Achieve Your Dreams

By Tonny Rutakirwa

This is the fourth book in the Awaken Series by Tonny Rutakirwa published by Tonniez Publishing Press on 25th March 2014. A new book release every birthday.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9780244871635

Tonny Rutakirwa

Tonny Rutakirwa is an author of 22 books on entrepreneurship, talent growth and children stories, and a conscientious entrepreneur growing a multi - sectoral multinational out of London, United Kingdom. He is the Chairman of Tonniez Group Holdings, which he founded in East Africa on 28th December 2008. He is also Corporate Affairs Director, Europe for Kizito Group of Companies where he oversees all public engagements for the company there. He has traveled widely in Africa, Asia, and Europe. A mentor, he has spoken at large public fora intended to spring young people into their various destinies. His private group of companies is growing a chain of 28 businesses and 588 co-brands in Europe, United States, Africa and Asia with plans to grow a Fortune 500 company to all parts of the world in 10 years. He strongly believes that science is the work of knowledge but art is the work of wisdom.

Book preview

Foreword

It is a pleasure making an independent contribution towards the author’s edition. The author is relentlessly equipped with all success principles deeply rooted from childhood experiences to global learning experiences where achievement never catches him by surprise. He is such a champion that will continue to awaken the past, inspire the present, as well as promote the future. His book entitled Achieve Your Dreams is a well-written piece, coherent and easy to comprehend. I found the literature so benevolent and to the gist above all. The financial discipline exercised and promoted by the author is awesome! We all must borrow his state-of-the-art formulas for personal growth and development since the rewards that come along with it last a lifetime. I must thank the author for the masterpiece well written and the enormous research shared ranging from personal experiences as well as from success gurus. The lessons inherent are just enough for one to learn as well as go an extra mile since they have already set a benchmark for achieving higher. We can only improve ourselves or set our minds to grow by learning from such well-proven and tested principles.

The author’s work is beyond an inspiration but has set a global challenge to those within his age bracket, those above and below, as well as those who wish to improve their current financial positions in this competitive twenty-first century, where early financial education is not a need but a necessity. This will sustainably evolve global problem-solvers whose dreams will always match with the needs of the present. Dreams that move you from your small personal and family world to the world of human development and human welfare. Dreams that connect talents and commitments to the community at large. Dreams that can be realized for a legacy as continuous charity to give rewards beyond death. Dreams that make you feel happy to see the fruits of your toil in the smiles you have helped put on the faces of people who cannot smile due to the lack of opportunities for them to grow and become self-reliant economically, spiritually, socially, and intellectually to make a difference, to improve living conditions, and to revive the glorious past. It is no doubt that you will find this edition useful.

Nsamba Hussein Kisiki, PhD

President, Invention Plus Limited

Kampala, Uganda

May 21, 2013

Design and Layout: Rica Cabrera

Editor: Kyra Cerillo

Acknowledgment

Lord God Almighty

Mother and Father

Brother, Sam, and godsons Samora, Lincoln, Isaiah, and Jordan

Tonniez Group vice president, chief executive, and management

Personal assistant Winifred

All contributors, well-wishers, and to you, the reader!

A Special Message

Creating a new set of inspirational packaging on dream achievement is quite a challenge. There are millions of books on this. It is equally a huge challenge to be all embracing of all cultures, circumstances, and possibilities with accurate projections in mind. The first challenge, I can accept; but the latter, I reject. This is because of my understanding of this that I write about.

In this book, you can get yourself some extremely valuable principles that cross and go beyond beliefs and all factors. It is one that any race, religion, political interests, sex, affiliations, and initiatives can relate with. Anyone can achieve their dreams. There are just a few principles to follow in order to make this happen. These principles and values have been carefully listed herein.

I hope you enjoy this book and benefit from it beyond what we can envision. I also look forward to you getting full value for your money, time, and above all a post-read generational relationship with myself or my team.

Thank you.

Tonny Rutakirwa

President, Tonniez Group Holdings

Introduction

To achieve your dreams, it is imperative to have a very clear picture in your mind of what you want. It is not enough to just want success, health, good houses, abundance, love, and all the good things of love. It is extremely imperative to know exactly the success you want in 3-dimension format, exactly how you want your love to look like, exactly how and where you want your house to be with details from colours, to the number of rooms, furnishing, cost, and all other details.

Mere wanting success or love or health is like sending an e-mail to a client with letters in alphabetical order and expect them to read your mind and sense what you wanted to write. You have no right to complain if what they interpret is to choose another service provider of end a contract. You do not write a message to your loved one with words in random order. They must be arranged in the right order for them to understand exactly what you wanted to communicate.

Why, therefore, do we expect things to just happen or pray for a dream house you have never thought about and expect a miracle? My mentor once told me, I believe in miracles, but I don’t believe in magic. A miracle is when you plant one hundred seeds and harvest a million. Magic is when you plant nothing and expect to harvest two million.

Many of us want magic. It happens sometimes, but even when it does, it doesn’t feel original. The ownership ratio is nearly 0:0. You soon get tired of it. You don’t treasure it. If you can’t treasure it, how can you value it? You will then not have achieved your dreams.

In this book, I want to show you how you can achieve your dreams. I look forward to reading your testimonies.

Chapter 1

The Value of Time

It seems like a rather grand concept, one of those big statements that we all struggle to define accurately. And the problem is, and always has been with people, that we don’t know the value of time until that time runs out. It’s a tragedy really, and one that I’ve always struggled with. Or at least I did, until someone told me a story, a story that changed my perspective entirely on the whole thing. I’ve never forgotten it, and I want to pass it on to you.

So I have a friend who’s a nurse. And she loves her job, really cares about what she does. She takes care of people, and she cares about every one of them. Even the ones who don’t care about her at all. She deals with drug addicts, criminals, mothers having their first babies, kids with asthma—pretty much every different kind of person you could think of. And some of them are normal, just your usual day-to-day stuff. They come in for a checkup or a blood test or whatever it is the doctor wants from them. But she told me about one guy, an older man, back when she was still a student nurse. Now, this guy had been in the hospital for a long time. He’d been checked in with some illness or another. and because he was of that kind of age, things weren’t looking too positive in terms of him having too long left in his life once he left the place. The fall has made the clock of his life start ticking and ticking fast. Everyone knew this—the doctors, the nurses, the man himself. They knew that even though he might live for a while, it wasn’t going to be years or even months.

Now, I know myself—if I was in his situation, I’d be feeling pretty miserable. What’s even the point of keeping up a brave face if you know you have barely any time left? I think a lot of us would be the same way, gloomy and hopeless because this situation was gloomy and hopeless. But this man wasn’t like that at all. If anything, he was almost too cheery. He’d chat with the people in beds next to him. He’d make jokes to the doctors and the nurses and spent most of his few weeks there smiling. His family would visit, and he’d be making them laugh too, even though they were devastated about the outlook for him.

My friend was very curious about this man. She couldn’t help it. She was only a young woman, nowhere near her time to die, of course, so she just couldn’t fathom how this patient was dealing with it so well. And he’d talk to her, just like he’d talk to all the other nurses, and they’d chat about the weather or sports or anything else that came to mind. But above all else, she was dying to know. What was keeping him so calm? Why did he seem so…content? So she made excuses to be around him, to try and figure out this mystery.

This man was obviously no fool, though, because eventually he noticed, figured out what was happening, and he asked her. He said, You want to know, don’t you? And of course, her being a nurse, she pretended she had no idea what he was talking about, that she was just doing her job, all the rest of it. But he saw through that. You want to know why I’m not wailing, crying, howling ‘woe is me’ at the walls? Because I’m going to die? And to this, she had nothing to say. What could you really say when someone asks you that question?

So she said nothing, and he told her anyway. And this is what he said:

I’m not rich. I didn’t spend all of my days on exotic holidays. I didn’t drive a fancy car, and I didn’t live in a big mansion. My days weren’t filled with parties or champagne or anything posh like that. I had a normal life and a normal car and a normal job.

None of this seemed all that impressive to my friend. There was no secret to eternal happiness there. But the man kept going.

What I did have, he said, was a family. I had a wife and three great children and two absolutely gorgeous children. And all the moments that I wasn’t working, I spent with them. I could’ve spent more time, I’m sure. I don’t doubt that for a second. But the moments we did have, they’re what means the most, and they’re what stays with me now. Why would I cry when I already have everything I could ever want?

And that was that. That was his secret. That was his answer—family. Nothing complicated. No ancient secret or gift from the skies. Just knowing that the time he spent with his family was incredible.

And that’s the value of time, at the heart of it. We can try to put a figure on it. How much money do you make in an hour, that kind of thing. But this man, this patient, seemed to get where the value of time really is. It’s not in the money we accrue during that time or in the material items we can grab. It’s in the moments we create with the people we love because if we end up where he was—and eventually we all will, one way or another—no amount of cars is going to make a difference. The number of rooms in your house won’t matter either. The only thing that will matter at that point will be whom you spent your time with. If those memories are still with you in your final days, then that was the most valuable time you could have had.

The value of time can also be perceived from the perspective of a gift. In fact, time is a gift. You don’t decide the amount of time you get. You have to take the amount of time available to you and make the best out of it. But the good thing about this gift is that we are all given the same amount. Whether you are a president, a peasant, a billionaire, or an astronaut, we have sixty minutes each hour. The queen, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault, Amancio Ortega, Hinduja brothers, and you have only twenty-four hours each day. Nothing more, nothing less. You can’t buy more time or give orders for other people’s time to be stolen and given to you. We all have the same gift.

But then what makes the difference? How do successful people achieve their success so efficiently while we all have the same amount of time? It all comes down to how much we value our time and how we utilize it. Once you have thrown it out of the window, it is gone. You can never recover the lost time. The only option is to live in the present and make maximum use of it.

And the value of time as a gift can be changed by your own perspective. The value of a gift is always not related to how big it is or how costly it is but, rather, on how much the receiver values it. If you give a real car as a gift to a child and also give them a toy car, they will value the toy car more since it is something they can use and easily interact with. In the same manner, your own perspective on time determines its value to you. Are you using most of your time to sleep, read, work, network, or go out? How do you use your free time? Which strategies do you utilize to make the maximum use of your time? These little differences in how each one of us utilizes time determine the value it impacts on our lives.

There are numerous currencies in the world with varying amounts of value relative to one another. Some of the major currencies include the US dollar, the euro, the Japanese yen, the renminbi, the Canadian dollar, and the Russian ruble. Their value keeps changing over time.

If you lose the currency you have and all your riches are destroyed, you become broke. You are left with nothing in terms of financial value. However, you can recover your