In late 2015, I discovered Tim Ferriss. His podcast had already been running for over a year at that point, interviewing some of the most interesting people alive: investors, authors, athletes, scientists, and military commanders.

To date, his podcast remains roughly styled the same way. Invite an interesting person over, have a long, detailed conversation (usually about two hours), and publish it for the world to listen, for free.

Darren Shearer started his Theology of Business Podcast (now the Christian Business Leader Podcast) in 2016, publishing bi-monthly one-hour conversations with Christian business leaders. Still, I didn’t learn about it until about 2020.

I was equally excited about both podcasts when I discovered them, yet failed to cultivate an active listening habit. I’m convinced, though, that there are people who’ve been consistently listening to these conversations for over ten years, and their lives are better for it.

I see many of these podcast fans doing interesting things like starting their podcasts, YouTube channels, businesses and so on, and I can’t help but recognise that I had a similar chance as many of them. In fact, I wanted to start a podcast with a friend as far back as 2019.

Then I wanted to do so again in 2020 with another friend, when the Google Podcast Fellowship took off, and I remember recording some episodes for a newsletter titled “Coper Spotlight.” I interviewed other interesting members of the National Youth Service Corps for my podcast. It took off on LinkedIn, then it went down. Somewhere in 2023, I started again (see the podcast section of my website), but when it got tough, I didn’t get going; I just closed shop. In hindsight, I couldn’t sustain my creative commitments because I had never been a consistent podcast listener.

I can’t help but imagine the transformative impact Darren Shearer’s podcast would have had in my life if I had been following him for a decade. Who would I be today if I had listened to his guest episodes every two weeks since 2015? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect it would have changed things.

Since I haven’t been following actively, I wanted to catch up on some of what I had missed. By my latest count, Darren has produced over 250 guest interviews. That is roughly about 200 hours of concentrated thinking from kingdom operators across various business domains available for free.

And to show you just how serious my assumptions about the transformative power of consistent podcast listening are, I looked up some research, and it’s just as I suspected.

An often-cited study on the educational value of transformative podcast listening is Simon Hieleson’s, who concluded that students use podcasts "rationally as a supplement to their study activities." So you have a transformation in education, at least through the way we learn.

You also get improvements in attitudes, as some podcasts can lead listeners to change their behaviour and become more socially aware.

Moreso, especially among female listeners, what scholars call parasocial relationships (cultivating something like a mentoring relationship) with educational content creators (and I would add podcasters) can increase people’s desire to learn.

I wouldn’t say that these benefits apply to all podcasts, though. These benefits are more likely to be acquired through what I call legacy podcasts. Yes, "legacy" because people who commit themselves to becoming masters in a craft eventually get there and find the most effective ways to derive value from that work than beginners in the same field, and their work often paves the way for innovation. I have written previously about why we should make reading seminal works a habit, and it is a corollary of this.

Tim Ferriss started his podcast in 2014. Darren Shearer started the Christian Business Leader podcast in 2015. Both are still active and have published hundreds of guest interviews with people who have the very things that many others, even in their domains, are still dreaming about.

That consistency over time is the key thing. Anyone can produce great content for six months, but very few people show up every two weeks like Darren Shearer for ten years.

By implication, these legacy podcasters create a unique body of work that would have cost a lot more otherwise.

Over the past few weeks, I have been transcribing Darren Shearer’s 280+ guest interview episodes, reading through what guests said about pricing, leadership, failure, faith, integrity in the marketplace, and building companies while raising families. The breadth of personal experience shared is positively overwhelming.

These topics would have taken a university business school years to develop into curriculum materials, but Darren Shearer produced them across simple conversations, at no cost to listeners.

Tim Ferriss has done a similar thing, so his podcast archive is now one of the most comprehensive informal resources on peak performance, entrepreneurship, and education available today.

Watching recent seasons of Shark Tank alone has taught me more about valuation, market sizing, and what investors actually care about, and it’s fun. I enjoy it. I learn new things in each episode because knowledge is embedded in the stories the entrepreneurs share and the conversations they have with the ‘sharks.’

Listening to smart people talk consistently for years will transform your life. So don’t miss out like me.

Find one legacy podcast in a domain that interests you, that interviews practitioners on every episode and tune in at least once every week. Or find one show like Shark Tank and continue following for as long as possible.

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Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

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At one end are passivists. Believers who think that God calls people through a dramatic personal encounter so clear and unmistakably divine that it sufficiently casts out all doubt and breaks through every hesitation. And until that occurs, we wait.

On the other end is a pragmatic dismissal. A sense that calling is simply a spiritualised word for career preference, and that you identify it by trying various things and observing what produces the most satisfaction or earns you the most socio-economic advantage, then you commit to it as the one God wants for you.

Neither extreme is particularly helpful, and both have produced Christians of a paralysed faith (the waiters), and the suspicious who approach their jobs without a zeal for excellence until they find the successful one. Both senses equally lack a genuine spiritual significance.

Calling means two things

Os Guinness, whose book The Call is arguably the most thorough treatment of vocation among modern Christian books, makes a helpful distinction.

There is a primary calling, that is the universal call of every human being to know, love, and follow God, and there are secondary callings, the specific contexts and roles we play at home or at work, through which our primary calling is expressed. Simply, our primary calling gives us direction while our secondary calling gives us form.

It is natural for the primary things to lead the way and for secondary things to follow, so our vocation only needs to follow God.

Another lesson to take away from the book is that our primary calling can be secular (happening in ordinary ways), and the secondary work can be spiritual (done for God). The form only needs to follow God’s direction.

To be even more practical, if you’re wondering whether God has given you a specific directive in business, you need not wait for a spiritual encounter to convince you before taking action, because that is procrastination.

That’s not to say that God never gives us a specific move to make, especially in rare dilemmas, but not all matters in business require such a spiritual experience of specificity. Moreso, having the wisdom of God is itself directional, as He guides us unto all things.

The more productive question about our secondary calling is: given who I am, what I carry (the Holy Spirit), how I was made, and what I have already observed about where my presence in the world produces the most fruit, where is my investment of life most aligned with what God is doing?

Having said that, we must also note that there is no reason to believe that any living person is without a calling, as both our primary and secondary callings indicate that we are purposeful beings.

In the rest of this article, I will use the word vocation instead of “secondary calling” because it is more fitting for business and work.

Factors that determine our vocation

Frederick Buechner’s suggestion is that the place God calls you to is the intersection of your joy and the world’s need. Joy because God cares about the feeling of satisfaction and enduring happiness we get from long periods of creative work. Afterall, He also observed His creations and called them “good.” Only after He had done a succession of good works did He rest. So God cares that we do excellent work and find satisfaction in it. So, which work gives you this feeling of joy, not just happiness, which is short-lived, but joy?

And when you think of that work, how does it meet the needs of other people? Not your need but theirs. For which activity do people appreciate you, even when they pay for your service? You may also answer this question about what needs your meeting before answering the question about joy; the order doesn’t matter. What matters most is whether you derive joy from the value you give other people.

The mistake many people make is starting with money. People often chase businesses they think will yield the highest returns, but forget that before that sector or line of work became profitable, some pioneers made sacrifices to establish the field, and sometimes those pioneers earn the bulk of the money. Secondly, profitability is never guaranteed in any area of business throughout human history. Just think of all the established businesses, like travel and tourism, that took a hit during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Having said that, I must add to Buechner’s two ideas other non-negotiable factors that should determine your vocation.

The first is the presence of genuine competence that consistently creates value for other people. God cannot call you to incompetence, especially persistent incompetence. So your calling cannot be in an area of business or work where you may be considered a sluggard, because that will spoil any witness to the gospel you make.

I don’t mean that whatever God calls us to will be easy. From Scripture, we can count many key characters whom God used to accomplish things they didn’t think were possible.

So whatever area of work God wants to use you in, He will require growth, a willingness and ability to face real discomfort, and if God is calling us to do something significant at work or in business, we will typically undergo the longest seasons of development before the full fruitfulness of the gift is visible.

But there is a difference between the discomfort of growth and the frustration of operating in a domain that is just outside your field of competence. The marketplace Christian who consistently produces work that others find valuable, solves real problems, and creates valuable outcomes is almost certainly operating within their domain of vocation.

The second necessary factor is conviction. John Calvin taught that the gifts God distributes in creation are the fingerprints of a purposeful God on the lives he has made. Think of the millennial or Gen Z who would not work for a tobacco company or refuse to invest in a company involved in fossil fuels because of their convictions about global warming.

The third factor is the evidence of fruit over time. Jesus told his disciples that a tree is known by what it produces. The marketplace Christian who is genuinely operating in their calling will find, over time, that their work produces outcomes that exceed what their talent alone would predict.

When pursued faithfully over time, vocation tends to produce a particular kind of compounding return that is recognisable to those who are paying careful attention.

The fourth factor is confirmation, which is either direct or indirect. The fact that someone pays you for what you help them achieve, or that you even grow through your work and have joy, is an indirect form of confirmation.

But the most trusted direct confirmation usually comes from the community of other believers, marketplace Christians who can tell that God wants to work through you in a certain vocation.

Because just as Paul’s calling was confirmed by the church at Antioch, and Timothy’s gifts were recognised and named by a community of elders, the marketplace Christian who senses a calling to a particular arena should be testing that sense against the observations of people who know them well.

Therefore, if you feel God is calling you to a certain vocation, test yourself against these conditions:

1. Do I derive joy from that activity?

2. Am I meeting the needs of my clients/customers?

3. Am I competent in that line of work?

4. Does the business conflict with core aspects of my faith?

5. Have I consistently produced good fruit over time in that field?

6. Have other marketplace Christians confirmed my calling in that business?

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Some people think transformation will come, while others think it is within their power (harnessing tangible and intangible resources) to build it. In either case, personal beliefs are consequential because everything in the universe is a manifestation of some belief.

The beliefs we hold about ourselves, others, what matters, and what’s beyond us form the frame behind everything we are or become. That’s why your worldview matters (a topic for another day).

For now, let’s address some questions about the future, and no, it’s not about AI. The whole world is concerned about it and rightly so, but just like money, AI isn’t everything.

What do you believe about your potential, risk, failure, or destiny, because the beliefs you negotiate today will determine the story you tell tomorrow.

1. Should I only pursue what I’m passionate about?

What you believe about the relationship between your passion and your ability to provide will determine whether you build a business, career or just collect expensive hobbies.

Steve Jobs is a pioneer for those who believe in following their passions. Watch his famous speech again, and you’ll see just how unique his life was.

It’s fair to say that only passionate people change the world. Except that not everyone will be an inventor or lead the movement for new cultures, as Steve Jobs did.

I will not bore you with statistics about startup failure rates or Hollywood dreamers who never made it. But believe me, if you’re inclined towards a stable life, passion is a terrible counsellor. If you follow it and are unsuccessful later, someday your rent will be due, and you’ll hate that you’ve been thinking about some lofty idea and not your survival or convenience.

Chris Rock grew up watching his parents work gruelling jobs to keep the lights on. His father was a truck driver and a newspaper deliveryman who worked two jobs, but today he’s one of the most accomplished comedians in the world. Comedy isn’t even a stable business, but one of those ‘passion careers’ with its share of danger (yeah, that Oscars slap), so despite experiencing hardship in childhood, he chose the field anyway.

It makes sense to think twice about following your passion, especially since Chris Rock, who’s asking you to do so, has seen both sides of the career coin. It also makes sense because the marketplace doesn't care about your passion, but about the problem you solve (more about this in a bit).

Just know that if there’s no demand for what you love doing, you’re left with a hobby with serious overhead.

2. What actually determines whether I’ll finish what I start?

Everybody grapples with this one, and far too many of us do that naturally by trying to escape it.

I propose you answer this question instead: Do you believe you can handle the pain long enough until you succeed?

One might think that, since Hormozi has built his fortune owning gyms, he’s referring to physical pain. No. This means there’s a predictable pattern in achievement: everyone starts excited, most people quit when competence plateaus, and only those who can endure boredom and discomfort cross the finish line.

Sometimes, things don’t go as planned, so expanding our capacity to stay in the game when every impulse wants to quit is equally as important as any other skill necessary for success.

3. What’s the real cost of playing it safe?

Every moment we spend protecting ourselves from failure is a moment we’re trading away from possibility. Risk and regret are both forms of pain, but only risk carries possibility. Risk is futuristic; if it turns out well, you win, if not, you lose or learn, but at least you face a future possibility head-on. Regret, on the other hand, is centred on the past; you look back on your life and see things you wished you had done differently.

If that sounds a little too serious, know that we don’t necessarily face life-altering risks or regret every day, but at transitional moments in our lives, entering adulthood, birthing a child, going to college, getting married and so on. The choice is almost always ours to make, albeit there may be pressures and influences.

Ultimately, what you believe about risk will determine what opportunities you even allow yourself to see.

4. When have I actually failed beyond recovery?

Willink spent decades in the SEALs learning that the only unrecoverable failure is the one you accept as permanent. To be fair, men like Willink spent years training to be both mentally and physically strong, while most of us dread ever having to endure anything like such training.

That said, the fact remains that everything else, bankruptcy, rejection, humiliation, defeat, is just data if you choose to use it that way. They are all impermanent unless we make them otherwise. In fact, all things, including fortune and success, are impermanent. There once was a Vanderbilt, Tesla, Jobs, Newton, Maradona, Einstein, name them all. We live, and we die; we just do both differently, and these two are the only certainties in the human experience.

I am learning that the story I tell myself about my past matters infinitely more than what actually happened. What we believe about our failures is a hallmark of our lives.

5. How do I actually grow when I’m already overwhelmed?

Here’s something practical from Tony Robbins: “Take 15 minutes out of your day and decide you’re going to go for microlearning. Decide you’re going to learn what matters, something pragmatic, something valuable.”

It’s easy to think that transformation means assuming a new life and getting rid of the old one, like burning down a pile of utterly useless rubbish. But if we’re being practical, it has a lot to do with the things we’re learning every day. And you don’t acquire a massive amount of impactful information in one day; if our brains were wired that way, everyone would have IQ scores above 200, and college degrees would take months, not years.

It could be 15 minutes or 1 hour in an online class, do it!

6. What does it take to build something that actually matters?

According to Sam Corcos, “If you want to build an average company, you can just do average things. But if you want to build an extraordinary company, you have to try new things.”

Corcos co-founded Levels, a health tech company challenging how we think about metabolic health, by doing what many people thought unnecessary, making continuous glucose monitoring accessible to everyday people, not just people with diabetes. How’s that for thinking outside the box?

Average results come from average beliefs about what’s possible. If you want your work to matter, you have to believe that the rules everyone else follows aren’t laws of nature. They’re all negotiable.

7. Where does true influence come from?

Take it from the greatest quarterback of all time. He proved his beliefs about excellence through two decades of relentless consistency and seven Super Bowl rings.

Our beliefs are constantly on trial, and our daily choices are easily the evidence that counts. We can claim to have discipline while hitting snooze, claim we believe in integrity while cutting corners, in excellence while doing just enough.

Today’s influencer culture has many people taking pictures in gyms without breaking a sweat. If that’s who you are, you have no business with integrity.

8. How do I position myself for the future I want?

Ken Coleman shares an obvious secret: “To do what you want to do, you’ve got to be around people that are doing it and in places where it is happening.”

Academics have argued for decades about whether nature is stronger than nurture. That’s because there are merits on both sides of the argument. The point Coleman is making here is that our environments are determinative

You can read every book, watch every video, attend every webinar, but if you’re surrounded by people who think small, you’ll think small. Your beliefs about what’s achievable are constantly being negotiated by the people you spend the most time with and the spaces you occupy.

9. What builds genuine confidence?

Shawn Meaike gets to the core: “The greatest thing for your self-image by far is work.”

Affirmations and visualisations are good, but working something out is just better because more than saying or imagining things, you have results to prove you’re capable. That’s what work gives you, proof and if done well, irrefutable proof.

And yes, it sounds like a transactional view of humanity, but the human experience is itself filled with all forms of exchanges.

10. Are we truly equal if we have different outcomes?

One problem with considering work as a means of identity formation is reconciling worth with results. This quote is a favourite of mine on this matter. Simply put, our intrinsic value has little, if anything, to do with our market value, because we all have equal worth or dignity.

But the economics of building wealth are subject to different considerations, the primary one being that the marketplace doesn’t pay for worth; it pays for value delivered. And in this, there’s no injustice except that which is perceived.

You can believe you deserve success, but if you don’t deliver value to the next person, you get nothing. On the other hand, you can believe that your worth as a human being is secure regardless of your socioeconomic outcomes, while still pursuing excellence.

Since the beginning, the marketplace has always rewarded us for our contributions, not for who we are, but we can all be contributors.

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Every question tackles a common challenge, and each answer offers the wisdom you need to move past it.

Some of these statements are not universally applicable, so feel free to take what applies to you, but the chances that they all apply to you in equal measure are high.

1. When should I share my new business idea with others?

Sara Blakely says, “Ideas are the most vulnerable in the moment you have them. And it’s also people’s instincts to share the idea in the most vulnerable stage.”

Here’s what she did long before she started the women’s clothing line that made her a billionaire.

“I waited a year before I told any friends or family what I was working on because I didn’t want ego to get involved too early. When ego gets involved, you end up spending your time defending it or explaining it instead of pursuing it.”

In Nigeria, we say, “Resist the urge to shalaye [explain] because you go explain taya [exhausted].”

Give your idea a chance to succeed before you kill it with feedback.

2. How do I deal with people who don’t believe in me?

Take it from Amira Sajwani:

“I don’t listen to [doubters] because I have a father who believes in me, a husband who’s supportive, and brothers that are amazing.”

3. What should I do when I’m uncertain about my next move?

This is the first quote from Alex Hormozi in this edition.

When it comes to literal practical advice on what decisions to make during those long periods of waiting on your expectations, Hormozi nails it: “Build capacity... only people with capacity can both recognize and capitalise on [opportunities].”

4. How can I turn change into an advantage?

The entertainment industry is likely the most dynamic industry. James Keyes has made many fortunes from the film industry, and he knows how to deal with change.

He says:

The “CEO is all about change equals opportunity. If I respond to this change, and others don’t, I’m going to turn that into shareholder value. So, change can be positive if you manage it in a positive way.”

5. Do I need to stay consistent with who I’ve always been?

Sometimes, the person who started a business may not be the same person who can scale it. As Kayla Itsines says, “You are under no obligation to be the same person that you were yesterday.”

6. Why shouldn’t I put off today’s work until tomorrow?

Thomas Kehinde warns:

You need to know that action also compounds. It’s called momentum. For instance, the entrepreneur who does something good today has 24 more hours of progress than the one who waits until tomorrow.

7. What’s the ultimate goal for building wealth?

You’ve likely heard quotes like this about making passive income. The idea is solid, though I think many people get it wrong: passive income is generated by active assets. More on that another time.

For now, the fundamental difference between a job and a business is between trading time for money and building systems that generate value independently.

8. Should I trust others or trust myself?

Billy Ray Tailor shares this perspective:

“Believe in you. If a bird lands on a branch, does the bird trust the branch or does it trust its wings? I’ve seen many birds land on branches, but what I’ve never seen is a branch break, and the bird fall and die.”

9. Should mental health always come first in the pursuit of success?

This one is controversial, but then it’s Mr Beast: “If my mental health were a priority, I wouldn’t be as successful as I am today.”

In short, every path requires sacrifice, so choose what matters most in your present.

10. Why isn’t my business getting the attention it deserves?

Todd Johnson says, “Everybody needs you. They don’t just know who you are. So your job is to identify who those people are, get to the highest mountaintop that you can, and tell them who you are.”

11. How do I handle competition in my market?

Dean Graziosi shares a secret:

12. How should I respond to critics and naysayers?

If you can, dismiss them like Codie Sanchez because “only empty hands point fingers.”

13. How should I approach each day of my life?

Tony Stephens will be the first to tell you:

14. What’s the point of hiring intelligent people?

Steve Jobs is legendary, so listen:

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

15. When do market leaders become vulnerable?

Mike Repole says, “When the big guy on top gets a little too comfortable, the starving entrepreneurs are gonna eat their launch.”

16. Do I need to be the smartest person in the room?

You may not.

17. What’s the timeframe for building lasting wealth?

James Dumoulin has interviewed hundreds of millionaires and billionaires. He says, “The richest people in the world? They think in generations, not days.

18. How do I choose which goals to pursue?

Alex Hormozi will challenge you:

“No matter what your goal is, you will suffer to achieve it. So pick a goal big enough [that] it’s worth suffering for.”

19. How do I handle rejection in sales?

Muhammad Binghatti is a billionaire realtor.

20. What’s the difference between being an employee and being the boss?

Ralph Waldo Emerson made the distinction many years ago.

“The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who knows why will always be his boss.”

21. Is having a dream enough?

Not according to Thomas Kehinde.

22. How do I know when I’m truly ready to take action?

Take it from Thomas Kehinde again, “When you’re ready, you don’t delay. You don’t procrastinate anymore.”

23. Should inexperience hold me back from starting?

Adryan, a 13 Year Old Barber, says:

“A lot of people see my age and get scared, saying they don’t want a cut. I tell them, if I mess you up, I’ll fix it. Trust the process. Just take the risk, it’s always worth it.

24. Why don’t I see immediate results from my efforts?

Reid Hoffman created LinkedIn. He says, “Most people don’t think about how you compound in ten years... and that’s how you create something that’s epic. It changes industries.”

25. Does wealth have a specific look or background?

Ashley Fox affirms it doesn’t. She says:

26. What’s the most important investment I can make in my company?

Vinod Khosla states simply: “The team you build is the company you build.

27. What are the three essentials for entrepreneurial success?

Sara Blakely breaks it down: “Solve a problem, bet on yourself, and have fun.”

28. How can I ensure my business survives long enough to thrive?

De’el Woods says, “Stay [spend] small enough, long enough, you’ll be big enough, soon enough.”

29. How do I attract more success to my business?

You’ve seen Muhammad Binghatti in this list earlier, but here’s another nugget for you:

30. What weakens my resolve and commitment?

Hear it from another billionaire, Tony Robbins, “Negotiation with yourself makes you weak.

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The stats are just depressing.

92% of adults will not follow through on their resolutions because, by the second Friday in January (on “Quitter’s Day”), many people have reverted to their usual selves as the new year loses its luster. As for the goal setters who survive January, well, nearly 80% abandon their goals by February.

That millions of people fail at New Year’s resolutions means we’re getting it wrong. We’re failing at our annual goals because we use the wrong timelines, the wrong metrics, and the wrong part of our brains.

1. You need 21 days

Many people have been led to believe that habits take 21 days to form. It’s a catchy number and short enough to feel manageable. You tell yourself it’s just three weeks, “all I have to do is try something new for just three weeks, and I’m good to go.”

But research on habit formation reveals that health-related habits typically require between two and five months to develop, with a median of 59–66 days before they feel automatic.

So if you start on January 1st, you won’t actually be “rewired” until mid-March at the earliest. That’s why by February, when the novelty of the year has worn off, the new habit you’re trying to cultivate hasn’t yet been automated in us.

2. You are perfect the way you are

As if getting the timing wrong isn’t enough, we’re also miscalculating the cost of changes we need to make to achieve our goals.

For example, if you say you want to earn more money and are calculating things right, you must be ready to sacrifice leisure time, risk failure, and do the tedious work that high-income skills usually require.

Just as the person determined to lose weight must be ready to suffer pain from exercise, dietary changes, and fasting.

You cannot be serious if you want the result, yet hate making the sacrifice. You cannot be serious if you have a “goal” that pushes you forward but a “lifestyle” that pulls you back.

3. Your past failures don’t matter

If you’re serious about achieving your goals, start caring about the impact of failing at them every year because they pile up, and as they do, they impact your self-esteem and your potential.

One study on the impact of failing to achieve one's goals found that “participants who failed the high and specific goal showed a decrease in affect, self-esteem, and motivation compared to participants who attained that goal.” This study was conducted with specific goals, so imagine the impact even for people who set ambiguous goals.

In other words, after failing to achieve a goal, we are likely to avoid taking on similar challenges in the future, defaulting to easier alternatives.

You set a goal, you fail, you feel bad, you set a smaller goal next time, or worse, you stop setting them altogether. Eventually, you train your brain to believe that “trying” is painful and useless. That explains why some people don’t bother setting goals. They’ve tried and failed, so to them, there’s no point trying anymore.

You might say, “Okay, how about people who don’t give up but continue setting goals that they are statistically doomed to fail?”

Well, I think they’re trapped because they’re obsessed with outcomes.

Society constantly reinforces the idea that success is visual. It’s the car, the house, the number on the scale, the job title. So, naturally, when we want to improve, we focus on changing what is visible. We dress differently, we buy a planner, and we get a gym membership. We “package” our lives to look like we are making progress.

External change is attractive because we can at least be rewarded with attention, admiration, and influence. And we think no one cares about our behavioural changes. That no one admires how we approach things calmly under pressure or our patience.

Yet these are the traits that actually produce the outcomes people want.

The only goal worth setting is behaviour change

Many goals are framed as outcomes: earn more money, lose weight, start a business, and get promoted. That’s okay.

These outcomes feel concrete and motivating, but only the right people should set them.

Why?

Because they correspond to a fundamental set of behavioural patterns. Examples:

• People who are oriented toward serving people, offering value, or have acquired a set of in-demand skills tend to earn more money and are right to set goals for even more income.

• People who have developed an endurance for pain and discipline are likely to follow through on weight-loss programs and tend to achieve their physique goals.

This is true because most, if not all, of the goals we set require underlying habits, decision-making capacity, emotional tolerance, and so on to support them. Otherwise, when reality introduces stress, boredom, or resistance, the goal collapses.

To achieve your goals next year, you have to become someone fundamentally different, depending on the size of the goal, or incrementally different, which would require you to adopt one or two new habits.

Without making core behaviour changes, however difficult they are, you cannot pursue your goals, much less achieve or sustain them.

So, if you’re serious about achieving your goals in the next year, identify the behaviour change you need to make first.

And that’s it!

There’s no better list of things to do than that. Forget about your list of resolutions, you’ve made them before (I bet at least once) and failed.

Change your behaviour first.

This principle is universally applicable. As Ibukun Awosika says, “Your attitude towards money will make or destroy you.”

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Projection is a common defense mechanism. We do this by attributing our own positive or negative traits, feelings, or impulses to others for several reasons, including our innate desires to validate assumptions, avoid responsibility, and protect our ego.

One might think we project only negative traits onto distant relationships, but we do so even in close, meaningful relationships like marriage and work. Without evidence, a husband likely accuses his wife of cheating if he feels insecure with his fidelity to her. At work, a manager who feels insecure about their own performance might accuse an employee of being lazy, even when they’re working hard.

Projection gets in the way of your professional development by blocking the self-awareness you need to lead yourself, your team, or your home.

And what can we say about projection and your faith? Well, for starters, fixating yourself on other people’s weaknesses while you’re blind to the “plank in your own eye” is as immature as it is pharisaical.

Projection leads to self-deception, which, in turn, prevents believers from spiritual maturity.

Fortunately, many of us know we need to grow spiritually. Still, less than one in five Christians (just 18%) said in a 2011 study that they’re fully committed to investing in their spiritual maturity.

You need character as much as competence

Modern research suggests that we may be aware of certain unwanted traits within ourselves but still project these onto others, sometimes without even realizing it.

One of the smartest Nigerian techies I know resigned from a job owing to his boss’s excesses: late-night work calls, no weekend breaks, micromanagement, and other issues that threatened his mental health.

Later, as a freelancer, he acknowledged his weaknesses, such as a tendency to work spontaneously, even though he had agreed to a structured project deadline with his client. The truth was that without accountability, he’d often leave tasks until the last minute. Yet, he was sure he’d never work for someone like his old boss again.

A survey of over 75,000 people around the globe on the most desirable leadership trait found that Leader honesty, which aligns with integrity, ranked highest.

But reports state that about 90% of individuals on dating sites lie; about 40% of resumes contain inaccuracies; children tell 86% of lies, and 75% lie to their friends. Perhaps more alarming is that 70% of liars indicate they would lie again when convenience or personal gain is at stake.

So we want integrity in our leaders, whether at home, work, or in our communities, but not in ourselves?

One problem is that many people try to navigate work through hard competence or technical skills alone, or primarily. We assume excellence in execution will compensate for inconsistency in character, but it usually doesn’t.

Sometimes, other people are difficult and are entirely responsible for the outcomes they get, and sometimes we’ll be unable to change them. But there are things that we can control.

A LinkedIn Global Talent Trends report says that about 89% of recruiters believe that a bad hire generally comes down to a lack of soft skills. Similarly, an America Succeeds study analyzing data from 82 million job postings found that the top five soft skills were requested nearly 4x more often than the top five hard skills.

What I believe is common to all soft skills is leadership: intra-personal and interpersonal. Leadership might mean different things to different people, but what matters most, as I earlier stated, is integrity, the consistency between your values, daily actions, and your organisation’s goals.

However, when you habitually project, you’re shielding your ego from facts about yourself; you are demonstrating an inconsistency between what you demand of others and what you allow in yourself.

To see clearly and lead with integrity, we must first face what we are struggling with.

Five clinical signs you’re projecting onto others

If you recognize three or more of these common signs, you are likely carrying and spreading a toxic pattern.

1. You blame others for mistakes you also make

You have an almost automatic refusal to acknowledge personal shortcomings and shift the blame to others.

Examples:

• Criticizing colleagues for being “bad communicators” while you leave Slack messages unanswered for days

• Blaming your team for missing deadlines when you consistently turn in work late

• Complaining about unprofessional coworkers while showing up late to meetings

2. You get upset or defensive when someone gives you feedback

You react with an intense, disproportionate emotional response like immediate anger, profound outrage, or extreme defensiveness to feedback or actions that are objectively minor.

This is perhaps the most revealing sign in workplace contexts, a disproportionate emotional reaction to feedback that, objectively, is meant to help you grow professionally.

Examples:

• Becoming hostile during performance reviews when weaknesses are mentioned

• Viewing constructive feedback as a personal attack on your competence

• Quitting jobs or projects when accountability increases

3. You feel threatened when colleagues receive recognition you think you deserve

Research shows that when we suppress unwanted traits, we become hypersensitive to signs of that trait in external objects. In the workplace, projection often manifests as misplaced resentment toward colleagues who are succeeding in areas where you’re secretly struggling.

This looks like:

• Attributing a coworker’s promotion to “politics” rather than examining why you weren’t promoted

• Dismissing a peer’s success as “luck” while refusing to analyze their actual strategy

• Feeling threatened by team members who demonstrate skills you lack

• Creating narratives about why others don’t deserve their positions

4. Mind-reading others and accusing them of intent to harm you

You accuse others of having specific, negative internal motives when you have no concrete evidence. For example, you are certain a coworker is “scheming to undermine you” or that your partner is “emotionally distant,” just when you need them the most.

A manager feeling insecure about their performance might accuse a capable direct report of “trying to take their job”. The manager is the one harboring the fear of being replaced, and they are projecting that emotional state onto the subordinate to reduce the internal stress.

5. Championing integrity publicly but lacking the same

You project a noble and ethical public image but display inconsistent, uncontrolled behavior in private toward subordinates, family, or when you think you’re not being watched.

When you passionately advocate for accountability and communication but act cruelly or inconsistently in private, it exposes your weaknesses.

These signs aren’t exhaustive.

And while projection is a habitual weakness, it can be reduced over time with intention.

Projection is an unconscious defense mechanism. It takes keen observation and honest self-evaluation, or better, an accountable partner(s), someone who will tell you the truth and support you through it. This might be a mentor, your spouse, a close friend, or a Christian counselor. The key is choosing someone whose judgment you respect and whose feedback you’ve committed to receiving without defensiveness.

But generally, when you feel the urge to criticize others, pause and ask yourself if you’re seeing something in them that you haven’t admitted in yourself. Put yourself in their shoes so you can check your ego before you blame them.

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And before your eyes find anything, your hand knows exactly where to go. To your phone.

Within minutes, you’re either reading a bible passage or scrolling through messages that late-nighters left you or app notifications, and breaking news. Fifteen minutes in a queue is long, as most people will tell you, but it vanishes quickly when your phone has your attention.

By the time you get out of bed, you’ve lost arguably the most precious thing you have in a day: your ability to control your approach to it.

If we consider our relationship with technology throughout history, it’s been generally helpful. Some might say that checking our phones too often is bad, and they’d be right to tell that to children or to someone whose health is threatened by incremental access to mobile gadgets.

The context has to be appropriate for such a statement; otherwise, you risk applying the same logic to other tech inventions, such as electricity, whose constant supply would be obviously socially transformative in places like Nigeria.

How a phone-first morning affects your faith

When you reach for your phone before you even fully wake up, before reaching for God, you’re making a choice that shapes the rest of the day.​

You’re starting your day in “reaction to” rather than with “intention for”. You’re reacting to whatever notifications pop up rather than deciding what actually matters.

And for young Christians trying to build a genuine faith, giving up control to others and automated notifications that reduce the influence God ought to have over our affairs.

One study found that 78% of African teens identified as Christian, but only 14% of nominal (non-committed) Christian teens read their Bibles weekly, compared to much higher rates among committed believers.​

The gap isn’t about whether we believe in God but whether we’re meeting with Him daily as we should.

Your willpower runs out fast

You don’t wake up with unlimited self-control.

Think of your willpower like a battery that starts at 100% when your eyes open and gradually drains throughout the day as you make decisions, resist temptations, and handle stress.

Roy Baumeister, a leading researcher on willpower, says that self-control functions like a muscle; it gets tired. The choices you make, the notifications you read or swipe away, and every difficult conversation you have burn your resolve.

So if you rush through your willpower in the first 30 minutes scrolling social media posts that strike various thoughts and desires in your mind, you’ll most likely be running on fumes when the real challenges of your day arrive.​

Whenever I recall my experience with on-site jobs in Lagos, my appreciation for the productive people who work such jobs across African cities every day increases. They are very tenacious people. I mean, you dash out the door, dodge Lagos traffic for at least an hour, stand in packed danfo (buses), deal with street vendors and other pedestrians, avoid potholes, and manage aggressive drivers.

The problem is that by the time you arrive at the office, you’ve already exhausted significant determination and emotional energy. You’ve absorbed stress from countless interactions and decisions. So if your battery started full at 5 AM, by 9 AM, it’s drained halfway.

Working remotely gives me a tremendous advantage because I can protect those first crucial hours. On most occasions, I begin my day with the right amount of energy, at full bar.

So one would expect that because of this advantage, remote workers would be more conscious of their morning routine and develop a deeper relationship with God. But if I’m being honest, it hasn’t been a strong case for me or for many of the youths I interact with.

Though on-site workers are fighting an uphill battle to preserve some morning willpower, and remote workers have a faster start to the day, the temptations and troubles of life remain roughly equal.

I think the Bible isn’t accidental about anything.

It repeatedly points to mornings as a sacred time.

The Psalmist says: “In the morning, LORD, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait expectantly” (Psalm 5:3).

And Jesus? “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, [He] got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed” (Mark 1:35).

The mental model of the first thing

If you break your phone-first habit and replace it with something intentional like prayer, you’ll be nearly certain of regaining control of your morning. ​

If the first thing you do is check your phone, you’re programming yourself for reactivity. The mindset you have goes something like this: “Whatever comes at me today, I’ll respond to it.”

But if the first thing you do is pray, read Scripture, or sit in silence, you’re priming yourself for agency. You’re saying, “Today, I’m choosing what matters. I’m inviting God into my plans.”

When you’re done with Bible study, your brain goes, “What’s next?” And what’s next for a responsible young adult is work.

We know that spiritual maturity is becoming more like Jesus: more patient, more generous, more courageous, more at peace. And transformation results from a genuine relationship with God.

It requires your clearest mind and the willpower you haven’t exhausted, and the first thing you do in a day determines your approach to everything else.

In our current economic environment (2024–2025):

• Minimum wage reached ₦70,000 in July 2024, while inflation hit 34.19% in June 2024

• Food inflation alone reached 40.9% (up from 25.3% year-over-year)

• Real purchasing power: A ₦70,000 wage buys less each month

So every purchase decision is increasingly essential because a cheap item that fails in 6 months represents a lost opportunity. But a very good buy is a hedge against inflation.

Now that doesn’t mean all expensive things are good.

So let me explain.

I was talking to a friend recently who just started earning about ₦300,000 per month (roughly $200 USD at current exchange rates). That’s still poor by any real standard, even if it’s better than someone earning ₦100,000.

I told him he needed to upgrade his appearance to match his new role. Better shoes. Better clothes. Look more professional.

His response? “That’s too expensive.”

My younger self would have said many things to win him over, but age has a way of making you short of words. So I used maths instead, and he bought the idea straight up.

I’ve shared this thought process at least three times since coming to it months ago, and it hasn’t stopped making sense. I’m assuming you’d like it to, so I did some research to add veracity to the idea, and voila! An article about shoes, clothes, laptops and common-sense economics.

A cost-per-use approach to building wealth

Say you buy a pair of decent tokunbo (imported, fairly used) shoes for ₦30,000. That’s 10% of a ₦300,000 monthly salary. Make that two pairs at the exact cost for each, and that’s 20%. Of course, it’s expensive. I know you still have to pay your utility bills, transportation costs, and sort out family obligations and so on.

But those shoes don’t disappear after one month, so you have to buy another pair the next month.

Even if someone steals both pairs the first time you buy them, chances are they won’t come back to steal the same pair of shoes if you repurchase them the following month, so relax.

You see, if you work 22 days a month, that’s 264 working days per year. Over 5 years (I like using 5 years as the average lifespan for quality items; it’s conservative and easy to estimate), you’ll wear them roughly 1,320 days.

Let’s calculate it using the price of one.

₦30,000 ÷ 1,320 days = ₦23 per day.

That’s less than the price of “pure water” (sachet water, it’s now ₦50 in Lagos Island).

Now compare that to cheap ₦10,000 or less shoes that tear every week. Think of the shame, the discomfort and the cost of repairs.

You’ll buy them at least 3 times a year, spend ₦30,000 total, and still end up with worse shoes.

The “cheap” option actually costs more, and you get no increase in social capital. How do I mean?

Dress the way you want to be addressed, and you’ll earn more

This principle also applies directly to your paycheck.

Several peer-reviewed studies document that professional appearance directly correlates with earnings:

• Attractiveness premium: A 1 standard deviation increase in facial attractiveness is associated with 2.0–3.3% higher lifetime earnings

• General appearance advantage: Good-looking workers earn approximately $19,945 (roughly ₦30 million) more annually than average-looking peers—nearly equivalent to a college degree’s financial benefit

• Formal attire productivity: Employees who dress formally are 25% more productive than casual dressers, regardless of industry

• Sales and first impressions: Properly dressed customer-facing employees increase sales by 30%, while 80% of recruiters believe clothing directly affects job prospects and promotions

You might say ‘okay, but these studies are mostly in the US'. ‘ Trust this. Please stop taking your chances in Nigeria on this matter. We’re very stereotypical, and we judge quickly.

Just do the needful.

If professional clothing can increase your annual earnings by ₦150,000–₦500,000, then investing ₦60,000 in quality shoes and ₦150,000 in professional clothing isn’t a luxury.

It’s common sense, I think. But this idea has actually been studied in consumer psychology research, which confirms that when people evaluate items through the lens of usage frequency and longevity, they naturally shift toward higher-quality options with lower long-term costs.

If you’re in sales, borrow this idea and roll it out whenever someone says what your offering is expensive, but make sure you aren’t selling rubbish, please.

Boots theory on why poverty keeps us poor

We often think of stingy and generous people as if these traits are natural attitudes only. But this idea is actually old. And one of the things I’ve learned about wealth management is that it can be learned.

British author Terry Pratchett wrote in his 1993 novel Men at Arms. His character, Sam Vimes, a working-class city guard, explains this idea too:

“A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”

The observation made by that character eventually became known as the “Sam Vimes Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness.” So yes, poverty forces people into expensive cycles of cheap purchases, but they also stay poor because they don’t want to break that cycle.

But break it! Please break this cycle.

I know how hard it is. It’s definitely not as easy as I make it sound. I was recently offered a ₦900,000 tokunbo laptop, which would be suitable for my work. The owner bought it about a year ago and wanted to sell to raise money for relocation abroad. The specs are worth the cost, but I couldn’t afford it!

So, I will likely spend more than ₦900,000 on cheap computers over the next 5 years, if I decide to make gradual upgrades. Worse, given current inflation, a ₦900,000 laptop today could be worth ₦1.2–₦1.5 million in 2–3 years.

Poverty prevents people from making sound economic decisions, but it’s possible to overcome it. I, too, must break the cycle.

Waiting is expensive, too.

In many instances, people stop at this point when discussing this issue, but there’s more to it.

Let me explain.

If you’re a freelancer with a monthly net of ₦300,000 who just learned you need a platform subscription that will genuinely improve your productivity and earning capacity but that costs ₦200,000 annually, you have one of two choices:

Should you buy it immediately?

• You subscribe in Month 1

• For 12 months, you benefit from time savings, better work output, and professional advantages.

• Total value extracted: 12 months of compounding benefit over 12 months.

Should you save gradually to buy it later?

• You decide to save ₦50,000 monthly and subscribe 4 months later

• You delayed 3 months, missing entirely the value the tool could have provided

• When you finally subscribe, you’ve lost 3 months of productivity advantage

• Total value extracted: 12 months of benefit over 15 months

So you’ve permanently lost 3 months of income potential, skill development, and opportunity.

That time cannot be recovered because:

One study on procrastination and financial behaviour found that people who delay investments in tools and skills experience significantly worse economic outcomes than those who invest immediately.

Are you sure you can’t afford it?

Different situations require different strategies:

When you can’t afford:

The money literally doesn’t exist. You earn ₦150,000 monthly and have ₦120,000 in fixed rent plus utilities. You cannot spend ₦200,000 on anything. This is physics, not psychology.

When it’s uncomfortable to afford:

The money exists, but spending it feels scary or requires sacrifice. You earn ₦300,000, have ₦150,000 in fixed expenses, and the remaining ₦150,000 is yours, but spending ₦30,000 (20% of discretionary income) on shoes feels dangerous because you’re emotionally attached to that safety buffer.

When you truly can’t afford something, you need to save methodically, but more importantly, negotiate payment plans that let you get the value of the purchase instantly and pay it off gradually.

Wealth compounds, poverty compounds too

No rule, I think, in wealth management is as popular as the law of compounding, but people have it wrong when they believe that only gains or prosperity compound. Poverty is also a force multiplier.

One study on compound effects shows that small financial decisions accumulate dramatically over time.

• If Udo likes cheap things and purchases five shirts at ₦15,000 each, the total is ₦75,000. If they last 6 months each, the annual cost: ₦150,000 in constant replacement, with perpetual professional image anxiety.

• But if Udo purchases three quality shirts at ₦30,000 each, the total will be ₦90,000. If they last 3+ years, the annualised cost is ₦30,000, with a consistent professional image and psychological stability.

Udo can save ₦100,000–₦120,000 annually. Over 10 years at a modest 8% investment return, that ₦100,000 annual difference becomes ₦1.6 million in accumulated wealth.

Hyperbolic discounting

But why do we resist buying expensive, quality items even when the math supports it, and we know it?

Hyperbolic discounting is a cognitive bias where people heavily weigh immediate costs over future benefits. If you earn ₦300,000 monthly, a ₦30,000 purchase feels like 10% of your entire monthly income right now; you can feel it.

If you buy it anyway, you will benefit from that quality shoe’s durability, but its durability feels abstract and distant; you can’t feel it. Judging by your feelings, and you go with the ₦10,000 shoe to avoid immediate discomfort, you’re sacrificing long-term financial health.

If you can resist that feeling of discomfort when you’re buying a reasonably quality item, you’ll feel the worth of that good judgment sooner than you think.

When should you buy expensive things?

Try using these questions to improve spending decisions. They’ve been helpful to me.

1. What’s the cost-per-use over its lifetime?

   Purchase price ÷ expected days of use = daily cost. If this number is low (₦25–₦100 per day for heavy-use items over a five-year lifespan), the “expensive” item is actually cheap

2. What value am I losing by waiting?

   That is, will delaying cost me time, money, or opportunities? Or is the cost of NOT having this greater than the cost of buying?

3. Does this improve my earning ability or save me money?

• Tools for work: Usually yes

• Professional appearance: Usually yes

• Status symbols: Usually no

  Prioritise the items with the most significant impact.

4. Can I genuinely afford this, even if uncomfortable?

   Do I have the money after covering essentials, or am I cutting something less important, or going into harmful debt?

5. Is this quality that lasts, or just expensive branding?

   Research durability and warranty

Life is an organic whole; we make wealth from waste and heal from food. Never mind that urbanization has made distancing ourselves from the earth appear noble. We can equally gain wisdom and food from tilling the soil.

When I set out to cook even a small pot of jollof rice, a popular West African dish, the process takes me about two hours. Adding extra salt is avoidable, but peeling and slicing onions are inevitable. In leadership, you have core and supplementary activities, too.

And while I would rather not induce myself to tears when preparing a delicious meal to nourish my budding creative juices (I recently started a YouTube channel), I would fall short of my target without adding a sizeable amount of onions at each milestone: fried fish or meat, fried stew, and the winner — an orange-hot-looking and ready-to-eat portion of jollof rice on the table. As Sylvester Stallone would say, “That’s how winning is done!”

So, what do onions have in common with leadership? A couple of things, but the best parts are “peeling” and “slicing” yourself like this nutrient-rich vegetable. "Peeling refers to removing biases and affiliations that may hinder your leadership effectiveness while slicing represents the strategic allocation of your resources to delegate tasks effectively.

Peeling as Accountability

For many years, the Farmers’ Almanac has asked people to “waste not” and “want not” as diverse plants and food offer life-saving nutrients to help us lead our best lives.

Natalie LaVolpe sums up the invaluable nature of onion layers: “The outer skins of onion and garlic provide an excellent source of vitamins A, C, E, and numerous antioxidants. The skins of onions are also a rich source of flavonoids, particularly quercetin, a potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory.”

But how does the back of this small paper-packaged ball of juice get such capacity? Vegetables like this protect themselves by reinforcing their outer layers with attacking and healing nutrients. So, while you may peel them, you’re advised to keep them for other uses. Leaders should peel off their biases in official matters. Outside official matters, your preferences are likely healthy, considering you’ve garnered trust from others.

Peeling refers to distancing yourself from affiliations that could undermine your integrity. It is how you protect yourself from the arms of the law and lurking spiteful criticisms awaiting fulfillment. You would have a hard time doing this if your office is attractive to vested interests, but if you shed off some benefits that could accrue to you personally, you’ll sharpen your focus.

The former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele, plunged the country’s finances through numerous payouts to the previous political administration. Now, he battles prolonged court trials he could have spared himself.

Imagine you're the chair of the organizing committee for a national children's Bible quiz with participants from various congregations and denominations, including yours. How would you ensure fair competition?

You shed off any bias that could make you favor your own church's children. In such a case, you should not be involved in creating practice materials for your church’s children, as you may inadvertently offer tips and suggestions they can leverage.

Peeling is also how you make yourself accountable. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO 26000:2010) describes accountability as:

• accepting and responding to appropriate scrutiny and responsibility to prevent and remediate wrongdoing.

• answerability to controlling interests, legal authorities, and those affected by its actions or inaction.

If you’re subject to your interests, you will lose accountability. However, you’d be free to focus when you shed your affiliations or anything that may cause you to yield to personal interests in official matters.

Slicing as Strategy

Some leaders hold multiple positions within a group and in other groups. Such leaders will perform even better by delegating their responsibilities to others available to support them and whom they could mentor.

The trust in being appointed to multiple positions is that your presence or vision could yield better results. Do not get carried away by thinking you’re endowed to do everything yourself. There is no joy in wearing yourself thin.

I have seen some people throw a whole onion after peeling off the back into a cooking pot. I doubt that is as effective as slicing your onions into your soup or spreading it atop your rice, chili, hot dog, and whatnot.

Don’t throw yourself into every task required of your office. Instead, slice your presence, energy, time, or any worthy resource of value you have to lend. This strategic approach will not only nudge your delegate towards effective task fulfillment but also inspire and motivate them to take ownership and excel in their roles.

In the example above, a small church may appoint you to head its children’s ministry. Still, as plans for a national competition take shape, the conference of children's ministers may also appoint you to head the national organizing committee.

In that case, while you may be excited about the possibility that your church winning the competition will further prove your capacity, you would not be free to focus on your national role unless you shed off that bias. Shedding would mean appointing someone else to lead your local children’s ministry.

Slicing alone won’t cut it.

When good people end up as bad examples of leadership for pandering to the requests of their admirers

Leaders who end up as bad examples often have many admirers and gain traction for leadership. When they falter, the public is shocked at the lost potential while MBA students pore over the details. Yet it is usually the case that such leaders either didn’t peel and slice, or they just sliced and it hurt. 

Rajat Gupta allied with Rajaratnam in the Buffet-Goldman deal, and they both went to jail for it. Gupta was a rag-to-riches leader who ended up on the board of Goldman Sachs. Upon learning from a board meeting hours before the public that Warren Buffet was billed to invest in the bank, he sliced off some minutes to call Rajaratnam, who quickly bought nearly two hundred thousand shares.

Morgan Housel aptly sums up the life of Rajat Gupta and his ally in his book, The Psychology of Money, “… they went to prison for insider trading, their careers and reputations irrevocably ruined.”

A few years ago, I was a secondary school teacher with the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) in Niger State. During my service, I volunteered with a vibrant campus radio station, Search FM Radio (now Search Media).

I learned from the late Odafe Imogo (OD), a prominent on-air personality whose show, the Morning Ride with OD, was the flagship breakfast show in Minna.

He took a chance on me once and gave me several other opportunities to appear as a social commentator on the show. Working with him, I developed an understanding of communication as a development strategy. That experience was priceless, and I remain truly grateful for his lessons.

Shortly after we met, he challenged me: “Justice, I know you can talk, and you talk well, but the most important football player is not the striker,” he said one morning after an episode of the show.

"Do you know who the player is?" he asked.

I don’t remember my guess, but it wasn’t correct. I didn’t know much about football, and OD knew I didn’t, so he spared me further guesses and said,

This was my first experience in media. At the time, I was interested in research, writing, and presentations. But I couldn't even produce a show. So I saw this as a challenge and knew that doing as he advised would mean learning a lot more about the radio business.

Though I left Niger State upon completing my youth service the same year, I took his advice seriously, experimenting with it as I took up various roles in other sectors. When I started a podcast in 2023, I was reflecting on some of the biggest ideas that had inspired me. My experience with radio was one of them.

I had an early fascination with radio because growing up, my family lacked a TV set for many years (I had tinkered with the first one we had to ruin). Our attention inevitably shifted to the radio set as a primary source of entertainment, and I grew fond of that too. That fondness lasted long enough and led me to Search FM, where I met OD, and his advice has shaped my attitude toward work and personal growth.

Is the utility player truly an asset?

A utility player is adaptable and proficient across various functions (not necessarily roles) within an organization.

Though some think it is "a backhanded compliment, as it suggests the player is not good enough to be considered a specialist in one position." This derogatory sense is inadequate. It shouldn’t undermine robust conversations about whether multifunctional people are truly organisational assets.

I am not pitching a utility player (multifunctionalist, generalist) as a necessary replacement for specialists, as certain professions and industries should retain specialists as they deem fit. That said, even specialists can be utility players if they have a good deal of skill and interest in supporting other business functions.

Also, my position on utility players here contextualises my thoughts on the debate between generalists and specialists. I have found the work of David Epstein, whose book “Range” has influenced my understanding of this topic and addresses it better than I can. So in the rest of this article, I use the terms utility player and generalist interchangeably.

I believe utility players are undeniably germane for development organisations and others in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments.

For organisations, VUCA means an opportunity for advancement and agility, and utility players can meet such demands. Regarding these, a review of "Range" identifies "two distinct reasons for thinking the generalist (utility player) might have an edge over the specialist.”

1. "Generalists are better at navigating ‘wicked’ learning environments."

Utility players adjust to fill in gaps and provide needed support. Their openness and willingness to learn make them adaptable to uncertainty and ambiguity. Employees with these traits will prove valuable in complex, dynamic operations.

2. "Generalists end up with better ‘match quality.’"

Utility players may often find themselves in different contexts, whether learned or experienced. Still, they try to connect and integrate insights from those several domains and disciplines into a solid role they settle into later.

Here are 4 steps to consider

Becoming a utility player is more than just about how you change your organisational function. It's about exercising responsibility and making meaningful contributions to other areas of the organisation beyond what your job role requires.

Be genuinely interested in supporting your colleagues.

Development projects, for instance, usually focus on contributing to societies and often require cross-functional teams.

What makes a team so functional isn't that each person brings some form of expertise, but that each person is interested in supporting and contributing to others’ work.

Whenever I work from the office, I often pace around asking my colleagues what they're doing; some respond with a puzzle as if to say, "Are you my boss?" but some open up and share, and I have learned that those who do enjoy it because talking about your work is therapeutic. It always leads to an exchange of ideas that relaxes one's pressure to succeed and vets out low-hanging fruit.

Take Various Roles

Teaching, managing training and programs, broadcasting, recruitment, monitoring and evaluation, market research, and small business management are among the core responsibilities I have successfully handled in my previous roles. These experiences have taught me a lot about how research and strategy can inform organisational processes and outcomes more than I would have learned in one postgraduate course.

If you're a young graduate, consider trying out for as many functions as possible to become more versatile. You may not try various job roles across different sectors, especially if they are unconnected, but similar roles in diverse industries or within the same sector are just right. The duration is up to your discretion.

That said, your personal training isn’t a substitute for learning about what other teams are working on, supporting them, or trying out various job roles to build competency while testing your performance against your KPIs.

That’s because training and certifications are explorative and experimental opportunities, especially as you learn from experts. If they offer capstone projects, you'll get some experience, too. They also allow you to demonstrate versatility to potential employers or clients. Still, working with various departments and seeking feedback and guidance from more experienced or knowledgeable individuals in areas you want to learn will help you build multifaceted competence.

Join agile organizations

Some organisations are agile-oriented, so they breed versatility among their employees and help them grow into utility players. Agile organisations constantly identify, create, and maximise opportunities, wielding a “customer-centric, innovative, and collaborative culture [that enables] their employees to work in cross-functional and self-organising teams."

One study has identified dynamism and stability as the twin traits of agile organisations and recommends 18 practices, including continuous learning (structures that promote seamless learning) and role mobility (regular vertical and horizontal movements between roles and teams), which are the forte of utility players. The study also notes;

There is no trick for identifying which organisations have a culture "of empowering teams to take responsibility and produce quickly to identify problems early."

Your chances of joining one increase if you examine the clarity of their vision and mission statements, how they structure their teams and processes, and how they measure performance. If you would like to join an agile team, here are five questions you might ask at your next interview;

1. Tell me a few stories of team and product failures and how the organisation responded.

2. How are decisions about products made at a team level? What approvals by leadership are required and why?

3. What are your company’s mission, vision, and values? What team communications are about getting to know each other as humans, not just as workers?

4. Are your teams releasing working software/products to your customers each sprint? If not, how often and why?

5. What experiments are your teams running to improve their collaboration, or how has your organisational design changed based on employee feedback?

Working in agile organisations can help you become a utility player soon enough because you would be working on different tasks, paired with experts in the same team, and churning out results sooner than you might in traditionally oriented organisations.

Be people-oriented

Now you know there are more opportunities to learn and grow if you're a utility player. Utility players thrive in agile organisations and VUCA environments by trying new ideas, measuring outcomes and performance, and iterating quickly with customer and client feedback, as well as input from other stakeholders for whom your products and services are targeted.

Being people-oriented will help you become more versatile and flexible, as you understand how your work affects the lives of the people you’re directly and indirectly responsible for.

Whenever I take on a new project, I constantly review how it impacts the target audience or achieves the donor's desired results. I do this by evaluating the project, reporting progress, and researching ways to improve my team's efforts.

The goal may vary by project, but it’s usually the same: how are audiences’ lives changing because of what we are doing? You cannot succeed otherwise because the success of your work hinges on the degree to which you reasonably answer this question.

One of the few things certain about my work is learning. I work with and for people with different backgrounds, experiences, and expertise. Little things are guaranteed because different projects yield different outcomes, and people usually have different needs.

What is certain is that you grow by working well, failing fast, learning quickly, and cultivating a genuine concern for people’s well-being.

Let me add that becoming a utility player is no guarantee of financial success. Today, most jobs are specialist roles, and recruiters prefer specialists. Yet those who are versatile and have a flexible approach to learning and working, who work in VUCA environments such as the development space, will find career fulfilment as utility players.

Reflecting on your professional journey, in what ways have you benefited from versatility?

As Frank Herbert once said, “One learns from books and example only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.” — Frank Herbert.

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