morning and says goodbye every night as you leave. Many treat me as if I am invisible.

So today like every other day, you greeted me in your simple manner “Hello” as you came in, but curiously, I observed I had not heard your “Good bye, See you tomorrow.”

Hence I decided to check around the factory.

You see me. I look forward to your greetings every day because, to you, I am someone. When I did not hear your farewell, I knew something had happened. So I sought and found you!

Moral Lesson:

Be humble, love and respect those around you because you never know who you impact with your smile. Reach out and touch someone. Show them they matter. Make it personal.

Happy World Smile Day!

What does happiness look like for you?

Perhaps it’s being at peace with who you are or the freedom to pursue your deepest dreams. Or maybe it’s having a life partner who loves you unconditionally, a family, or an incredible network of friends

Whatever true happiness means to you, these 5 simple rules make living a happier, meaningful, more satisfying life accessible.

1. Clear your mind get in a beautiful state.

2. Be grateful.

3. Breathe deeply.

4. Live simply. Give more. Expect less.

5. Do things that bring you bliss daily. Find fun activities you enjoy like listening to music, meditating, or dancing.

Acknowledge the unhappy moments, reframe your thoughts and remember the five simple rules to be happy.

This beautiful poem was shared with me by Robert Michael Fried, Author of Igniting Your True Purpose and Passion.

As we reflect on matters this holiday, I felt that this was fitting:

Ready or not, some day it will all come to an end.

There will be no more sunrises, no minutes, hours or days.

All the things you collected, whether treasured or forgotten,

will pass to someone else.

Your wealth, fame and temporal power will shrivel to irrelevance.

It will not matter what you owned or what you were owed.

Your grudges, resentments, frustrations and jealousies will finally disappear.

So too, your hopes, ambitions, plans and to-do lists will expire.

The wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away.

It won’t matter where you came from

or what side of the tracks you lived on at the end.

It won’t matter whether you were beautiful or brilliant.

Even your gender and skin color will be irrelevant.

So what will matter?

How will the value of your days be measured?

What will matter is not what you bought

but what you built, not what you got but what you gave.

What will matter is not your success but your significance.

What will matter is not what you learned but what you taught.

What will matter is every act of integrity, compassion, courage, or sacrifice that enriched, empowered or encouraged others to emulate your example.

What will matter is not your competence but your character.

What will matter is not how many people you knew,

but how many will feel a lasting loss when you’re gone.

What will matter is not your memories

but the memories that live in those who loved you.

What will matter is how long you will be remembered,

by whom and for what.

Living a life that matters doesn’t happen by accident.

It’s not a matter of circumstance but of choice.

Choose to live a life that matters.

Mae Berkel shared the donkey story with me. Another example of how Mae doesn’t just inspire. She affirms with her authenticity, depth, and compassion. A poignant story and a powerful reminder to hang in there, and find an innovative way up and out.

Here’s the donkey story and how to be more resilient:

One day a farmer’s donkey fell down into a well. The animal cried piteously for hours as the farmer tried to figure out what to do. Finally, he decided the animal was old, and the well needed to be covered up anyway; it just wasn’t worth it to retrieve the donkey. He invited all his neighbors to come over and help him. They each grabbed a shovel and began to shovel dirt into the well.

At first, the donkey realized what was happening and cried horribly. Then, to everyone’s amazement, he quieted down. A few shovel loads later, the farmer finally looked down the well and was astonished at what he saw. With every shovel of dirt that hit his back, the donkey was doing something amazing. He would shake it off and take a step up. As the farmer’s neighbors continued to shovel dirt on top of the animal, he would shake it off and take a step up.

Pretty soon, everyone was amazed as the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and trotted off!

The moral of the story: Life is going to shovel dirt on you; all kinds of dirt. The trick to getting out of the well is to shake it off and take a step up. Each of our troubles is a stepping-stone. We can get out of the deepest wells just by not stopping, never giving up!

Shake it off and take a step up!

A head, a heart and a helping hand… Growing up, this was all my mother urged me to be. This was her legacy to me, as it had been her mother’s to her.

I was born on July 2nd at Agha Khan Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya. I spent the formative years of my youth trailing my mother on her endless escapades to Mathare Valley, a shantytown on the outskirts of Nairobi, where she worked with women.

Mathare is a desolate place. People live in abject poverty with no functional utilities; no clean water, no sewage system or electricity. They live in shacks made of mud, bits, and cardboard and rusty corrugated iron. Crime is rampant and the streets are permeated with drugs, prostitution, and a lethal brew of illegal alcohol called Chang’aa. Over 90% of the households are headed by single women, many of whom have been in abusive relationships and now engage in these illicit activities to survive. Their children witness the deprivation and inherit the hopelessness.

My mother set up a grassroots program, which became known as Maji Mazuri, good water in Swahili, to empower the women through alternative economic and social activities. Years earlier she had come to the United States with an improbable dream to learn, return, and transform her country of birth. The third child in a family of eight siblings, she had grown up with endemic poverty in a sweltering rural squatter town during the colonial era. On the day of her birth, the country was rife with political strife. The state of emergency had just been declared. Houses were searched at random, property seized and people detained without trial. During these years her parents were imprisoned several times leaving the children to fend for themselves.

Ironically, in a sense, both my mother’s character and the community she serves stemmed from this existence.  In my mother’s situation, because of her own mother’s tenacity, vision, and resilience, the tenuous situation calcified her character. Many were not so lucky.

When fathers were detained in British gulags during the colonial occupation of Kenya, women migrated to the city where they sought jobs as nannies, hawkers, cooks, and cleaners. Perhaps because of their sheer numbers or the scarcity of opportunity most were unable to find work and had to resort to other ways to subsist. They camped in the barren lands skirting the city, forming shanty villages that were not quite rural, not quite modern. As their numbers exploded and resources became scarcer these settlements mushroomed into squalor towns. Poverty wrapped its gruesome tentacles around their lives, snuffed out their hope and despondency paralyzed their desire to do or be more. Families cracked under the pressure of paucity and their children fell through the cracks.

While I cannot compare my childhood to a child’s in Mathare, my own lifestyle was not lavish by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve often recounted my high school years with an incredulous feeling that I actually survived carrying buckets of water half a mile to my dormitory so I could take a cold bath in the grimy shower stall that looked like it had not received a good scrub since the British left campus in 1963. I remember scraping salt off the brown beat-up benches that served as dining tables (without chairs) so I could spice up the boiled kale we called bitter herbs and devoured almost daily. I never complained because I knew I was part of an elite group; among the fortunate few, who even got to high school. I had my eye on college. Then the prospect of coming to America was grim and unlikely. My mother’s income as a social worker was minuscule, in fact sometimes non-existent. College was costly and even small scholarships were few and far between. I must have sent out over a thousand applications in vain.

Then the letter came, they had a spot for me in a small Liberal Arts university in the Midwest called Ohio Wesleyan. Tuition was paid. I owed that to an incredible couple I met on their visit to Kenya. They had promised that when they returned to the U.S. they would keep in touch and when they did they did more than keep their word. They rooted for me, spoke to everyone they knew, scoured schools, and searched for an opportunity. They found one. Four years later I thanked them from the podium where I delivered a graduation speech as the president of my class. I had my degree in Chemistry and a minor in Philosophy.

As I stand here straddling two nations I often wonder what shaped my destiny. I have one foot in the world’s wealthiest economy and another in one of the world’s poorest.  In America men live free in dignity and security, striving for self-actualization. As a child, my peers from Mathare were barely subsisting. With over 60 percent of the population in Kenya living below the poverty line, how was it that I escaped into the new world and was not the pregnant teen in the slums of East Africa?

I have engaged in many passionate arguments about why Africa is engulfed in the jaws of calamity. I know of many of my countrymen whose lives are scarred and twisted, in spite of their intelligence and ingenuity. Why? What went wrong? Why has the sleeping Giant still not stirred? The answers remain elusive to me. Instead, all I have is a passion for peace, a hunger to help, and a sense of hope that there’s got to be a new beginning. One day our children will have the future they deserve. Curbed in a clock of global responsibility by my international experiences, I like to think I have moved beyond my race, creed, and tribal allegiance. In the faces of so many people I have met around the world, I recognize pieces of myself. I believe we are all bound by our unwavering humanity, all different yet all the same and significant.

My mother taught me many things, for which I am immensely grateful. She taught me to live simply, speak kindly, love generously, and care deeply. She shared with me her abiding faith in the possibilities this nation provides. She imagined me running with the best because she believed, not only in my abilities but in the generosity of this nation. What she lacked in material wealth, she has an abundance of in wisdom. She taught me to question my motives and put what I deem important at the heart of my mission.

So, I often ask myself, what are my core values? What do I want to achieve? Like many of my friends and peers, I come up with a personal game plan at the beginning of the year and evaluate how I’m tracking every quarter. I also have five, ten, and twenty-year goals but my attitudes and opinions morph at every stage of my life. Whether I choose to work for a for-profit, non-profit, or government organization, I feel called to make a difference. My heart remains open to counsel and the instantaneous advert of a new adventure. I am curious about the possibilities and thrilled with the promise of the future.

My story began with my grandmother. Her story was one of willpower persistence and principle. She pushed herself past anyone’s point of endurance so her children would have hope, a future. She worked day and night on her farm so that she had enough for her children, enough to share, and enough to sell. She had her children out of bed working before dawn. Late at night, they all studied by the light of a kerosene lamp with their feet dipped in cold water to focus and ward off sleep. She instilled in them the value of sweat, smarts, service, discipline, and delayed gratification. They in turn passed these values on to us.

Today arthritis has stolen the spring in my grandmother’s step and age has mellowed the intensity in her eyes. It is hard to believe she is the same lady who tore through the fields with a hoe or a sickle and taught women in the village zero-grazing so they too could provide for their children.

Still, she carries herself with grace, and the determination that rings in her voice speaks to her pioneering spirit. My grandmother was the first lady in her country to cycle to the dairy and drive to the market. She was the woman who saved her scarce pennies for a sewing machine so her children would not go naked. She is the only Kikuyu grandmother I know who can talk to her grandchildren intelligently about Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez, revolutionaries who fought for freedom many miles from her East African village.

I hope that my life is a tribute to my grandmother, who showed me persistence and valor, my mother who has the love of life, and the people along the way who have given me joy and meaning to it all. I hope that my life says I had a generous attitude, that I worked hard loved much, and learned from my mistakes. I hope my legacy is that I had a vision and lived with a mission and that my perpetual optimism was a force multiplier.

In America, I have had a decent shot at life and I am certain the doors of opportunity remain open. As I pursue my own aspirations, I still hold the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper. My experiences have tested and transformed me. I have been very fortunate and successfully navigated many of life’s land mines. I know there’s more to come. An old Swahili adage translates to “ore must go through fire to become gold.”

My past has taught me many lessons. I know, as the ever optimist I am, I will have faith in the face of uncertainty and hope will remain the wind beneath my wings pushing me far beyond where I garner my own immense potential can take me. I know the best is yet to be and this awakens in me a sense of urgency that will not be squelched.

I have built my castles in the air. It’s time to put foundations under them.

No matter what career or business barriers you face, your greatest asset is always you.

This process will help you define your brand, discover your hidden passion and find the right job for you!

Step 1:

Find your dream job

1. Find 4-5 descriptions that would fit your ideal job using sites like indeed.com or Google. Focusing on your ideal scenario will not only help you dream big and discover your passion, but it’ll also help you hit on the descriptive words that resonate with recruiters (and hiring managers!).

2. Copy and paste all the descriptions into one document.

3. Go to Wordclouds.com and paste the job descriptions – the word cloud will show which words are repeated over and over again. These are your keywords.

Step 2:

Create your website

You can use squarespace.com, About.me, or any free website builder of your choice. You’ll use this when you connect directly with the right recruiters or hiring managers. When you reach out, your message should be very brief. This website will help you keep your email concise.

Step 3:

Create a LinkedIn profile

1. Use a compelling profile picture, a background picture that speaks to your brand, and a headline that includes your keywords.

2. Fill out your LinkedIn details completely.

Use your keywords as much as you can to describe your projects and achievements.

This will have 2 key benefits:

1. 1. 1. Your profile will resonate with the people who are most likely to have a position that fits you perfectly
      2. LinkedIn will show you more relevant jobs that match what you are seeking

Optional: Sign up for LinkedIn Premium just for one month so you can connect directly with recruiters. The jobseeker subscription is within the LinkedIn website and costs about $30.

This gives you the range of salaries offered for different open positions so you know how to negotiate when you get your job offer(s) and a certain number of credits to contact the person who posted that position that you want on LinkedIn directly.