Safari Mission, a nonprofit in Tulsa, OK, teaches about leadership. Our missionaries from our nonprofit in Tulsa, OK, teach individuals to lead themselves before they lead others. A missionary or leader that can lead himself into greatness will have others that follow. The biggest difference between a missionary or leader that doesn’t become great and missionary or leader that does become great is the use of time. You have to use your time what is important—on priorities.

If you look at most people’s time, it’s filled with all kinds of things that honestly come very far down on the list of priorities. A leader or a missionary must have their priorities sorted correctly.

A lot of people, you know, we spend 40 hours at work a week or whatever the case might be, then we go home and watch the leaders in the Olympics or whatever else is happening on TV. The thing is, not a single one of our visions and goals and desires that’s going to be accomplished by us watching the Olympics, as fun as that might be. Or maybe we watch the super bowl or whatever else in on television. At Safari Mission, a nonprofit in Tulsa, OK, we teach that this will not help you to become a leader.

Where I live as a missionary in Nairobi, in Kenya, we live in a housing addition there. Right outside where we live is a slum area, where the people are poor. They just have a few metal sheets over their heads. Over each one of those metal sheets, there’s a pole that sticks up. That’s an aerial antenna. Almost every single one of them has a television.

We live next to that, in one of the better areas of Nairobi. Where I live as a missionary, you don’t find these same sticks poking through the roof of the houses. It’s very interesting that the first thing a poor person will do if they have money left over, is they will buy their own entertainment.

The rich, the leader, the good missionary, they will spend money on books. In the rich people’s houses, you will usually find a library. You don’t find that in poor people’s houses. If you look at the investments that poor people they have spent on entertainment and television and all kinds of other things, they could have built a library. They could have taken that same money and use it for educating their own mind. Safari Mission’s missionaries teach leadership, and we teach leaders to improve their own mind by extensive reading.

There’s a saying that leaders are readers, and readers are leaders.

The government won’t push somebody to accomplish something. It doesn’t matter what kind of worldview you have; you’re not going anywhere unless you have the drive within to do what is necessary in order to go somewhere. A good leader or a good missionary knows this. We teach this at Safari Mission, a nonprofit in Tulsa, OK.

Poor people will look at people who are rich and say that they’re lucky in life. Go talk to the rich people and they’ll all say, “I worked for this. There’s a lot of sacrifices I made in order to get to where I’m at now”.
Look at college graduates. Look at the ones who landed a job out of college. Safari Mission, a nonprofit in Tulsa, OK, teaches that usually, that’s not luck.

Usually if it’s a tough job market, the college graduates that have done over and beyond summer vacation, they found internships and didn’t just waste the time. They’re the ones that are going to land the job at the end of college. They have done what other people weren’t willing to do and therefore they are now in a place that other people aren’t. This is the way to be a good leader and a good missionary.

The vast majority of people do the same thing that their friends are doing. If you’re just think of it, you know everybody, we’ve all got a circle of friends for the most part. That circle of friends consists of people who are like us, you know, with similar ways of thinking. If you talk about money, your friends will have similar thought patterns surrounding money usually. And so, you find people with–just pick a number, $50,000 income level. Predominantly, they are going to hang around with people at on under a $50,000 income level. People at the $200,000 income level for dominantly they hang around with people with $200,000 income levels and remain at the same level throughout their life.

This is because we tend to have a herd mentality, like dogs. They like to hang around in herds and, we like to be the same as everybody else. But if, as a leader, you want to go somewhere different and new, yet you think the same way that everybody else around you are thinking, you are guaranteed to be in the same position that the rest of that group is going to be five years down the road.

In other words, where we are today is a result of our thinking patterns yesterday. Every leader knows this. The students in our Bible colleges founded by Safari Mission, a nonprofit in Tulsa, OK.

As a missionary and a leader in Tulsa and in East Africa, I have learned that to be a missionary or a leader, you must give up many of the things that other people do in order to make a difference in your own life.

Where we’re going to be tomorrow is a result of what our thinking patterns are today. So, if you want to go somewhere different from your group of friends, if you want to be a missionary or some other type of leader, it’s only going to happen if we choose to have different thinking patterns and different behavioral patterns from the people that we’re surrounded by. And when it comes down to it, that’s what a leader is. A leader is somebody who does something different in such a way that you cause the inspiration of other people and they want to go where you’ve been able to go. That’s what leadership is. It requires that we have a certain mindset, call it grit if you want to.

If I, as a leader, want to go somewhere in life, the people around about me may not be the kind of people that want to go where I’m going. But if I decide that I’m going to get there, that I’m going to reach a certain goal, then I have to determine that I’m going to read, I’m going to study, I’m going to learn, I’m going to do what it takes to get there. Which means that some of the things that I’m currently doing have to go, and I have to make room for the things that will make me a good leader. The things that are my priorities.

It might mean that you have to make simpler dinners. That’s just a practical example. Some food takes a lot of time. It may be a sacrifice, but that might be what is required in order for you to have the little bit of time left over to invest into your future as a leader.

It might be to cut down on Facebook time.

You know what, Eleanor Roosevelt, a great leader, said that great minds talk about ideas. Average minds talk about current events. Small minds talk about other people.

There’s so much truth in that statement.

It seems to me that Facebook has become a collection of a lot of small thinking. I’m not against Facebook, I’m not against television. That’s, that’s not my point. My point, as a leader, is, it’s just a matter of priority. It’s a matter of cutting down on things that really are not important.

When’s the last time that we got out of revolutionary idea out of Facebook? Something that really changed the course of our life. When’s the last time we got that from television? But if you purposely go read a book tailored for the area of life you want to grow in, you’re going to grow in that area. As a leader, whether you are a missionary or a pastor or a business person, you will have to sacrifice time on one thing in order to use it on another. As you learn to lead yourself into places you haven’t gone before, you will be able to lead others. This is a foundational message we teach at Safari Mission, a nonprofit based in Tulsa, OK.