Every child is uniquely talented

When I was in high school, my heartfelt ambition and desire was to be a pharmacist. I still remember the day when that idea was planted into my mind.

My dad was driving me back to boarding school after the holidays and I asked him what career choice could make someone rich as quickly as possible.

Absent mindedly, he mentioned that a couple of his richest friends were pharmacists. Unknown to him, he had just set my career direction for the next few years!

All my subject choices thereafter were made with this goal in mind, to become a rich pharmacist.

 Career Choices

How did you end up deciding what to do as a career? Few of us as children had someone thoughtfully guide us in our future career choices.

Instead, the choices were made for us through what some family member thought would provide the greatest financial security, or through other random acts of fate.

Many of my friends in my university days had little passion for the degree course they were studying. In fact, our street translation of the acronym BA (Bachelor of Arts) was ‘Baba Amenituma’, which means ‘my dad sent me’. This was because many were in school studying subjects that only their parents thought were important!

The unfortunate result of poor or no career guidance is many frustrated young graduates who enter careers they have little passion for or interest in.

They dread going to work on Mondays and heave a huge sigh of relief every Friday! Along with those are thousands of others who have not been able to get a job in their area of training and yet are unable to translate their years of learning into solutions for societal problems around which they can build a business. As one wise man put it to me, we are a nation of schooled people who are highly uneducated!

Many parents are unwitting accomplices in creating this problem. We stress our children to get A’s in their exams creating the impression that children who are not academically gifted are failures in life. And yet every child, including those not academically inclined, has innate talents and strengths that can help them uniquely succeed in life.

Create Wealth

Wayne Rooney, Juliani and Eric Omondi are great examples that today, you don’t have to become a medical doctor to have great impact and create wealth in the process!

 This last week, 840,000 primary school students across the country sat for their KCPE exams.

Many of them did so with the fear that their final grade will have a significant bearing on the way their lives turn out. I want to challenge all parents, uncles, aunties and teachers reading this.

Let’s definitely encourage the candidates to do their best. But even as they do so, let’s affirm and encourage development of their innate God-given talents.

 Every child is uniquely gifted to be a success in life. They only need someone who believes in them and calls out that gifting!