There is nothing that hurts like entrusting your treasure to someone so close to you and that person disappoints you. Yet this happens so often in life. I have lent friends money and they didn’t pay back. I have given advice to friends only for them to mock me behind my back. If you’ve never been disappointed by a close person, then listen closely to Sam’s story.

Sam went to the UK as a target worker. According to his plans, he was to do odd jobs for a few years, accumulate enough capital and then return to build his business empire back home in Rwanda. So he kept sending money to his brother-in-law to buy properties for him. But his brother-in-law would use the money and then just take photos of any nice houses around and send them to poor Sam. Sam continued to toil and send all his savings home, believing that he was investing. 

To his utter surprise, upon returning, he found nothing on the ground. He nearly collapsed. His brother-in-law denied everything and police couldn’t help because there was no evidence to support his claims. In short, Sam lost everything he had worked for, for nearly a decade.

There are two major mistakes that I see in Sam’s handling of his finances and business. First, he assumed that a relative is an angel that was so interested in him achieving his goals. I know someone who got a relative to baby-sit his children but this relative would eat all the nice things like eggs and chicken left for the children. It’s when they became marinourished that the man discovered what was actually happening.

Secondly, he missed the principle of Monitoring and Evaluation. At least if his brother-in-law had cheated him once it was going to be excusable. But for him to have managed to deceive him for nearly a decade shows some loopholes on Sam’s end.

Let’s learn the lesson: if we want to achieve our dreams in life, we must learn to keep a close eye at our progress and keep monitoring how far we have reached in achieving our goals and objectives. Sam should have put in place ways of finding out whether his money was actually being invested as planned other than just blindly trusting a relative.

Goals are good, but they must be monitored. If soccer didn’t have goal posts the players would not know which direction to go. It’s the goal posts that show them where to direct their efforts. Same with our life goals. However, setting goals and stopping at that, without evaluating them weakens our ability to prosper. Since we are nearing the end of the year, this is a good time to monitor and evaluate our progress in relation to our goals for 2013. 

It is so sad to walk up the stairs of a tall building only to reach the top and realise you are in the wrong building. You feel like all your efforts have been wasted. This is true for the pursuit of success. There’s no elevator on our success journey; we use the stairs. That’s why we must keep checking to ensure that we are in the right ‘building’. 

Bake is the MD, World of Inspiration, and founder of the Authors’ Forum in Uganda.