When is comes to peer pressure, people get highly influenced with latest trend, it could be hairstyle, dressing, slangs and so on. People misinterpret the term peer pressure, 80% of people assume peer pressure is a manipulative and intimidating influence portrayed by a group of individuals, about the same age group, with unhealthy behaviours .
The definition above is absolutely wrong, peer pressure could affect a person either in a negative or positive way. Personally i don't easily succumb to peer pressure, I've seen lot of trendy stuffs my peers do, i don't usually allow myself to be pressured.
Following the crowd
Back in 2019, almost all my course mates were learning Importation, like it was the school trend, everyone was talking about it. For some reason, i just hated following the crowd, i had this mentality to do things my own way. More students were joining the learning importation trend, for me it made no sense to learn how to import goods, besides we were just students and we were also kinda broke.
Now tell me how a broke student would be able to import goods from countries like china, turkey and Bangladesh.
Then the fee for learning was 5k ( five thousand Naira), as a student 5k was huge for me, i could use it to feed for 2 weeks, the thought of giving it to someone in exchange for a knowledge i wasn't even sure i was gonna implement just made the whole thing more discouraging.
In the middle of the trend, a student implemented what she had learned and she imported from china to Nigeria. This act created an uproar in the whole school, everyone was trooping in and out of her hostel. This was when i started picking interest, i wanted to know what it felt like to import goods from other countries. I saved up and paid the tuition fee.
After paying, i started having some regrets, for the first time i succumbed to peer pressure, it felt like i had wasted my money to one stupid trend. But on the other hand i was willing to give the whole thing a chance, after learning i decided to implement everything I've learnt. At this time i didn't even have a dim to import anything.
I went back to the lady that was taught me importation, i told her i wanted to start importing but i don't have funds or capital to start, then she gave me an idea that changed my life completely.
She said, since i didn't have the capital, i could organise a pre-order, get people to pay and use their money to import the goods from China, at first the idea sounded crazy. I had doubts, how would someone trust me with their money, she encouraged me and asked me to remove those doubts and think positively. I listened to her, and i got five customers, i showed them pictures of some goods, they liked it and paid for it on preorder .
In total i was able to get 22,500 from my first five customers, i was super happy, for the very first time i succumbed to peer pressure it resulted to something positive. I used the money i got from them to import some goods from china. The joy i felt when the goods arrived Nigeria was unbeatable, it felt like i had won jackpot. I picked up my goods from the shipping company, i called some of my course mates to come see what i imported, they were all happy.
After everything, i decided to do importation as a full time business, I've made cool money from importing of goods and reselling. I'm so glad i allowed myself to be influenced with something positive.
Peer pressure is not always about being influenced negatively, there's also a positive side of it too. We shouldn't always neglect the good pressure that could make a big change in our lives, this time it doesn't matter if you're following the crowd, as long as what you're doing would yield good fruits.
Thumbnail generated by meta AI