Who cares about the orange? Where is the orange juice?

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As weird as this title sounds, I assure you that this is not a health related post. In fact, its more of an everything-related post. I have been fascinated over the past couple of days with the way we seem to disregard the raw materials and the process of transforming raw materials, but are eager to consume the finished product.

Let me break it down in less esoteric terms. No one celebrates the countless hours spent working in the library, but everyone turns up at the graduation to drink a bottle of coke and eat jollof rice. No one cares about how you felt when your first two businesses crashed, but everyone is eager to interview you about how you made your latest business a success. No one cares about how many years Bill Gates spent writing codes for Microsoft, but everyone cares so very deeply about the billions of dollars he has, and of course who cares about Dangote's history when he is busy making sugar, cement and building factories across Africa?

I am not in anyway saying that the end product, or achievements should not be celebrated, rather, what I'm saying is that the PROCESS is not celebrated enough. We have heroes in society who when giving interviews, gloss over the deepest, darkest and most confusing times of their lives and businesses, but instead, give us the magazine glossed up stories of how they became successful.

If we are going to celebrate the end product with such fanfare, I demand that we begin to celebrate the raw materials and processes that make the finished product, and I don't think I am demanding too much. The journey of the orange must be celebrated from the tree, to the factory, to when it is poured into a juice pack, placed on billboards and television adverts and given fancy names that end with "juice".

We are born as raw materials and the twenties are the time when we are ripe enough to be taken into the factory of life, before we can come out as finished products. I intend to celebrate the process on this blog, and in a few days, you will see the first celebration of the orange in the factory.