← Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Lessons - The Pastor Who Trained 45,000 Leaders Across Africa and Beyond | Dr. Sam Adeyemi - Founder of Daystar Christian Centre (20,000+ Members)
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Cohesity is a success story partner. Now your data is under attack all the time. Ransomware, breaches, outages, and the old way of protecting your data, like slow backups, complicated tools, recovery, that takes days. It just doesn't cut it anymore. That's why Cohesity Data Cloud exists. It's one AI powered platform that protects your data. It spots threats early and it gets you back up and running in hours instead of days. So if you are trying to build resilience for your company across AI and cloud and identity, head over to cohesity.com data cloud, cohesity, resilience everywhere. HubSpot is a success story partner. Now think about listening to this podcast. Right now you are probably multitasking. You are probably catching maybe 70 to 80% of what I'm saying. Now flip that and imagine catching only 20%. It's not a good use of your time. That'd be insane, right?
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But.
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But this is the reality for most businesses. Most businesses only use 20% of their data. That's like reading a book with 80% of the pages torn out. You are making decisions with a fraction of the picture. All the important details that get buried in the call logs and the emails and the transcripts and the chat messages and it's just floating around doing nothing for you. Unless you use HubSpot. Their customer platform brings all that unstructured data together and turns it into insights that actually help you grow your business. Because when you know more, you grow more. And when you're running a business on 100% of your data instead of 20, the decisions get a lot easier. Visit HubSpot.com to get the full picture today in this lessons episode. Explore how personal transformation begins with purpose and grows through intentional leadership. Discover how faith can unlock hidden potential and reshape identity. Understand why leadership is a skill that can be developed by anyone. And uncover how serving others creates lasting impact and defines true success. Talk to me about your journey. Talk to me about, you know, you. You, at one point in your life found God. I don't think, from what I understand, God was always as prominent in your life. I mean, your father was an engineer. It's not like you came from a family of people that were involved in the church to the degree that you are. So how did you find God? How did you decide to be this person in this life?
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Right. Thank you. So I was born basically into a Christian family. We went to church. But as far as having a personal relationship was concerned, that didn't come in until I went into College. Amazingly, one of my uncles had just become a born again Christian. He was a college student and he was like on fire for God. And the first thing he wanted to do was to lead everybody in the family to Christ, especially us young people. So the day my dad took me to college, you know, to resume, he came along. And then at my hostel, he saw all the various groups and clubs in my college, they had put up signs inviting young students to join them. Then he said to me, see all those, all those adverts? Don't join them. Okay, this one for the Christian Union. That's the one you should join. Okay. I said, thank you. Thank you, Uncle. In my mind I was thinking, you just go away. I want to enjoy my life, okay? This is the first time I'm having freedom away from home and I want to do what young people do. But amazingly, somebody came, a preacher came on our campus. And this was like two months after, three months after I resumed college, did a big crusade was preaching. And then I just decided to have a change of mind, interestingly, and gave my life to Christ. You know, I accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior. And it was an interesting change for me because I actually experienced the influence of God in my life. I'll tell you one significant part to it. Whenever I knelt down to pray in school, it would be like somebody pressed play on a video playing cassette. Now, I mean, this was a long time ago. Like this was like 40 years ago. Okay? I was a teenager.
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So you look, by the way, just a point, you look incredibly good for that being 40 years ago. So whatever you're doing, I want some advice. Good for you.
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Thank you, Scott. So I would see myself standing before people to speak, you know, and to teach. Now that was very remarkable for me because I am introverted. I used to be extremely shy. You know, I found it difficult to look into the eyes of just one person. So to, to even imagine me standing in front of a crowd to speak was completely out of it. And these thoughts only came when I prayed. So that made me know this had to be the spirit of God influencing my mind. This had to be God's design for me. Okay? So, yes, I was studying to be a civil engineer, but it looks like there's this other part of my life I didn't know was there. Okay? And truly, within a short while, I, I was elected into positions, you know, in my fellowship in school. That's why the leadership thing started. Before I was out of college, I was leading the whole fellowship, you know, in my college and then when I got out in Nigeria, you have this one year mandatory service to the nation. Every college graduate goes through it, except you're over 30. And it just so happened for each state, the people in the service, they choose someone to head the whole Christian group for a whole state. I was choosing to lead the Christian group for my whole state, which was very surprising for me. Again, because I was so quiet, I didn't know anybody saw me. Right. And once you were elected to do that, you couldn't do anything else. That was what you did full time for the one year. So. So that's. That's how I got into this line. The beautiful part to it, like I said, is it's been something really, really practical for me because I was able to discover my talents. Okay? I was able to take my attention off myself because that was what made me struggle at the beginning, because things were hard, like I said, for my family. I was desperate to succeed. And to succeed meant to have a good job, to have money, to have cars, to drive, to have a good house and. And all that, and be able to travel the world. But, you know, somewhere along the line, an elderly person, a minister at our church, looked at me and said, I want you to read the book. There's something about you. And he gave me the first book I read on leadership, Christian Leadership by Donald S. Altman. Now, for the fact that this was over 30 years ago and the book was already old then, you can imagine how old the book is. But it was the first book I was reading on leadership, and he loaned me the book. So I took a notebook, a small jota, and I wrote down all the major points in the book. I'll tell you again, an inflection point I had read in the book. The author said, those old ideas that suggest that a few people are born to lead, everybody else is born to follow. He said those ideas are dead. He said they were pushed by Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. Yep. He said, but if you read your Bible and you see there that God created man in his own image and told him to have dominion, you would know, therefore, that every human being has the capacity to lead. Then he listed the author, listed the qualities of a leader and said, whoever you are, look at the list. You have some of the qualities already. The ones you don't have, you can cultivate. Honestly. He was speaking to me for the first time. I accepted the fact that I could lead. I began to consciously develop the qualities of a leader. And Scott, since then, wherever I have been, I've literally just floated to the top. I've been able to develop my capacity to influence people for good. So I came to the conclusion that at the highest level of success, you help other people to succeed. That's also made me big.
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Thank you. I mean, I don't know, maybe it's my background in the sciences, but I just have this passion, you know, for giving people information that they can apply to their to day, to day living. So even in my leading a church, I made up my mind that I was going to teach what was relevant. So one of the things we did that revolutionized our ministry in Daystown was that we asked, what are people's needs? We actually looked at the demography of the people living 5 miles radius of our church. What's the age distribution? What are their needs? Now this was Africa, this was Lagos, Nigerian. And poverty came tops. So we said, okay, wait, how have we been addressing the poverty problem? This was three years after our church started and the only thing we had done was, I mean, we looked at my preaching and all I had been teaching was how people should give to the work of God. I then said, well wait, we shouldn't be starting from there. People need to have the money before they can Give it. Is there anything in the Bible we can teach them that will help them to get the money? I actually prayed about it and then went searching in the Bible and I was amazed. I was amazed at how much is in the Bible about finances. And I saw entrepreneurship. In fact, I saw that some of the most prominent figures in the Bible were entrepreneurs. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, even Christ himself was a businessman until the age of 30 when he started his ministry fully. And I thought what most of his disciples, Christ got from the business world, the fishermen were business people and so on. It was like I looked at some of the parables of Christ, the parable of talents, and so on. Then I just went, I just, I mean, I exploded. Literally. I was teaching practical things from the Bible. Now that surprised people a lot. After some time, I zeroed in on entrepreneurship. So by then, because we were meeting practical needs, our church was literally exploding, right? We went from running one service to running four services in 10 months because people were just coming, right? 30 minutes into a service, outside was full. There was a long line outside of people wanting to come in for the next service. Eventually, we were running five services on Sunday morning. So the first service, I was teaching entrepreneurship how to start and run a business from the Bible. And then later I then zeroed in on the leadership issue. So I started a leadership school. We call it the Day Tank Leadership Academy. We, we, we graduated over 45,000 people from the leadership school now. And we teach what you would get from the average business school. The only difference is we also have biblical stories to support the things we're teaching. But the principles are the same and they're so powerful, Right? Just yesterday, somebody sent me a direct message on LinkedIn and said I would want an opportunity to talk to you. I want to tell you how my wife and I attended the daystar Leadership Academy, started our business. They bake cakes, right? And he said, now we have a hundred people on our staff.
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Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.