At the foundation of everything that happens are some fundamental rules that can't be broken.

Rules like:

• keep your expenses below your income,
• you can't fool everybody all the time,
• you reap what you sow,
• you can't give what you don't have,
• you seldom rise above the people you surround yourself with, and
• lasting changes in life have to come from within.

A lot of times, in following trends and friends, we go against these fundamental rules. We bump up our expenses to keep up with the joneses while not paying attention to our income. Our future plans are filled with what to own and buy, not what income generating activities to do. We ignore the fact that we have to earn the money we need to spend and thus should pay more attention to growing our income generating ventures rather than growing our expenses. In the end, you see a lot of people who have too many financial pressures, and little unplanned urgent expenses become major emergencies.

There are also many of us who surround ourselves with the kind of people we don't want to be like. It sounds unnatural but yet we do it. We are avoiding taking a big leap. We feel too comfortable around them even though they are not helping us progress. We are afraid to join the community of the people we look up to. Unintentionally, we are breaking another fundamental rule. You can't rise above the company you keep. 

And they are a few of us who think we can work our way to the top through deceit. We lie about too many things. We trump up our competence and achievements. We profess to give what we don't have. We live like most politicians. And it is a terrible way to achieve success. You damage everything that matters more than money -- relationships, family and your reputation.

No matter how tempted you are to ignore the fundamentals, you shouldn't. A life built on unsound foundation will crumble or at best, be permanently faulty.

In all you do, always let the fundamentals be on your side.

I think the best way to find your passion is simply to make the most use of whatever resources you have today, to take the best of the choices you have today and to never stop improving.

I know it sounds a lot different from what most of us think. A lot of us think finding our passion is more of a soul searching exercise. Having to look within for the one thing we feel we are born to do. In reality, most people have found their passion by adapting to their changing world and working crazy hard to rise above the limiting circumstances around them than by looking within for the one thing to say yes to. 

The problem with trying to think out your passion is it usually leads to frustration and doubts. Our reality is always changing. The world within us and the outside world never stay constant. What you are crazy about today may no longer appeal to you in a year's time. Then the opportunities you considered in thinking out your passion may dry up faster than you imagined. Nothing stays the same and you'll gain more from being pragmatic than being dogmatic about your life decisions. Especially in the choice of your passion.

If you simply do whatever your hand finds to do and put in your best always at what you do, you will with ease find answers to a lot of your life's questions. 

We all have the potential to be whatever we want and most of us want to be highly successful and billionaires. And we want to figure out that sure legit way to accomplish that. We try to find that one thing that we should do with the whole of our heart and head to get to that goal. And we call that one thing our passion. Unfortunately, we all have very limited options at every stage of our lives. But there is a good side to that limitation. To be the best you can be and take your best shot at the success you desire, you only have to take the best of the options you have now.

image: blog.iquestgroup.com

And like Lord Chesterfield once said, "Take care of the minutes and the hours will take care of themselves." If you take care of today, make the most of today; you will inevitably be making the most of your entire life. Everything you are doing today are like sowing seeds of what will grow tomorrow. If you focus more on sowing right and keeping the field of your life well watered, you will have a rich harvest (success) in the future.

In fact, I think you should let your passion find you. Just focus on making the most of each day and the opportunities it provides.

If you look at the most influential people in the world, one thing they all have in common is that each of them is extremely good at something. So good that everyone knows it.

The people making the most valuable changes in the world are people who dedicated an insane amount of time and effort at getting extremely good at one thing.

The awards that matter are not given by Facebook votes or SMS votes. The Nobel Prize, Grammy Award, Academy Award, Pulitzer Prize, Webby Award, Copley Medal and being in the Forbes List. 

You have to be extremely good at whatever you are doing. And I believe that is where most of us get it wrong. A lot of us are good at what we are not doing. There is a mismatch between our passion and career. So we just give our career the minimum weekday efforts we can afford and pour our heart into being good at something else during the weekend. We don't push past the craft part of our career. We simply do our work like everyone expects and spare our extra energy on something else we love. Many of us don't take our skills to an art level, where we become magicians at what we do and are seen by everyone as extremely good at it.

Then there are those of us who never stick to one career path. We keep changing and restarting the learning cycle. We always building new foundations and never completing any building. Just when we should be getting beyond the average in our field we jump fields. We end up with so many unrelated skills and never rise above average at any skill.

I think the most productive way to work and live is to blend your work and life. Let them not be two never crossing lines. Better to do what you are passionate about, build a career out of it and live a life of harmony. And because you are passionate about what you are doing, you will always put in more effort to become better each day and you'll derive huge satisfaction that will positively impact all aspects of your life. You will become better and better, and soon rise beyond the craft stage and into the art stage. Everything you'll do will become more of art, closer to magic and perfection. People will value you and your work. Recognition and awards will roll in. And the time you spend at work will always be fun time.

This is going to be a quick and easy to replicate tip.

I will show you how to highlight duplicate values in a table in Excel. In MVP #51: Removing Duplicate Values In Excel I showed you how to remove duplicate values. But there are times you don't want to delete the duplicate values instantly; you want to see them and maybe show them to your colleague or boss before deciding what to do with them. So you would prefer to just highlight them.

For illustration, I have gotten a fictitious data sample from Domino's Pizza. For some days now the accounts haven't been balancing and one of the cashiers think it is her system that generates double entries for some sales transactions. And so the branch manager has engaged my expert help to extract the raw data from the system and bring it into Excel, then check if truly the system erroneously generates duplicate transaction records.

Each sales transaction has a unique ID, so a duplicate entry will have an ID that has already been recorded.

So let's proceed to fish out those suspect entries.

Highlight the Transaction ID column, goto Home menu, Conditional Formatting, Highlight Cell Rules and Duplicate Values.

Confirm the formatting to show up on duplicate IDs found.

Result is shown below.

The cashier is right. Her system is generating duplicate entries. The branch manager will need to have the system replaced.

That's how uniquely valuable being able to highlight duplicate entries is.

We all have dark days; days we just don't feel happy and motivated to do our usual activities. Days we feel we are not heading the right direction or we are not moving fast enough.

image: kaz-d.deviantart.com

The usual causes for me are:

1. when I suddenly notice lots of close pals getting on better than me with little efforts and having all the fun time in the world
2. when I try to think too far into the future, extrapolating my current state
3. when PHCN and traffic and the state of the country hit me hard on the same day
4. when I look too intensely at how slowly my life is progressing
5. when the internet that is meant to last a month finishes in less than a week, and
6. when I am just unhappy and depressed, and too depressed to find out why.

So how do I keep those days away?

Luckily, a large proportion of the usual causes for me are easy to avoid:

1. I no longer give people access to my WiFi so they don't run down my internet and I also try to make it last up to three weeks
2. I have managed to grow a very thick skin towards the state and affairs of the country. Everyday I tell myself that I live in a jungle and in a country that is a perfect example of what a squanderous life can become. I have turned the state of the country into a motivation to live productively.
3. I have become very less active on Facebook so I don't see all the day ruining pictures and updates of the people doing way better than me.

Then there are the causes I can't easily manage. I still have to think about my future and the path my life is following. Since finishing from university, all the significant progress I have made are in my CV and not in my bank account. And Benjamin Franklin's consolatory quote is losing its potency: "If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest." Also there are those days I feel my life loses its contrast and brightness for no reason. 

How do I handle those days off?

I'll tell you, but it is not as easy as it seems. And also not as ridiculous as it sounds. I simply pray and read my way out of depression. It's one of the benefits of being a christian. You don't have to bear all your burdens alone, especially the ones weighing you terribly down. Then I read about people with worse troubles than me. I take courage in their situation and hope from their success.

In case you've been hearing about big data and don't yet know what exactly it means, today is your lucky day.

First, a little background to help put things in the right perspective. Data is simply information that has been gathered and could be stored. 20 years ago, gathering information was relatively expensive. It often required people going around with forms and gathering information, like a national census. Then another set of people will be hired to enter those data in a storage and retrieval system. And those storage and retrieval systems were very expensive such that only big organizations could afford a significantly sized one.

Recently, all that has changed. It is now dirt cheap and sometimes free to own a storage and retrieval system (examples are your Facebook account and your email account). Then the gathering process is now digital and automated. No need of using people and forms. We now have more data than we know what to do with them. And that is the foundation on which big data is built on.

Big data is when you automatically gather and store all the data about your business (or life, yours or some else's), and it runs into billions and billions of billions, then you decide you are not going to discard anything but try to use everything with the hope of learning things you never knew and be able to make accurate predictions. That is big data. It is how Facebook figures out people you may know.

image: collegerag.net

Now to the second part: Statistician vs Data Analyst.

In those days of forms and pen for data gathering, there were data entry people (who gathered and cleaned the data for use) and there were statisticians who worked on the data (often as a sample of a bigger population) and try to make inference and predictions.

Recently, there are no more data entry people. Computers, chips and technologies now abound that gather data automatically and put them in usable form. Now the people needed to work on these data are people who can work these new technologies, mine data on a scale traditional statisticians have never experienced and build analysis a traditional statistical tool can't handle. 

In a sentence, data analysts are the new statisticians. The real ones know as much statistics as a statistician but use new tools a traditional statistician doesn't use. 

Unfortunately, there are more fake data analysts than genuine ones. I am one of the fake too but I am already fixing that.

I have sold 499 copies of my book on Amazon. Though most of the sales were during the five days promotion I ran. Below is the sales breakdown.

Promo Sales: 487

Regular Sales: 12

And on top of that, I have earnings from Kindle Unlimited readers. So far 2,002 pages of my book has been read and as I would be getting paid by page read at the end of the month I hope it amounts to something substantial.

Most importantly I am encouraged to write more books and complete my novel. I now have a proof that I can make money from self-publishing and selling to an international community via Amazon Kindle.

Next step is to do a hardcopy publishing and see how it would pick up.

We all have friends whose emails always end with the same last two lines:

Loku Bamtasi
Director, LB Concepts, 08012345678

So how do you do same for your gmail account so that whether you send out an email on your PC, your Android phone, your iPhone or your tablet, it is automatically included for you. 

It is called an email signature. And I will show you how to set it for your Gmail.

Login to your Gmail on a PC or Mac.

Look towards the far right corner at the top, click on the Gear Icon. A menu list will appear; click on Settings.

On the page that comes up, scroll down.

Till you see Signature.

Click on the Radio button below that for "No Signature". Type in the email signature you want to set.

Now scroll to the bottom of the page. You'll see a "Save Changes" button. Click on it.

And that is all!

Whenever you send an email from your Gmail account using the Gmail website or Gmail phone/tablet app, your email signature will always appear at the bottom. 

Have you come across a thoroughly honest person? He might be dumb, awkward, poor and every other thing we don't like to be, but you will always find out that you've got a special respect for him. That is the power of honesty.

image: differencebetween.info

To be honest is to be truthful and sincere. And it is extremely hard to be honest always. Extremely hard.

I know I am not honest always. I want to. I usually try to. But I occasionally find myself hand in hand with deceit. And the common cases are when I tell the truth but in an insincere manner. I call it being technically truthful. I say the truth but in a way you are sure to not get the full picture. 

Then I hear people say you can't be honest at all times. You have to condition the truth you say in a way to cause the least harm. And that is the mark of true maturity: how you say the same thing in different ways for different people/circumstances so you don't cause more harm than you intend.

I know they are right. There are times being honest causes more harm than you should cause. And make you look foolish and childish. 

But I think being honest always is great and possible without the disadvantages we attribute to it. You don't have to say anything sometimes rather than cause damage. You can always say the truth in a not hurtful way without going for an outright lie. And I believe honesty, no matter how impossible it seems, is the best policy.

I see many people equal education to being able to speak good English. And the better your phonetics the more educated they see you as. Our entire radio and TV media is built around that perception. 

I see some people equal age and travel to education. They believe that if you take out any two persons, the older and more travelled is the more educated.

I see other people equal wealth to education. They are obsessed with the idea that the rich knows what the poor doesn't know. That the rich is more educated, and it is the source of his wealth.

They are all wrong.

image: saynototopicalsteroids.com

The true meaning of education is to have a mind that is trained to know the limits of its knowledge; a mind that scientifically examines all without prejudice and a mind that is tolerant of other people's opinions. 

Education is to know what you know and not claim to know what you don't. It doesn't matter whether you went to a school or not. It's just easier if you went through a school. The greatest philosophers were men who lived when there were no schools. Now it is considered a mark of great education to be adept at socratic method. And it is believed that you are well above the averagely educated if you have read the books of Aristotle and Plato. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were men who were exposed to much less knowledge than us and yet we still build university courses around them.

Knowledge doesn't equal education. It's like the difference between an adult and a precocious child. Knowledge gets you attention (like that child and our OAPs) while education gets you a life. Education is knowing the limit of your knowledge. To verbally stay within the limits of what you know and not let anyone sway you with emotion laden unproven arguments.

Education is to not have a strong opinion about everything. The type of opinion that you can't stand anyone challenging. You know that your knowledge is not vast enough to form a valid a opinion about everything. According to Robert Frost, "Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper." 

Education is to live a rational life and embrace your ignorance. And the cool thing about it is that once you take this path, you will value learning more and reducing your ignorance about the things you care about.