 All right, welcome back to Business Insight and plus TV Africa's Zulu Ketem side hustles in the wake of the biting inflationary pressure in the country. My guest, Mark Idiahi, is an inspirational leadership coach, brand and communication strategist. His career vision is to be involved in assessing the need for acquiring and implementing revolutionary strategies and systems for top-notch performance in organizations through exceptional leadership approach. Idiahi is a social enterprise developer, a leadership mentor and sought-after speaker on topics related but not limited to leadership, governance, growth and collaborative development. He is the publisher of a formal Spender African magazine called African Future Leadership Magazine. Many thanks for joining me on Business Insights. Mark. Thank you so very much. Glad to be here. Yes, indeed. Our pleasure. Let's talk about side hustles. In the wake of the biting inflation that everyone can actually relate to, most people are looking at them having one or two other jobs attached to their normal source of livelihood. How do you really react to this new development because of the way things are going on right now in the country? All right. Once again, thank you for having me. Now, first of all, we must admit that this is an unusual time and people are barely surviving. To attend to live with just one source of income is a strategy for financial crisis. And I'm not going to be apologetic when I reference the first man here, I mean, if I go a bit spiritual, the first man God created, he put him in a place called Idi, and he gave him four strings. Think about it. He got in his wisdom and his multifaceted dimension in nature, who created man and put him in a perfect, what I would love to call a perfect utopia, where everything was well-garnished and abolished and everything working perfectly, and he thought that it was critical. And that man had four strings of income. Why in the world would anybody in the right senses think that he can strive in an economy as complex as Nigeria's economy with one string of income? Now, the question I will ask people around that are on night to fire, you call them night to fire us, how in the world are you coping with this incisive increase in price of commodity household items when your salary is not increased correspondingly? I mean, you go to market today, for instance, and you see an item that has doubled in price. You were in the market two weeks ago, now you're in the market, back to the market, and they tell you that the price has doubled. And the way they can rationalize that is to tell you, hey, are you not in this country? Are you not following the trend with the currents and with the fluctuation in exchange rates and all of that? So why should anyone? I understand in your intro, you said something there, we should not in a B to high side puzzle, then play down the significance of having the main puzzle. Yeah, there has to be that moderation. There has to be that balance. Your main puzzle is good. You have to have that going. But you have to be strategic and very pragmatic by devising strategy to have other strings of income. Otherwise, you're going to choke in this economy. All right, still speaking of streams of income, most people have actually moved towards the line of entrepreneurship. They are using their skills or most of the things they have passion for to monetize them to be actually getting something in return from that. I know people who ordinarily love cooking and because of the way the economy is really biting, they have even started one sort of food business even online. But some people will tell you that they don't really think they have short skills or they have enough skills that could be obscured to channeled into getting more money for them. Do you really have to be so talented to have a side hustle per se or maybe to be an entrepreneur on your own? No, not exactly, my brother. What we need, what they need is to think and think outside of the box. When a man is hungry enough, he would devise a meal. Hunger does two things to a man. Number one, hunger can incapacitate a man. And when that happened, it lost the ability to think. And when you can't think, you'll be stagnant, you'll be stranded. Then on the few side, hunger can become your recipe for social services because it drives you from a comfort zone. And comfort zone in the first place is an illusion. It's not real. Comfort zone are lacking into a rocking chair. The thing I hate about rocking chair is that you can be in one position, exerting energy, swinging back and front, and you never cover any distance. All right, Mark, are you still there with us? Can be enough. And you don't necessarily have to have this ingenious idea. In this time and age, you don't have to be so gifted with the ability to conceive grand idea for you to be able to be successful. There are claims here and there. For instance, for instance, I resigned from, I'm not in any way trying to undermine people that do nine to five, but I resigned from that about seven years ago. Because I wanted to be able to be in a place and make a whole lot of things happen online, leveraging on the on. There are many things that anyone can do in this age and time, without having to move around. And by the way, if you're going to be successful financially, mind you, it's not going to be by hard work, so to speak, in this context. It's not going to be by how much hustling you have done. I know we call it side hustle, but you can be in one spot. And you leverage on online platform. I have a friend who is into graphics for instance. And he's quite a US based client from United Kingdom, from different parts of the world. And I asked him a couple of days ago, why don't you love to take clients from Nigeria? Why don't you prosper for Nigeria clients? And he says, sir, with all that is happening with the currency, I'm in a vantage position if I have clients that are US based or Canadian or in UK for instance, because they get to pay me in their currency. But the time I come back there doesn't go a lot of money. Just to reference the point, just to put it in proper perspective, I was reading a commentary by an economist a few hours ago. And he said that this devaluation of NERA is intentional, but the government saw us to encourage exploitation and discourage importation. Now, I don't intend to laugh, but I think it's interesting. It's an interesting conclusion here, because you are saying that for us to be able to encourage and get people to export things or merchandise and call, there is need for the value to be devalued. That sounds good, logically, economically sounds good. But the last time I checked, all the economists can't even sense to find their way out of this conclusion we find ourselves right now. Because they are permutation, they are projection and they are analysis and call, they are not working. This is my point. As long as that economy policy does not affect the life of the common man when it comes to hustle goose, then we're in trouble. Because what you have on the street, the restlessness, the crime rates and this depression and all of this things happening is as a result of common man as it were, not able to take out a living, not able to fend for themselves. So any smart governments or policy makers have to be determined in ensuring that whatever policies that they come up with has to positively affect the common man. But the positive side of that is, truly, with the way currency is going right now, anybody who can be in a position to export would definitely be in a vantage position. So we are not just looking at the Niger economy, how you can survive within the spell. But how about you developing skills or going for information and knowledge. Ask yourself, what can I do right now from where I am to put me in a positive position financially to be able to be, I mean, to be able to strive. All right, fine. Some people would actually say that they really don't have enough time, that they work Monday to Friday. They work nine to five. But how can you really manage the 24 hours that we have in a day and still try to get a side hustle or maybe put differently? How can you manage your first job and a second job without having either of them suffer? Also, now, if I were to flip this camera, you realize that I'm actually walking from the house right now. We did nights. Okay, you see, time is the most valuable resource we both have. Both the janitor and the CEO in the 42500 have one-to-one equilibrium. I love to call it equilibrium is a unifier time. What you do and how you manage your time with the timing, where you'll be in the nearest, let's say five years from now, invariably. Hmm. All right, Mark, do we still have you there? It is really very, very good. You can keep complaining that you don't have time. How many hours in the day are you sleeping? Because? All right, we seem to have any connection issue there or it's a mark. Mark, can you hear us? Yeah, but just before we lost Mark there, we've been talking about how you can actually manage your time, be very efficient about it because some people might even expect us to have like 36 hours in the day just to do all they need to do at the time. But you have to be a very effective or efficient time manager if you really want to plan your finances, your resources, and of course, all of the other side horses or second jobs that you might have in mind. The we still have Mark there. Mark, go ahead. We lost you at some point. Yeah, continue, please. Okay, good. So as it all comes to this, how are you able to manage your time? For you to be successful, you have to be a good manager of the time. We all have 24 hours in the day. Like I hinted earlier, I'm working from the house right now. I don't have to get to the road, drive from one end of the street or from one place to the other. If I can do what I can do now. Look at what technology have afforded us. On the way back, I will have to be your office in your studio right now also have this conversation, but you are on one end and I'm on the other side and we are having this conversation and we are having the best of our time. Why? Because we are maximizing the moment and the opportunity that technology throws at us. So if you don't have time, if you are, if I was a 95, if I was a 95, what I would is to set up time. When did I get to the house from work? See, all the many things, I don't watch TV. I don't have no business with TV and all the people lost things that do anything that will not translate and have a positive impact in my bottom line and develop me and position me to be more efficient. I have no business with that. Most people have, now what they devote the large amount of their time to aside the work. Work is, your life is not all about the work. What do you do with the other extract time that you have? Okay. That is what it is all about. Oh.