One thing I am grateful about is the ability I have always had to keep living my life on my own terms without being drawn into trends. I am an obsessive extremist. I don't do middle ground obsession. When I love something, I don't do half measures. I can also do dislike that way.

There are many Africans with a free $50k to $100k lying idle somewhere than we think. They keep cash as a contingency for many reasons. Anything can happen. Positively or negatively. Cash is sometimes worse than a dead asset. They keep it anyway. Most likely outside Africa.

I was having a chat with my best man about African investments and I could have tried to teach him ancient Sumerian instead. Dude’s mind is closed to Africa. He would rather invest in Dubai as it made more sense. Problem is there are African investments with much better returns.

I think Africa has a massive PR problem. The problems are real no doubt but the opportunities are also real. The news about the problems overshadows the details about the abundance of opportunities. I still can't forget the lady at @Ashesi who told me about African abundance.

I have seen magic done in 2001 with $285m raised all locally in a month for a deal. Over 20 years later, African startups are still hustling in a demo day abroad for thousands of dollars that other Africans already have to give but don't or can't. It is a complete mindfuck.

There is a reason African people don't believe too much of the good news. They have been brutalized and conditioned so much with bad news that it becomes their frame of reference. Where else can a train track be attacked twice in two days and nothing is said by the government?

What is the calculation of the super-rich Nigerian and why don't they run to the hills whenever there is an economic crisis?

I think because each crisis presents new opportunities with loopholes to gain advantage. I’ve once said that Nigeria is the world’s opportunity capital.

What Nigeria produces in abundance is opportunists. We don't do capitalism or socialism in Nigeria, we do opportunism.

Opportunism doesn't think long term about anything. It takes lemons and makes lemonade, then tries to create a lemonade monopoly to have outsize sales margins.

This is why we import when things are scarce. We trade when we are broke. Importation and trade are very short-term value creation processes without long-term upside. It is why our wealthy people are ”low-quality” according to @DoubleEph 😂

There is generally no production depth

Our banking system is also complicit in supporting this charade. It is why most of the nonperforming loans have been made to these same opportunists masquerading as the ”super-rich”. I missed the opportunity to add quotes in my first tweet. Their so-called wealth is qualified.

Something is fundamentally wrong when an economy is almost completely transactional. Yes, I have made money from fintech but I also see the long term damage of the current fintech hype. Nigeria as a country has been in one long hype cycle. This is why I keep saying it isn't real.

I am in a meeting now that is so annoying but I want to take my mind off things that upset me to talk about love and marriage.

I have been listening to people talk in many @joinClubhouse rooms about what they expect from potential partners and laugh very hard each time.

I laugh because those expectations are what keep a lot of people single. Being single is also not a bad thing as I have been more single in my lifetime than I have been in relationships. I also learned a lot about what kept me single for all those years. It was largely idealism.

Let me digress a bit to one of the pivotal encounters in my life when someone literally came out of the darkness to evangelize to me.

He deliberately ran towards me to deliver a message as if he had been sent on an errand. He told me that God doesn't want perfection.

He said, God wants us to strive towards perfection but knows we will never attain it. He said I should not beat myself up whenever I don't measure up but I should remain trying. It is the act of trying that is desirable. God is the only perfection and we strive to be like God.

I became an Atheist after that conversation. I took the opposite direction in search for perfection. In a roundabout way, it led me back to faith.

That is also my story of love and relationships. The best came at my most skeptical moment after I gave up on everyone else.

Sometimes I wonder if we should be building certain types of African organizations with obvious gaps in people resourcing?Then I remember what my uncle and his friends did for the financial sector with MAYO and PTC.

Edtech has actually been in Africa longer than we think.

MAYO/PTC was actually the first Ed-Tech company in Nigeria and also the first place I worked and did my NYSC. We took UK accountancy and banking institute materials and used tech to modify and republish local versions of study text for students preparing for professional exams.

We also provided prep classes and corporate training. This was how we also started @SwiftaSystems, it was initially from tech training before we moved to product development and services.

For tech, we were self-taught but we created a new market for ourselves with education.

Education ALWAYS comes first before adoption when it comes to tech. We aren't doing nearly enough at the moment. Everyone wants to build products for the educated market and ignore the uneducated market. Uneducated doesn't mean formal school, it is about industry and paradigms.

Current Ed-Tech initiatives are focusing on basic education but market education is a significant opportunity. No matter how simple you think your product is to use, there will be many who will not use it until they understand the fundamentals and why it exists at all.

Epic Win!

That was our team. 🔥

How to become a SUCCESSFUL academic: a guide 1/n

How do I know how to become a successful academic? I don't, but I have received plenty of advice. As a good academic, I will just summarize what I have learned from listening

1) Be the ultimate collaborator but also don't be

Say yes to as many collaborations as physically possible: co-produce papers, LEARN, co-write grants, DISCUSS, it is all about synergy. But also, collaborations slow you down, have your own ideas! Just say no to collaborations

2) Be the methods ninja but also don't be

Science is only as good as its weakest link: don't be satisfied by applying the default analyses in the field. But also, don't let perfect be the enemy of the good and don't confuse reviewers. Just apply the default analyses in the field

3) Be the superstar teacher but also don't be

Professor means teacher, it is LITERALLY in the name. Being a good professor means being a superstar teacher. But also, focus on the science and minimize the hours of teaching, don't try to become a superstar teacher

My highlighted passages from The Psychology of Money by @morganhousel. Thread below

1. The 401k - the backbone savings vehicle of American retirement - did not exist until 1978. The Roth Ira was not born until 1998. If it were a person it would be barely old enough to drink

2. NYU professor Scott Galloway has a related idea that is so important to remember when judging success - both your own and others': "Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems."

3. Margin of safety - you can call it room for error or redundancy

4. "Every job looks easy when you're not the one doing it because the challenges faced by someone in the arena are often invisible to those in the crowd."

5. "The average equity fund investor underperformed the funds they invested in by half a percent per year, according to Morningstar - the result of buying and selling when they should have just bought and held."

Whenever people call me an elitist, I am flummoxed. I am from a working class background, I am a product of public education my entire life, and I spend my free time creating a podcast that aims to make great books accessible to all for FREE.

I am called an elitist because I believe there's a difference between literary art and plain fiction. I believe some books are more worthy of your attention than others. Lots of books are like junk food: pleasurable but not nourishing.

My podcast is dedicated to the idea that great books are for everyone and everyone deserves a chance to learn to enjoy them. This is not an elitist enterprise. It does, however, suppose that some books are truly worthy of your attention and that I have some capacity to judge.

My podcast doesn't pretend to be exhaustive. I have limited resources and time and perspective. But the conceit of the podcast is that in listening to it you will deepen your literary and philosophical education. These aren't just books I happen to like and hope you do too.

My podcast highlights books I think you will benefit from reading. Many of them are challenging; one might have to struggle with them before one can enjoy them at all. The podcast aims to help get you to the enjoyment/appreciation stage, to show that the struggle pays off.