Now that you know how to manage your time, you must work hard and understand that there are no shortcuts. You can get farther in life with just this, but I would advise you to stick around for more cappings. Yes, more… 😁
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell has a section called Problem with Geniuses. It is a universal version of the typical Nigerian notion that first-class graduates earn peanuts. It is not that they don’t understand the subject matter; we know there are not enough jobs, but there are enough for first-class graduates, so what could be the problem?
Trust me, it is not the government or the politician; it is a result of their decisions.
Earlier this year (2024), people shared how being a first class has helped them be ahead and remain ahead of their peers.
One of them that struck me the most is the man who shared he had to write ICAN during NYSC, rejected a job offer while still jobless to later work at KPMG Nigeria the following year, and now he is a manager in the UK.
We could argue that he is not a genius; following his story, some characteristics differentiate him from most first-class graduates, which I believe are the things he understands about deciding what to work on.
For generations, it has been known that success in life is determined majorly by three choices:
- Who you choose to marry
- Where you choose to live
- What you decide to work on.
- All of these revolve around the choices we make that ultimately result in a certain outcome.
Think of it like mathematics (pun intended as an engineering graduate) 1+1=2, 3-1=2, -1+3=2, or even as a computer (as a programmer), it is always garbage in, garbage out!
If I would apply this to some things about me:
I have a blog at limistah.dev, if you are not one of my followers, you would have had no idea about it until now. However, I have an article on Smashing Magazine and another on LogRocket; these would likely catch your attention better.
Also, which sounds better about me: I have open-source projects under a parent project called ObjectSpread and I am the founder and lead maintainer, or I have contributed to popular open-source projects like Vault by Hashicorp, PayloadCMS, Gin-Swagger, etc.
I believe Smashing Magazine caught your attention better; same with Hashicorp, Payloadcms, and Gin. With these, you can attest to my expertise. Yes, my blog says enough; a more reputable source removes all the unnecessary doubt.
It is the same with the kind of school you attend, which determines the kind of education you get. No one should be labeled by the kind of school they attended; still, there is a minimum for this rule to apply.
It is the same with the kind of neighborhood you grew up in; this should label no one, but stereotyping exists as the sad truth.
While it is great to work hard, even tough, the platform and problem you eventually choose to work on also matter.
When I got my first full-time role, my colleagues at the office were discussing how career progression should go, to them, they believed their careers had started. I said my career would start until I worked at Paystack or Flutterwave, which did not happen; I would work at Oasis Living in Nigeria months later.
In 2022, my brother got admitted to OAU and was waiting for resumption. I told him, “Hey, you could use your JAMB result to get admitted to Covenant, you know?” He resisted and argued the school fees were expensive (you can’t blame him).
I told him, “Well, it is a fixed cost, and you get to graduate in 4 years from Covenant University.” He resisted, still.
This year, we were randomly discussing, and he said he regrets not accepting my offer for him to attend Covenant University. It has been 3 years since then, and he is just resuming part 2 of his program, but with Covenant, he could be resuming part 4.
That is a great lesson for him on choosing wisely regardless of the cost. For him, that was not the beginning.
There is a new revelation that I do bring to his attention. Immediately after high school, the only admission he could secure was to a polytechnic, which I advised against. It was tough for him back then, but it is a good decision for him now.
I reminded him how many years had passed and how much money he had spent. And had he accepted the offer, he could have a diploma.
In contrast, another person at a university spending the same amount of time, with a slight difference in cost, would get a degree; he always nods his head in agreement—my consolation to him on missing the Covenant offer.
It is glaring; we all have 24 hours in a day, but with different opportunities, agreed. Most times, what differentiates us from how we end up in life is the kind of problems we choose to solve and how we choose to solve them.
I believe working for just working sake is fine, but for everything we do in life, there is a result and an end goal. Life is a journey with many stops; some stops could put you on another bus based on how you did on a previous bus. And we could agree that school is a stop too.
Choosing to work doesn’t have to be doing just work. It has to be impactful work. Most times, we don’t have the requirement to be at a place of impact, which is the reason why it is best to outwork everyone at the current stage to create an unfair advantage for the next stage—working extremely harder now, but on the right problem.
Going back to the story of our accountant: He chose to work at places of impact, but he understood the requirements ahead, which helped him prepare what he needed to get to places of impact, and those impacts propelled his growth—it was not magic.
The fascinating facts from these choices are:
- You will marry someone (sorry to the woke marriage is a bondage ideologist)
- You will live somewhere
- You will work on something (even if you decide to be an entrepreneur)
Then why do you want to:
- Just marry anyone?
- Just live anywhere?
- Work anywhere?
Why can’t you:
- Marry the best person for you?
- Live at the best place for you?
- Work at the best place for you?
I have always been asked if I have an idea around AI, and my response is always: I don’t want to build with AI—building with AI is me trying to create another AI platform.
I want to build something for the platform, as Andrew Ng always advises, by applying AI to real-world problems.
This also translates to adjacent growth; if AI grows, my stuff grows too. This can also be seen as investing in stock. Why would I want to bet my all on new stuff when I can leverage a part of bigger stuff and grow with it from there?
You can stumble on impactful work and life; that is not my genuine advice for you, as it results from low self-awareness. You don’t want to control everything, but be sure enough to know what the outcome of what you are doing could lead you to, then let life happen in between.
It is like trying to create your own Google rather than working at Google or with Google. By creating yours, the chances of succeeding are slimmer, and the chances of impact are almost none.
There are many lives to be impacted by working at Google or doing something with Google. Google gives you a readily available platform that you would spend years building; the case of ChatGPT going from zero to a million users in 24 hours is tempting.
As always, be real with yourself; can you create such an impact? If you can, what exactly are you trying to do differently? ChatGPT is a novel solution that gives an interface to decades-long work in AI/ML.
Still, I am not asking you to ditch lowball opportunities. I am simply asking you always to define impact in your work. Cal Newport mentioned that when he was choosing the school to join after his PhD at MIT, he decided a small university where there was a lot of work to be done and he could be a pioneer of the department.
He chose Georgetown University over other established universities where there was still work to be done, but his work would become another document in the library, hard to find, and he became another faculty member rather than a pioneer.
You could choose to work in a new, emerging field, such as an up-and-coming company; please do this in an environment where there is a potential platform for the field to grow. Slack was a company for gamers that could have been hard to find in the gaming industry, but it finally became famous as the leading workplace solution.
The problem with first-class graduates in Nigeria is that they do not translate the style of work they used to achieve their first class in school to their work life.
Some stumbled upon a first class, which I would even debate as a lack of self-awareness; you don’t work that dedicatedly hard and not expect a result. For some, it was deliberate, preplanned, and a goal they sought out when setting foot on their campuses. Why not do the same for work life?
Just as graduating with a first-class, knowing what is possible and choosing to do the most impactful work is the way to go further and stay ahead, doing hard work won’t—especially on the wrong thing.