“When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us”.
Alexander Graham Bell
In desperate need of money, a young man went to a big multinational in search of a job. After meeting the office manager, he was given a date to come back for an interview. On the day of the interview, he was asked to clean the floor. The young did as he was told and his work impressed the office manager.
“You are hired”, the manager said. “Give me your email address and I will send you the details on the terms and when you can start”.
“I neither have a computer nor an email address”, the young man replied.
“Then I am sorry”, said the manager, “if you don’t have an email address, you cannot get the job”.
The man left, dejected and feeling hopeless. He didn’t know what to do and only had 1,000 shillings in his pocket.
On his way home, he made a detour to the market to buy some tomatoes to use that evening. The tomatoes were selling at a heavily discounted price so the young man decided to buy a full sack. On his way home, he met an acquaintance who asked him what he was carrying in the sack. The young man told him. The acquaintance was in need of tomatoes and the young man sold him a portion at a higher price than he had bought them. At that moment, an idea came to him; he started selling the tomatoes door to door.
In less than two hours, he had managed to sell all the tomatoes and double his capital. He repeated the operation 3 times and returned home with 6,000 shillings. It dawned on the young man that he could survive this way. The next day, he woke up very early in the morning, bought more tomatoes and sold them. He did this every day and with each passing day, his money tripled.
Soon after, he had enough money to buy a cart, then a truck and then he had his own fleet of delivery vehicles.
Five years later, the man’s company was one of the biggest food retailers in town. He started to plan his family’s future and decided to take up a life insurance policy. He called a broker and chose a protection plan. When the conversation was concluded, the broker asked him for his email address.
“I don’t have an email address”, the man replied.
Amazed at this revelation, the broker asked, “you don’t have an email address and yet you have succeeded in building an entire empire, do you imagine what you would have accomplished if you had an email address?”
The man paused for a while, "yes", he replied. "I would be an office cleaner”.
