Advising my younger self to listen to advice

Greetings!

One thing about life is that we grow with experience and as we all know that experience is the best teacher, so we should all know that there's nothing we can do about the past being it good or bad. But for the experiences gathered from the past, most especially from our younger selves, they go a long way to shaping our lives towards a better and successful future.

Atimes, looking back at our younger selves used to be full of “Had I know?” This particular question is a question of regrets about what has characterized our younger selves. Though, some really got their young selves right, but to me and from my experiences, many didn't get it right and this is part of what has been affecting many people now.

Having talked so much about what the younger days used to be, I would like to share my experiences and what advice I would briefly give to my younger self if given the chance. Though, my younger self was characterized with love and wisdom, but aside from this, there's moments I wouldn't like to remember and even if remembered, I would like to make amends if the past were to appear again.

One thing I did with my younger self that's following and affecting me till today is my inability to heed to words of wisdom in the form of advice from my father and this really affected me and my journey till today. My dad is a very talented person when it comes to dishing out advice and word of wisdom to people, but maybe because he's my father, I have never taken him serious in my life even when others used to troop to our house for advice and later come to testify for what the advice has done for them. Can you imagine?

On two different occasions, my father called me, advised me and sounded a note of warning to me. The first was when he advised me not to venture into partnership business with my cousin, instead of me listening to his word of wisdom and fatherly advice, I never took him serious and this later bounced back on me and at the end, I was at the receiving end as I lost every of my investments in the partnership business. This was a serious matter and it really got to me.

Also, having experienced such disappointment for not heeding and yielding to his first advice, I still made the same mistake the second time, as loss affliction struck the second time.

This time around, I was about to be a graduate from the university and preparing for my NYSC, but because of what I and brother would be eating, I decided to invest the little I had into selling of foodstuff, but before then, I told my dad about my intention, but he advised me not to go ahead, I was within me thinking of how much this man hated me, so, I decided not to carry him along in my business plan again, so, i went behind him to invest my money into the business and at the end i brought nothing out of it.

So, it's at this stage I surrendered and decided not to do anything again without heeding to my dad advice, but still, I could not resist my urge to invest my money into businesses. But this time around, I didn't inform him and I went to invest my money on getting a plot of land which was later taken away from me by the land grabber, when this happened. I could not even tell him as I kept it to myself.

So, having lost so much money, I was down and frustrated and from then and till now, I have not been able to recover from the losses, and it's these acts that has humbled me to be the person I'm now.

So, I I'm giving the opportunity to advice my younger self, what I would advice my younger self to change about himself is to always heed to good and constructive advice and word of wisdom from those that have it and by so doing, regrets will not characterize my younger self as it had characterized it from the past experiences and occurrences.

This is my entry to the hiveghana weekly prompt.

Thanks for reading.

Picture sourced from metaAi