By Debbie Olujobi

Popularity must be fun; popular people seem to have a natural flair for getting liked. People want to be around them, things seem to come easily to them and it can look like they have a charmed life. Now we shouldn’t compare being known or even famous to being popular; one is just recognizability while the other combines recognizability with affection and even common affinity.

Popular people have one thing in common; they all look and feel familiar; you think you know them; something about them is so familiar that you quickly let your guard down. They make friends easily and get along with all creatures; its a feat I sometimes admire. Not being a popular person has made me a curious observer/admirer of those who are.

One would think popular people would be wildly successful! After all they are the life and soul of every party/gathering. They are those who show the greatest potentials with great leadership skill as youngsters so it never fails to amaze me that they never amount to much when it really counts. They don’t seat on the boardrooms and are hardly on the Fortune 500, they often find their glory days passed when the partying was loudest. The sad reality is that being popular and liked is not a recipe for success.

A certain amount of ruthlessness mixed with ambition and a large dose of hunger won’t make anyone popular but 9 times out of 10 it will bring some level of success. Nice guys sometimes don’t come first because they are not willing to push anyone or step on anyone to get ahead. The richest under thirty in the world didn’t think anything of perfecting his friend’s ideas and cutting them out of the company to make Facebook a global phenomenon.

Lately I came across someone who used to be the life and soul of every gathering back in the day. He was from an illustrious family and lived like a king when we were in school. In those days having a car made you royalty as no party was complete without him and his particular set of friends.

I couldn’t find any reasonable explanation for his lacklustre life considering he had been born with a formidable platform to launch from and I spent a long time thinking about him and wondering what was responsible. He is not the only such person I know, and as a parent I wonder at what point we enable our children to grow up into adults who can’t be successful later on in life.

A majority of the popular children I knew earlier on in life were from comfortable and even very rich homes. They had things and advantages the rest of us didn’t dare dream of. They travelled to exotic places and we all flocked around them trying to feel like we belonged.

Most of them were quite nice and I remember visiting some homes that left me gasping in awe. Their parents had the right connections and they should have been successful but a great percentage of them are not. I am beginning to wonder whether making our children too comfortable by giving them the best of everything is actually setting them up to fail.

So back to popularity! What does it really mean to be popular? Why do people flock around you and why would you be singled out for affection by a majority? Nothing goes for nothing and if truth be told everyone wants something.  If it is not material, it will be emotional or even physical.

Popularity is a seed watered by opportunism. You are only as popular as your entertainment value.  People will flock around you if there is something to gain and while that is fine as a young person, they will flock away as adults when the business of reality and survival begins.

A recent edition of Time magazine describes the young generation as narcissists, fascists and entitled.  Please permit me to add opportunists. They are the “Me, Me and Me” generation. They remind me of those entitled and popular  children who have now failed as adults.

They want the best, most expensive and latest of everything; they just aren’t willing to wait or work for it. They will live off their parents at home for as long as they can and even when they move out their parents are the free supermarkets and ATMs they use with abandon.

Like the popular kids of my youth, they are obsessed with perception. They desire all the trappings of success and want to drive the cars their fathers drove at 50 in their 20s! The tragedy of it is in the numbers. When I was growing up, comfortable kids were the minority but with the re-emergence of a formidable middle and upper class, the entitled kids are the majority. Parents are working their fingers to the bones to provide the creature comforts of what Time calls the narcissistic, opportunistic and popular  generation.

Popular people often find themselves making sacrifices to maintain loyalty. It’s all about perception and they can’t stand for anything lest they lose the perceived adoration of their admirers. Successful people on the other hand know the value of discipline and sacrifice, they know that life is not a partying 100 metres sprint but a marathon that takes sweat, blood and time.

We all should take a look at our offsprings, the Facebook generation who spend their time uploading pictures on the Internet, enjoying the sweat of their parents and generally loafing. They will find out soon enough that life is not a popularity contest; after all, their parents won’t live forever.