Every Productive Person Thinks Like This by Apostle Femi Lazarus: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Productivity Begins in the Mind, Not in the Schedule

Many people equate being busy with being productive. They are not the same. A productive person is not simply someone who is occupied — it is someone who has found simpler ways to accomplish things. If what should take 20 minutes consistently takes two hours, there is no way to measure the work, and there is no innovation. Before productivity can be discussed in terms of output, it must be discussed in terms of the quality of thinking.

If the mind is not productive, the person cannot be productive in the field. It starts with the capacity to analyze, draw conclusions, target correctly, and re-research the best way to get a desired result. And the results must be obtainable consistently — not just once.

The environment a person operates in matters enormously. A system that glorifies quantity over quality — where the person who takes two hours to do something appears more productive than the person who does it in 20 minutes, because the effort is visible — punishes efficiency and rewards performance. Surviving in such a system requires becoming an authority in the domain, because only authority can redefine the terms.

The Mind Must Be Trained Like a Muscle

The mind can be trained in productivity the same way the body is trained in the gym. One of the most effective methods is training with absurd deadlines — setting a task and refusing to violate the boundary. Every time a person sets a goal and fails to meet it, they condition themselves to see themselves as someone who breaks their own rules. That self-concept — of someone who does not finish — becomes reinforcing. The broken mind, the defeated mind, cannot build anything to international standard.

The discipline required is not the discipline of enduring hardship. It is the discipline of persevering until the result is visible — continuing to work the stone until water springs from it. Not everyone is naturally wired that way, but everyone is wired to grow in some direction. What is not worked cannot grow.

The person who will truly progress is the one who wants it enough that no external encouragement is necessary — and who has reached the point where no one can want their progress more than they want it themselves.

Vision That Never Launches Dies Inside

The mind is designed to carry visions the way a womb is designed to carry babies. When a baby dies in the womb and is not removed, it begins to decay inside and can destroy the womb itself. Every vision that is nurtured, fed, and never birthed is doing the same thing — rotting inside the mind, making it a hostile place for new ideas.

People arrive at a point where their minds can no longer sustain new vision not because they lack creativity but because so much has died inside that the space is compromised.

The practical resolution is to begin — not with perfection, but with what is available. The iPhone 13 lacked what made room for the iPhone 14. What is missing from a brand is the opportunity for its next version. You cannot improve a vision you have not started. Start it first. Then it can be upgraded.

Two signs that a vision will never launch:

person
Apostle Femi Lazarus
Enjoying this sermon? Browse more messages by Apostle Femi Lazarus on Declassified Podcast at ReadSermons.
library_books More Sermons
• Talking without acting — people who love the sound of their own vision, who take pleasure in impressing others with ideas they do not actually believe, who have reprogrammed themselves from the logic of doing to the logic of appearing intelligent. No person of action is impressed by intelligence. They are impressed by results.
• Waiting for perfect conditions — insisting that A and B must be in place before anything starts. Genesis chapter one is a management textbook: God prepared the environment before placing what would live in it. But he started with what was available and built as he went. Start with what is accessible and expandable.

Building a Team

When selecting people to work with, temperament matters less than certain specific qualities:

• The ability to improvise — someone who, if the standard approach is unavailable, can quickly adapt and find what works with what is at hand
• Creativity — the ability to use anything to get the job done
• Leadership ability — not the most talented person in the room, but the person who can manage everyone in it
• Consistency — someone who can stay on the assignment until the work is done
• A guardian eye — someone who sees what no one else has seen, who watches and protects what others overlook

None of these people need to be verbose. The ability to produce excellent results with a limited budget is worth more than any qualification.

Africa, Narrative, and the Power of Story

Every generation inherits a story. The question is whether someone else wrote it for them.

The trauma of the slave trade has predisposed entire populations to certain behaviors and self-perceptions. The day Africa stops seeing itself as a continent of oppressed people — conditioned to regard the products and ideas of other races as original and supreme — something will begin to shift.

But this cannot happen without honest reckoning with history. Revolutionary African leaders — from Julius Nyerere to Patrice Lumumba to Thomas Sankara — all paid enormous prices. And in most cases, the people who afflicted them were people of the same color, acting on behalf of outside powers, only for later generations to celebrate the ones their fathers destroyed. Africa has been taught to carry the sword on behalf of the colonizer.

The manipulation of crowds in Africa has created a climate where revolutionary leadership is nearly impossible to sustain — because populations have been made easily triggerable, easily manipulated, easy to turn against their own best interests.

This is not fixed by blaming governments alone. The corruption runs at the level of the individual. The person crying injustice often carries the same greed. The person who steals is not categorically different from the one who would steal if given the opportunity. What differs is access.

The Solution Is Independent Knowledge

The ingredient African youth most urgently need is independent knowledge — not knowledge sourced from CNN, BBC, or Al Jazeera, whose purpose is to shape perception, not to inform. Knowledge independent of the history books written by those who colonized. The people who stole a nation's past cannot be trusted to accurately describe where it has been.

Your best indicator of who is genuinely dangerous is who your oppressors celebrate. Your best indicator of who is genuinely useful is who they demonize.

The best marketing in the world is American. What does America sell? Stories. Venice draws millions not because of what it is but because of the stories built around it — in books, in films, in cultural memory. Makoko is a body of water too. Nobody built stories around it.

Africa has more material for extraordinary storytelling than almost anywhere on earth. The waterfalls, the lakes, the culture, the innovation, the history. None of it has been packaged and distributed. Nollywood sold Nigeria's dysfunction to the world for decades. Now something is beginning to shift — but the storytelling must become intentional, consistent, and built for investment.

The responsibility does not fall solely on governments. It starts with individuals who refuse to consume only what is handed to them, who seek out what has been buried, and who decide that the story they tell about themselves will not be written by someone else.