How Much Is Your Life Worth?

How Much Is Your Life Worth Beyond Your Income?
How do you evaluate the worth of your life?

You have a good job and you earn a seven-digit salary, with substantial savings and shares, but if suddenly you expire, what legacy have you left behind, besides your wife, children, and private possessions?

I have seen people whose greatest achievement in life is just their savings, shares, and private properties.
They have no legacy.
They have contributed little or nothing to the advancement of their local community or humanity, except the taxes they paid as salary earners.



Dr. Pat Utomi is the epitome of the Nigerian Dream in honesty, transparency and service to humanity.

In Nigeria, the exemplary life of Dr. Pat Utomi is worthy of emulation. He did not wait until he became a millionaire before contributing to the progress and success of many people who are not even related to him. He has done so much for the edification and transformation of many Nigerians who were strangers and he cannot even remember many of them if he met them on the street today. But most of the Nigerian millionaires who made their fortunes by the misappropriation of public funds have no other legacy, besides their fleet of luxury cars, private estates where they rip off tenants and their private schools where they charge exorbitant fees without providing the quality education they advertised and their wives, mistresses and children.

What will eventually determine the worth of your life is not your personal possessions, but your altruistic service to humanity.
The value-added life is the life that is of great benefit to your community and humanity.

Charity begins at home, but nepotism or tribalism is not charity.
It would be more satisfying to see those you have helped to get the education that changed their lives or you gave funds gratis for startups, and they became financially independent.

Many years ago, when I was in my mid-twenties and an editor of a children’s magazine, I met a teenage boy who was a cobbler. I wanted to know what circumstances made him not to be in school like other children. He told me that he was fatherless and his very poor mother gave him out to an uncle who brought him to Lagos to become a houseboy. I asked him what he wanted to do. He said he would like to buy his own shoe-making machine and I was able to give him the money. I did not see him again until many years later. He was now a young man, working as a professional tailor and a budding scriptwriter. Today, he is a screenwriter and film editor.

Those who are using the children of other parents as houseboys and house girls, would you be willing to give out your own children as housemaids and houseboys?

Only evil and wicked people will exploit the economic and social disabilities of others and make them their servants, they pay starvation wages and treat them like sub-humans.

Would it not be better and worthy to sponsor these poor and needy humans to get the education they need or start the business they would like to do and become productive, so that they can add more value to our community and humanity?

I know fellow Nigerians who waste over N500, 000 (five hundred thousand naira) for only 20 days accommodation in a luxury hotel when they could have spent half of that sum in a very comfortable guest house and give the remaining sum to the needy to pay for the school fees of their children or give them a decent accommodation.
N20, 000 (twenty thousand naira) only is enough for a poor widow to start a lucrative trade. N250, 000 will be enough to start a cottage industry to employ many jobless people and improve their living standards.

Let us make a positive impact in the lives of others and see the positive development in the advancement of our community and humanity.

Cheers and God bless you as you do so.