Value addition

Hello everyone, how have you all been today? As some of you must have known by now, I am currently doing the second phase of my field practical training in Lagos, and classes officially started today (yeah, we do have classes 😩)

The experience has been fun so far and today we had a few classes but the journey to the institute's headquarters where the class was held was a very stressful one. Apart from the constant traffic we encountered, our bus broke down halfway to the institute and we had to board another bus which was very uncomfortable.

The first class was very interesting and we learned about the entire process of canning fish, the teacher was very inspiring and I learned a couple of things from him. But the one I really want to talk about was the last lecture we had and that is the reason for this article.

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The last teacher talked about how some fishes are referred to as having low economic value because they don't grow very big and so, a lot of people don't like buying them. So what did they do to solve that problem? They added value to the fish by using it to create something else; fish meal, which is used for making fish feed which is used to make fish feed used for feeding fishes.

He called it value addition; they have taken something that isn't very valuable and used it to create something very valuable (fish meal), with that way they make sure that the fish didn't go to waste. That got me thinking about how this also applies to humans, do will carry out value addition as well? 🤔

People do tend to lose value over time and what a lot of us usually do is to cut them off when we notice they are no longer adding value to our lives, but what if we can make them valuable? Sometimes the reason why most people are no longer valuable to us is that they are not equipped with the skillset which we think we need.

And sometimes the reason is that they have picked up some bad habits which we are not comfortable with and over time, our relationship with them begins to wear off and finally we cut them off. Value addition can come into play in the first scenario if we teach our "valueless friend" the same skills we have.

Take for example two friends that are living together, one is a successful YouTuber while the other just play games all day (let's call the YouTuber Peter while the gamer is Paul). Peter might get tired of Paul over time especially if he isn't really interested in games as much as Paul is.

The best thing Peter can do if he truly values their friendship is to teach Paul how to be YouTuber as well, since Paul is already a good gamer, he can make videos about his gameplay and publish them on YouTube. If that is too much for Paul to handle, then they can work as a team; Paul plays games and comes up with tips and tricks, while peter handles the entire YouTube aspect.

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With this method, they will work together on the same thing as a team and Peter has successfully added value to Paul by making use of his skills as a gamer to create and publish videos on YouTube, and both of them will both make money from it while enjoying what they do best.

But that isn't what happens most of the time, and they can ve various reasons for it. The two major reasons are; the first friend will be reluctant to teach the other one because of selfishness (maybe) or he feels the other friend won't agree to learn that skill.

The second reason is that the other friend will blatantly refuse to learn such a skill, and sometimes you wouldn't really blame him/her because it might be something that they aren't really passionate about. But I feel the major reason why people don't carry out value addition on their friends is that they feel it will be too much work to do so and they will rather take the easier route; cut them off.

Thanks for reading 💖💖💖

Thursday February 24, 2022