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.

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.

There is this inertia that most people in business who think they are successful have that prevents them from acting on things until it is too late. It is why they are caught unawares by change.

I read ”Only the paranoid survives” and I am seeing it play out in real life again.

Constant paranoia doesn't mean acting like a crazy person or even a mean and greedy person. It means that you are constantly aware that adverse change can make you irrelevant very quickly. The speed of irrelevance is much faster now and it largely depends on team types.

Some teams can be deluded. They believe too much in themselves because of past glory that it clouds their ability to see future danger. When the unexpected finally happens, they turn on each other and blame themselves and abandon the ship. They have always been living a lie.

Some teams can be totally ignorant of what is happening around them and can have tunnel vision. They end up working on products that have become irrelevant before they finish. They still believe somehow that others will adapt to them and csnf understand why failure happens.

Some teams can have extreme keyman risk. One person knows most of what needs to be done and nothing works well when that person is not in the picture. This type is more prevalent than we can imagine. Once one person takes more initiative, others just become passive.

Epic Win!

That was our team. 🔥

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?

I used to work 14+ hour days and have a 'no days off' mentality. This year I cut that shit off and focused on building a career and life of quality. The results are higher income, more time to enjoy life, schedule on my terms + stronger relationships. Fuck your "hustle."

The reality is 99% of people's "hustle" is just them hustling themselves. Hustling yourself out of life and into a worker cog. The exact opposite of what you want to become when you're an entrepreneur. You're becoming the same system you sought to destroy.

To build a successful business it takes way more than just plain old hard work. I am a huge believer in American grit, not American hustle. You need hard work, but if that is all you can bring to the table, you have no place running a business.

People work hard because they believe in what they're doing or they feel they have to make it happen. I get that. We have families and people counting on us. But you are failing them all when you live in your office.

We are privileged in even being able to run a business. If you are lucky enough to do that, you owe it to yourself, your loved ones, and the people counting on you to do it the right way. Be healthy. Sleep. Live your life. Be more than your career. 🖤

Make them irrelevant > Hold a grudge

Holding a grudge is the easy thing to do.

But holding a grudge is not the right thing to do.

A grudge puts poison in your body & rewires your subconscious mind.

You consume the poison & destroy your reality while your attacker sleeps like a baby.

"I grew up in Finland.

a) it rains all year round.

b) we have a lengthy and cold winter.

c) Finland is a sparsely populated country with just over 5mil ppl, with land size ~3/4 of CA and most of it forests and lakes.

d) no friggin body is raking the forests." @mallahadley

. . .

Trump's "assertion that California’s forest management policies are to blame for catastrophic wildfire is dangerously wrong."

Trump's message attacking California is "ill-informed, ill-timed and demeaning to those who are suffering as well as the men and women on the front lines."

"Wildfires are sparked & spread not only in forested areas but in populated areas and open fields fueled by parched vegetation, high winds, low humidity and geography. Moreover, nearly 60 percent of California forests are under federal management ...

I'm going to write a thread on the way #autistic people perceive pain. Something that I haven't talked about much before. #autism /1

For some #autistic people, what neurotypicals might interpret as mild pain actually feels like sensory hell. Some autistic people are really sensitive to pain. #autism /2

It's important that medical professionals understand this. Even if they think that it's mild pain, it's actual sensory hell for the #autistic person.#autism /3

Medical professionals shouldn't accuse #autistic people of being "silly" or being "extra" if they are sensitive to pain. This has happened to me before. Medical professionals shouldn't invalidate the way autistic people perceive pain. #autism /4

Some medical professionals just don't have enough understanding of the way #autistic people perceive pain. I hope this thread will help them understand better. #autism /5

How to Network: Must read for shy people

~ Thread ~

1. Start with Whom You Know

Start slow by networking with relatives and friends.

Once you gain some courage, you can expand to strangers too.

2. Put on a Happy Face

SMILE

This is such a basic rule yet people just don't think about it.

3. Listen to be Heard

Everyone wants to talk about themselves.

If you are shy, be a good listener.

If you let them speak, they will remember it as a great conversation

4. Say their Name

People like to hear their own names.

Calling them by their name would make them more comfortable.