Ever wondered why engineers used to be adored? Why people rank engineers as high as medical doctors, and, in some countries, even higher. It is because engineering is one of those rare fields of study where you are taught to create your idea. To never stop at thinking or having a great idea, but to always work at building something immediately useful and replicable from your ideas.

It is engineers who built the greater part of the modern life we enjoy. And like I used to tell my doctor friends -- "Doctors save lives; Engineers make your life worth living." Imagine being alive in a jungle with no access to any technology. That would be a life not worth living. To further prove our prominence, all the cool gadgets the medical world depend on are built by engineers.

image: swharden.com

So why programming?

Now engineering has evolved. To turn your ideas to immediately useful and replicable products, you now have the internet platform. Every year, the online world is booming. That is where all the innovation is mostly oozing from. And the new biggest companies in the world are those who operate in that space. 

And guess who control that space? Who are treated like Kings and Queens in that expanding world? It's the programmers. Think Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and those geeky programmers who are now billionaires because they wrote a computer program.

And as usual, things take a long time to catch up with the global trends here in Nigeria. Remember how Blackberry was still hippy here when the rest of the world had moved on to android and iPhones. Even the ATM got here 20 years after it had been in other countries. But the great thing is that when we catch up it's like a wildfire. Almost everyone has an android phone. There are millions of ATM machines in Nigeria. So I am sure that when the new online billionaire trend reaches here, it would make working in Shell and going into politics look less rewarding.

And that is why you need to start positioning yourself for the (permit me to call it) coming wealth transfer. Where the non-geeks and non-programmers will give their money to the geeks and programmers. Even if you can't prepare yourself, encourage your child and siblings to get into the programming space. Not only will they have a greater chance of becoming a millionaire, they will also never become jobless. No good programmer ever runs out of work. 

I recently got a mail from one of the finance managers I trained. Occasionally, I get such high profile clients. Usually CFOs who are changing jobs or wanting advanced knowledge of Excel to complement their very high finance and accounting domain knowledge. I do a one-on-one training for them which I currently bill at N50,000/day.

So in the email, he attached a particular chart and asked how to make a similar one. Below is a snapshot of the chart type he sent.

We’ll make for this table. Download the practice file here: Creative Chart File

UrBizedge Yearly Revenue
UrBizedge	FY2013	FY2014	FY2015	FY2016	FY2017	FY2018
Expenses	₦ 63,000,000	₦ 78,750,000	₦ 98,437,500	₦ 123,046,875	₦ 153,808,594	₦ 192,260,742
Tax	₦ 15,924,093	₦ 16,480,479	₦ 19,062,787	₦ 11,381,509	₦ 13,075,861	₦ 10,050,507
Revenue	₦ 75,600,000	₦ 113,400,000	₦ 170,100,000	₦ 204,120,000	₦ 306,180,000	₦ 459,270,000

Insert a chart: Column Chart.

Also choose the first chart layout under design. So the labels will be under the charts, like the one under.

Rightclick on the Expenses chart bar and move to secondary axis. Do same for tax too.

The end result is:

Next is to give the secondary axis the same range (0 to 500million) as the primary axis.

Now make the Expense and Tax bars overlap. Rightclick on any of them, format data series and set to overlap.

Last major step is to expand the Revenue bar by reducing the gaps between the bars.

Final stage is to delete the secondary axis and give the chart a title.

Download the practice file here: Creative Chart File

A lot of my friends are amazed when I tell them that most of our clients come from my online activity. We don't do any offline marketing and we constantly get a stream of customers enough for us to run a monthly Excel training class. And I handle all the online branding and marketing.

I am already getting a few collaborative offers to come facilitate digital marketing and social media branding classes. I have walked the talk and my business is built entirely on digital marketing. So I have the practical and business experience people will want to hear and learn from. Then on top of that I have read the theories and have consulted for one of Nigeria's foremost digital research agency. So you can safely say I have a deep knowledge of both the practical and the theory.

I have decided to share my knowledge and test run the training I would be delivering to paying clients. It would be free for you and you can also ask me all the questions you have about getting results online.

image: blog.snobmonkey.com

If you are interested email me at mike[at]urbizedge[dot]com

It would be an online live training (webinar). I will send you the webinar invite so you'll have the joining details. The date of the webinar would be Sunday 12 July 2015 at 6:00pm. 

I would be explaining the following:

1. Introduction to Digital Marketing
2. a.    What really is digital marketing?
   b.    Digital marketing vs Traditional marketing
   c.    Recent trends in the global business and marketing world
   d.    The components of Digital Marketing
                                            i.    Having a strategy
                                          ii.    Defining your audience
                                        iii.    Matching your audience and your strategy (Optimization)
                                         iv.    Selecting your digital tools
                                           v.    Social media marketing
                                         vi.    Measuring results and making continuous changes
                                        vii.    Building a lasting and profitable relationship with your audience
                                      viii.    Going from good to great: having a cult following
   
   
   2)    Social Media Marketing
   a.    Social Media fundamentals
                                            i.    What really is social media?
                                          ii.    How did the social media come about?
                                        iii.    How does the social media work?
                                         iv.    What are the current global trends for businesses?
   b.    Facebook
                                            i.    What really is Facebook?
                                          ii.    How big and effective is Facebook marketing?
                                        iii.    Why your company needs to be present and active on Facebook
                                         iv.    Marketing as against just placing adverts on Facebook
                                           v.    Setting up a Facebook advert (live demo)
                                         
   c.    LinkedIn
                                            i.    The Facebook exclusively for professionals and companies.
                                          ii.    How big and rewarding is LinkedIn marketing?
                                        iii.    Why you and your company need to be present and active on LinkedIn
                                         iv.    Marketing and job attracting strategy on LinkedIn
                                           v.    Best practices for effective brand building on LinkedIn
                                         
   d.    Twitter
                                            i.    Demystifying Twitter
                                          ii.   Finding out if Twitter will benefit you or not
       

Don't forget to sign up by emailing me at mike[at]urbizedge[dot]com or replying to this blog post.
                                 

After about two weeks of setting up, getting rejected and making changes, the hugely popular online learning platform, Udemy, has approved and made internationally available my business data analysis with Excel training course!

You can view it here: Business Data Analysis with Microsoft Excel 

I plan to make it as rich as possible, constantly updating it with new training sessions covering Power BI, ODBC connection setup, PowerPivot, DAX, lots of sample projects, VBA programming in-depth and everything I know on Excel.

It will be my main online Excel training platform. I would be referring those wanting online training there. It frees up the stress of managing an online course, billing and technical set-up.

It's time for me to get the mic and screencast software, and start recording more videos. Even remaking the old ones.

Don't forget to check it out: Business Data Analysis with Microsoft Excel 

Happy new month!

This month we'll be hosting a webinar on Excel's revolutionary PowerPivot and DAX (the functions you use in PowerPivot). You can register here: Webinar Sign Up Form

PowerPivot is Excel's powerful tool for analyzing big data and it can connect to a lot of popular data sources: Access, Microsoft SQL server, Oracle Database, Teradata, Informix, IBM DB2, Sybase, MySQL (via ODBC), Excel files and text files.

I currently use PowerPivot for a project I consult on for a big telecoms company. It allows me to easily analyse millions of rows of data easily and make lots of deep insight reports. I am able to explore relationships between different data sources and make rich reports that would have been impossible with other common data analysis software.

In the coming webinar, I will show you how to enable PowerPivot in Excel 2013 (provided your license version of Excel has it) and how to set it up to import the data you want to analyze. I will also show you how to make new columns from the columns in the originally imported data. They are called Calculated Columns.

I will introduce Data Analysis Expressions (DAX). They are the formulas you'd use in PowerPivot. They are more like modified Excel formulas but just structurally different. I will, in my usual easy to understand way, demystify DAX. We will work through some common DAX functions.

Best of all, I will have all your questions on PowerPivot and it's practical use answered.

Don't forget to sign up: Webinar Sign Up Form

It is not the things we are most motivated about we spend the most of our energy on. Even when we are following our passion, we still have to do a lot of boring non-motivating tasks. And we are usually most motivated about the things we can spare little energy for.

Often, the ones who have the motivation lack the energy and the ones who have the energy lack the motivation. And even in our individual lives, we struggle to find the energy for the things we are most motivated about and burn a lot of energy on the things we have little motivation for.

Sometimes, it's like we only get motivated about the things we can't afford to do energy-wise. Every employee has an entrepreneurial dream. Most entrepreneurs have a political or NGO dream. Everyone picks a dream they can spare little time and energy on.

I have more motivation for learning that earning. Everyday I spend more energy on learning I give up on earning. And whenever I put my energy into earning, I give up on the things I am most motivated about. And that's my personal illustration of the energy - motivation tradeoff. It's very hard to put all your energy into what you're most motivated about.

Today's post is another good illustration. I have gotten the motivation to write a long post but have not enough energy for it. So here I end today's blog post.

If you read my posts you will know all that is going on in my life but there is a great chance that you'll also not know the complete me. And it's my fault. I share only the perspective I see myself from. I overemphasize some aspects of my life and de-emphasize other aspects, often unintentionally. But I have a valid reason for it. I write daily for a very selfish purpose: to force myself to move on and make decisions I can without shame blog about. Writing helps me think more objectively about my life and make me more dedicated to sticking to good values.

The aim of my blogging is not to make an autobiography. That I end up sharing my life on my blog is a happenstance. I simply gave myself a goal to write daily. I didn't specify what kind of writing, but found out that the more I write the more it is about me.

I seldom take pictures. If you look through my phone, almost all the pictures you will see on it are pictures people borrowed my phone to take, and they are not even pictures of me. And it's even worse than that. I don't have an album. If you come to visit me and want to see an album showing my pictures from when I was little through my teenage years to now, I have nothing to show you. The best I can do is to login to my Facebook account and start searching for the pictures friends were kind enough to tag me in and the occasional pictures I took.

But if you ask me for my writings since I began writing 12 years ago, you can be sure of enough to keep you engaged for more than a day. They are my real photos. They reveal the me I have been most conscious of and they show my real progress through life. 

Whenever I want to know what I was like 10 years ago, I pick up the poems I wrote 10 years ago. Whenever I want a comprehensive report of my life in a particular year, I read through the articles I wrote that year. 

Writing is my own special way of preserving memories. I find it more accurate than photos and more useful too. But just like photos, it's always got a perspective. And since my writings are all selfies, they are greatly skewed. There will always be parts of my life that will consistently not be captured.

Yesterday, in church, I was thinking back and running through my life. I have a lot to be grateful for: the path I am on, the people in my life, the stability I enjoy and the amazing people who endure my daily self-centered ramblings.

image: etherealwellness.wordpress.com

Yes, I am grateful to you for every moment you get my mail. I do not underestimate the kindness hidden in your enduring my mails. It's one of the purest kind of love to let another be his true self. And I am very grateful to you for that.

I have been learning a lot in the past one year. Almost everyday I know way more than what I knew the previous day. And I don't just mean experiential learning but a lot of formal learning too. 

image: dmlcentral.net

Below are the list of the learning I am undergoing:

1. Online MBA. Last year September I got an admission to University of Nicosia for an online MBA programme. There are 12 modules (courses) and we take about 7 weeks to do each module. It is more intensive than I originally imagined. The reading requirement is a lot and the assignments are tough and stressful. Yet I am pulling through. I have managed to combine it with not just my work but also other numerous learning.
2. Excel Programming. I have learnt more Excel programming in the last one year than I have all the previous years put together. I have done Excel programming projects that seemed impossible. 
3. PHP Programming. I am currently undergoing a PHP course and learning to program PHP from scratch. It's interesting but also demanding. It's part of my web development career move. I am now sure than the future lies in my building enterprise solutions that do not have to reside inside Excel or be installed on a computer. Enterprise web applications are the new cool and money grossing software.
4. Android Programming. I am also currently taking an Android programming course by the amazing Tim Buchalka. I have been dabbling in and out of android programming but now I hear with the new Android Studio it is much easier to make android apps.
5. C#. I began learning C# more intensely immediately after I quit my job last year. It is a language I want to be proficient in and I hope to build phone apps, office add-ins, companion desktop software for my web apps and even web apps with it.
6. Small business and consulting management. I have also been learning a lot on how to grow my small business and be a thriving consultant. It has been tough internalizing what I learn and practicing them hasn't been smooth either, but all those knowledge leave me better than I was before I acquired them. The little I succeed in internalizing are worth all the stressful efforts.
7. Other web app and phone app development courses. I am also enrolled in an iOS app development course using Swift, an Angular JS course, a Python for data analysis course and a game programming course. My ultimate goal is to become a full stack web developer. It requires a knowledge of all aspect of web development such that you can manage to get a great web app done by yourself. But you'll also be required to be a master in one or two languages and aspects of web development.

All these are a lot of learning. And I combine them with trying to make money to survive and thrive each month. So I have had to find a way to hack learning.

Hacking learning is all about learning very fast and learning a lot using means that are natural to you. It requires a deep knowledge of yourself and your learning pattern. Then building your learning experience around your most convenient ways of learning.

I am very comfortable with reading ebooks that have close to a thousand pages. I even prefer them to video lessons and audiobooks. So I go for them more. I also can read for long hours a day, so I give myself an almost impossible target. I buy lots of ebooks. I also don't worry when I don't understand something. I simply read on and try to find a book on that problematic point later. I can read a lot and understand what I have read more easily than a lot of people. So I build my learning experience around my learning strengths.

And that is hacking learning.

Yesterday I read the most inspiring life story and today I am going to share it with you. It's the answer someone gave to another's question online. You can read the original Q&A here: Quora

Virali Modi

Question:
I am a thirty year old drop out and I don't know how to live as I already wasted years living a virtual life until now. How can I start my life again? Or is my only option to quit?

Answer: (By Virali Modi)
I'm a 23 year old drop out from the 12th grade. I don't have any degrees or talents that make me extraordinary. I can't draw, I can't sing, I can't paint, and to be honest, I don't have adequate grammar (not something I'm proud of). The only thing that I do have is a positive attitude, confidence, and optimism.

You're only 30 years old and you're ready to give up. I feel sorry for you, I really do. No, not because you don't have money, are unemployed, or because you've wasted all your savings on alcohol – rather, I feel sorry because you think this is the end and you're ready to quit.

When I was 14, I went into a coma. I was on life support, I couldn't breathe and I wasn't responding to any medicine. The doctors wanted to "pull the plug" because there was no chance that I'd survive. My dad – everyone, except my mom knew I wasn't going to survive. She didn't know. She begged the doctors to keep me alive until my birthday (which was in 8 days), they accepted her plea, on one condition. They said that if I didn't respond on my birthday, they would take her signature and pull the plug, she agreed. On my birthday, I opened my eyes. The doctors kept me on life support until I fully came out of my coma on the 5th of October. If it wasn't for my mom, I wouldn't be writing this answer right now. I wouldn't be alive. 

After my hospitalization, we realized that we were bankrupt, we sold all of our assets to support my medical treatment until the government funded insurance covered the remaining costs. We had to empty the apartment we were staying in, and my dad eventually found a job. We started living in a congested one bedroom "apartment". Was life easy for us? No. Definitely not. I was 15 at that time, and I could barely move. I didn't have my privacy, and it was really awkward.

We had everything, enough money to live a lavish lifestyle, a business, cars, a house, and expensive clothes, electronics, and Chinaware. We sold all of it. We went from rich to poor. We had to start fresh. We had used up all of our savings as well. It was difficult to adjust to such a contrasting lifestyle. But there wasn't much I could do about it.

Back to my point, I'm 23 and a 12th grade dropout, I don't know what I'm going to do in the future. I have high hopes that I'll enter the modeling/acting industry, but I realize that it's a 25% chance that I'll actually end up being successful, but 25% is still a lot! I do have my confidence which helps me master any job that I'm given.

My advice would be to strengthen your confidence. Have the knack to learn different things. Start doing things which will broaden your mind and help you understand your strengths and weaknesses. Stop wasting your money on alcohol. Start looking for a job, even if it isn't paying that much. Make a goal (anything), and set out to achieve it. 

Look, everyone has bad times in their lives, you're experiencing one right now, you'll get through it. Just don't lose perspective of your goals, aspirations, and dreams. You can't give up whenever life throws you a curve ball. Learn to fight and dodge it.

Remember what Dory said, "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming." Go with the flow.

the end


Isn't she inspiring? I especially love her recommendation on having a positive attitude, confidence, and optimism.