When we hear “short-circuiting,” the first thing that probably comes to mind is the electrical term for when current flows along an unintended, low-resistance path instead of through the intended circuit load, which leads to overheating, sparks, blown fuses, tripped breakers, or electrical fires, usually due to poor wire insulation, water contact, or faulty connections. And you wouldn’t be wrong.

But as you can already guess if you have read The Zigzag long enough, I’m focusing on the live application.

I’m talking to my daughter, who says she wants a certain bag. It’s cute and all, but way above what I think an 18-year-old should be carrying, especially as she hasn’t earned a dime in her life. I ask her, “If you get a bag that working adults in their 30s or even 40s are saving money for, what will you look forward to when you’re that age?”

Lifestyle short-circuiting, aka premature arrival. Nobody likes premature anything.

This kind of short-circuiting kills anticipation. When you get everything you want too early, there isn’t much to look forward to. Research suggests anticipation can give dopamine hits. This is the reason you feel good when you are looking forward to something. Just meet me a few days before an upcoming trip; the excitement and anticipation almost serve as impenetrable armour. I will endure any annoyance. Lol

There is also what is called a motivation vacuum: what keeps you going when you already have the goal? You take the fun out of the chase. Then enter the hedonic treadmill, also called hedonic adaptation. A psychological concept coined by Brickman and Campbell in 1971, which says that regardless of major positive or negative life events, humans would return to a relatively stable baseline of happiness.

You buy that bag, get that house, and get that promotion; you will bask in the excitement for a while and return to whatever your baseline of happiness was before. It then means that the larger the scale of the things you get, you need to work extra hard and possibly start doing crazy things to get the same or a marginal amount of joy (you are “working” harder to hit the same “high”).

If you get a new bag, it might take 10 new bags, for example, to get you to the same level of happiness you felt when you got the first one. This is what they mean by adaptation. This is the reason people keep chasing and chasing; one house is not enough; it has to be two or three in different cities.

Human beings are goal-seeking creatures. Our brains release dopamine during the chase, not when we achieve the goal, so we need to make sure we are incrementally increasing the goals we are chasing so we don’t “max” out too “young”.

I guess this whole topic will be controversial because very young people can make insane amounts of money because of the resources available to them. We are becoming millionaires way younger than our parents did, so how do you balance one’s ability to afford everything they can now versus deferring some things?

What does leaving room for anticipation and not creating a motivation vacuum or even preventing “pass out” on the hedonic treadmill look like now?

Outside of material things, this idea translates to how we work. Wanting to start a business immediately after school versus getting a job. How do we gain mastery of things over time?

In all of this, I’m not ignorant of the term “efficiency”, especially in the age of AI, where a task of two weeks can be done in a couple of hours. We need to take and acknowledge that win, even though it’s still weird that we don’t seem to have any “free time” despite all the hours and days AI is saving us. We’re even busier, but that’s a topic for another day.

The thing is to know what things qualify for shortcuts and what we will get the most value from if we take the longer route. For example, should we still keep slugging it out at the gym if there is a magic pill for weight loss? Jokes.

This whole thing reminds me of those people who peak in secondary school. You see them as adults, and you wonder how such a “hot” person looked so withered. They crash and burn.

We should treat life like fine wine: some things work better with patience.

That’s it.

Keep going,

Ije.

I’m reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck, and the feeling it gives is like that of one enjoying their favourite bowl of ice cream. Truth is, it’s been on my to-read list for a while but was moved up because I wanted to read it first before watching the Netflix series, to see how well they translate the characters.

Anyway, I came across this portion of the book: a conversation between Samuel Hamilton and his wife, Liza. He was telling her about their neighbour, Rabbit’s warning to him concerning the type of pigeons he chooses to raise. Samuel decides to go against the warning.

“I told Rabbit I was going to raise some pigeons and—do you know? He said, ‘No white pigeons.’ ‘Why not white?’ I asked him, and he said, ‘They’re the rare worst of bad luck. You take a flight of white pigeons and they’ll bring sadness and death. Get gray ones.’ ‘I like white ones.’ ‘Get gray ones,’ he told me. And as the sky covers me, I’ll get white ones.”

And Liza said patiently, “Why do you be forever testing, Samuel? Gray ones taste just as good and they’re bigger.” I’ll let no flimsy fairy tale push me,” Samuel said.

And Liza said with her dreadful simplicity, “You’re already pushed by your own contentiousness. You’re a mule of contention, a very mule!”

“Someone’s got to do these things,” he said sullenly. “Else Fate would not ever get nose-thumbed and mankind would still be clinging to the top branches of a tree.”And of course he got white pigeons and waited truculently for sadness and death until he’d proved his point. And here were the great-great-grand squabs cooing in the morning and rising to fly like a whirling white scarf around the wagon shed”

Look at Samuel: after being warned that white pigeons would bring him bad luck, he stuck to his preference for white pigeons, and I guess he proved the superstition to be wrong. Or was his case an exception?

It got me thinking about what it really means to be a contrarian, a rebel. Is it how some people are born, is it environment, or is it adaptation or necessity?

Because what is really at the heart of rebellion?

I have come to understand that it’s a staggering range: from a rebel as a freedom seeker, a questioner, a person who thinks differently, the one who is seeking autonomy of self, who dares to imagine, the one who looks for a whole new way of doing things, and sheer stubbornness and delusion.

There are rebellious acts external to us. These are the louder, bolder, contrarian personas that we are familiar with, the likes of Steve Jobs, the Think Different campaign and the innovation Apple brought with it, and the political and civil activists like MLK Jr., Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, Fela Kuti. Albert Camus, who made a whole career almost from the issue of what it means to be a rebel, etc

While the bolder rebels shift industries, culture, & technology and genuinely have transformative impact, I’m more curious about internal rebellion and rebels. The everyday rebel who speaks up even when their voice falters, thinks for themselves, and continuously evaluates their values and beliefs. The ones who make up their own definition of success. The ones who keep fighting with the mental struggles that make us want to roll over in bed and not face the world. Fighting the sheer will of going against our debased natural human tendencies to keep being good. Fighting the tide of fear, discomfort, and distraction as they move toward their desired future.

I put together some quotes on rebellion that make me think:

Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.— Apple’s 1997 Think Different Campaign.

There’s a rebel lying deep in my soul. Anytime anybody tells me the trend is such and such, I go the opposite direction. I hate the idea of trends. I hate imitation; I have a reverence for individuality. -Clint Eastwood.

What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion.

Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that, somewhere and somehow, one is right… The rebel … says yes and no simultaneously… In every act of rebellion, the rebel simultaneously experiences a feeling of revulsion at the infringement of his rights and a complete and spontaneous loyalty to certain aspects of himself.-Albert Camus

These quotes speak to different dimensions of what rebellion means. The Apple campaign: an inspiring corporate focus on the DNA and mindset. Clint Eastwood’s is the personal, going-against-the-norms version. An identity almost wedded to just going the other way. Then Albert Camus’, which might be the most wholesome form of internal rebellion.

I have now come to understand that the rebel or rebellion is both about what we oppose or stand against and what we choose to protect. The ability to say not only no but also yes when appropriate as we seek the truth, for love, dignity, justice and how we choose to live.

While being mindful of our true intentions, separating altruistic goals for good that serves a greater good from stubbornness that serves no one, aka a rebel without a cause. I wonder if Samuel Hamilton, seeing as his wife called him a mule of contention, was a rebel without a cause

Keep going,

Ije

Je ne sais quoi: literally, “I don’t know what.” That elusive, pleasing quality, a charm or X factor that makes a person, place, or thing memorable but can’t be easily named or pointed to.

You know how you meet someone, and there’s something almost otherworldly about them? They never seem to be trying too hard. They’re at home in their own skin. They can move through a crowd, can add something meaningful to a conversation, and can also be just fine with being quiet and listening. They ask questions that make you think. They notice things other people miss. And for some reason, after they leave, you remember them.

I was chatting with a younger friend about her career. She’s brilliant, technically skilled, and so confident in her growth that she told me she wouldn’t need to hustle for jobs anymore.

I told her the next thing I needed her to do was figure out how to leave this country, even if it was just crossing the border and coming back. I wanted to see a stamped passport. To collect experiences, of course, not just to merely travel for the sake of.

Then I asked, “Is tech the only thing you want to contribute to a conversation?”

“Ouch, Ije,” she said. It stung, but we laughed.

What I was trying to get her to see is that being exceptionally good at something is great, but that alone is a very narrow way of experiencing the world.

I’ve been thinking about cultural capital, and the advantages it gives us. I’ve come to believe that it might be that “something” we can’t quite name in certain people. It’s the accumulation of the books they have read, interesting places they have been in, foods tried, people listened to, ideas they have wrestled with. The openness with which they have allowed serendipity to happen, the failures they have embraced gracefully and the curious outlook with which they move through the world.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu developed the concept of cultural capital to explain how culture, education and social background shape our opportunities and status. His work centred on the premise that success isn’t determined by money(economic capital), qualifications or who you know (social capital) alone.

He described cultural capital in three forms.

The things we embody: Vocabulary, habits, tastes, mannerisms, accents, posture, etc. This extends to how we navigate unfamiliar situations, engage with people different from us, or recognise those unspoken rules that govern a place or people. It develops over time through exposure, practice and experience.

The objects we own: Books, art, music, objects, etc. While money can buy them, ownership isn’t the same as understanding say the meaning behind them, their history. You can buy art because you can afford it, or because it’s trendy or as an asset class, which doesn't necessarily mean you appreciate the art, the reason it was created, the sensibilities of the artist, for example. It might as well be as good as buying a cereal box off a shelf.

The formal bestowments: Degrees, qualifications, certifications and titles. These are the most formally recognised forms of cultural capital. They signal achievement, place you on social and economic strata, and can open doors.

People who are immersed in cultural knowledge through the type of conversations they have, books, travel, art and the environments in which they insert themselves would most times have an advantage over someone who has just a traditionally impressive CV.

There is a danger of cultural capital being mistaken for elitism; while the elite can access these things, elitism can also be a state of mind, especially if you are in environments where access to these things is available to everyone.

So while being able to navigate an elite room is a useful skill. It doesn’t necessarily prove that you understand the world better than someone who has never entered one.

Maybe becoming truly cultured extends to seeing value in places and people we would otherwise overlook. For example, the craftsmanship of a poor artisan who has mastered that skill over years, and It’s probably being passed down through generations.

Maybe it’s about expansiveness and breadth, which isn’t the exclusive birthright of the wealthy, well-travelled, or formally educated. The gateway is paying attention, asking better questions, reading widely, listening carefully, and being willing to have your assumptions and perspectives challenged.

We can all develop taste. Practice Curiosity and expand our world because the more worlds we encounter, the more possibilities we can imagine. We become better at making connections, seeing things from different perspectives, and inadvertently become better people; we have seen enough to understand that the lenses through which we see life aren't static.

That’s what makes certain people so charming: this ability to remain “open”. That’s what building cultural capital does: it makes us more interesting people by making the world an interesting place for us to explore.

Keep going,

Ije

I’m my son’s “test case” for him to check his understanding of economics and most of his subjects, really, but particularly economics. He can be such a geek. I find it cute that he does this, and it’s our way of bonding, and I learn or refresh a lot of my knowledge this way.

This particular day, he was explaining the role of the government, private businesses, etc. in society, using our family and the different roles we play or should be playing based on each person’s strength.

While listening to him be such a nerd, I was in awe of his love for economics, but more importantly, the fact that he was, without knowing it, playing out one of the intelligence cheat codes: extrapolation and pattern recognition.

Extrapolation is recognising that two things that look different on the surface may be governed by the same underlying structure. The ability to have such a great grasp of a concept that you can extract its principles and apply them to an unrelated concept or situation.

This way of thinking is very personal to me, because I would be a millionaire in dollars each time I get this variety of looks: alarm, concern, worry, and confusion each time I tell people I trained as a doctor but no longer practice.

The truth is that I’m still “doctoring.” All the problem-solving and strategy work that I do (medicine, the practice of it; is to a large extent, essentially problem-solving; the way my mind works is all credit to my medical training, pattern recognition and extrapolation.

Anyway, after listening to him, I decided to look for different ways and circumstances where this works, and I’m sharing these with you. You’re welcome. Lol

A queue. At first glance, it is simply a line of people waiting to be served. But underneath it is a dynamic of capacity, demand, flow, and bottlenecks.

Once you understand how queues work, you can relate the mechanics anytime you have an “overflow” problem. Overflowing inbox, workload, obligations, etc. Understanding how queues are managed can be extrapolated into these other situations

Another example is building muscle, which uses the mechanism of progressive overload. Muscles aren’t built by lifting the same weight in the same way forever. It’s done by increasing levels of challenge, intensity, reps, time under tension, time for recovery and adaptation, and rinse and repeat. Take the same principle out of the gym and apply it to how we learn.

If every book you read is easy, the conversation you have affirms what you already know or believe, or the things you take on are things you can do with your eyes closed, then we are not growing. Intellectual growth works in the same way progressive overload works.

My daughter recently decided to challenge herself by reading genres that are outside her usual, more classics. She has been struggling, complaining but staying with Toni Marrison’s Beloved. LOL

Architecture on the surface is about the structure of the building, but it’s also about communication. A well-designed building tells you where you are, where you need to go and what matters without requiring an instruction manual.

Apply that to how we think about presentations, essays, websites, etc. A well done one has little to no explanation for anyone to explain what is going on or what you should be doing to you.

Evolution, biology, and business strategy. Evolution is intuitive; it rarely has a grand master plan where it’s planned out what things would look like in a million years. Life forms adapt to their environment. Business strategy can borrow a leaf from evolution while having a plan; it should perform small experiments, watch for what the environment, aka market, reacts to, and then go from there.

One I particularly like is what investing can teach us about how and what we decide to spend our time on. Investors typically evaluate decisions using opportunity cost: choosing to invest in one thing means you can’t fund another.

When we extrapolate this into everyday life, it means starting to understand that every single thing we say “yes” to carries a hidden trade-off/opportunity cost. This way we can stop making decisions just by asking, “Is this good? But by asking, “Is this the highest-value use of this finite resource?” Our time, focus, money, mental bandwidth, and reputation are all forms of finite capital. And without intending to, we have become poor capital allocators.

Extrapolation is closer to seeing beneath the surface of a phenomenon until you isolate the rule governing it, then asking where else that rule operates.

We can actively build this skill by observing what is actually happening underneath the surface of things and isolating the underlying mechanism that controls it. Seeing where else this mechanism appears and then applying it even if it seems unusual in that context.

The point is, when you meet new challenges, you have to figure out whether they're similar to something you have seen or done before. It gets you started much quicker than having to learn the unique language or nuance of that particular context. That is how I have been able to switch careers and industries quite a few times

If you have to start learning everything from scratch, it would be like what management consultants call boiling the ocean.

Keep going,

Ije

Anaïs Nin is often quoted as saying, “We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.”

You know how they say a strength is also a weakness. Everything seems to have a yin and yang version, so it will likely always profit us to extract more value from its positive side.

We have always “demonised” external validation. Dancing to the gallery. People-pleasing. All these things can be soul-sapping and keep you solely dependent on people who might not really care.

But what about the enabling part of external validation, especially when we use it as part of our performance infrastructure?

We humans, are fundamentally social. For hundreds of thousands of years, being seen, recognised and affirmed by the tribe was literally a survival mechanism. It’s well documented how much our social networks and connections matter to our survival and wellbeing.

Let me show you what I mean.

My brother was telling me a few weeks ago about something interesting that happened to him at the gym. For the past year or so, he was just not able to get past a certain weight. I can’t remember the exact weight, but I’ll use 4kg just for reference and to paint a picture.

He had tried all he could but just couldn’t lift past it. Then one day, he was lifting and some guy he knows at the gym, working out beside him, started hyping him up. Someone who had been struggling was suddenly able to lift 7kg. 4 to 7 is a 75% increase.

What did the guy do?

Did he suddenly develop new muscle fibres?

He had it within him all along. There’s no way he could have done that if he wasn’t already capable of it.

Here’s another example. I joined a walking group, and my humble goal was to walk 10k steps. My initial personal goal was actually 7k. Then someone in the group hit 20k. And it’s like someone inserted something in your head that you hadn’t even thought possible.

Then all of a sudden, 20k steps, which only happened when I was in Europe, became “ordinary”.

Mine was not an active hype like my brother’s. The mental barrier was lifted by being with people who subtly make things possible just by doing it, plus the very human competitive nature we all have.

It was borrowing a collective momentum. The power of being pushed forward by a tide.

The difference was probably the power of “impressing” another person. The power of borrowing another person’s belief in you.

It’s almost someone else permitting you to believe. Someone lending you their wings till you are able to grow yours.

So here’s what I’m saying: instead of overfocusing on the “negative” part of seeking the recognition of others, let’s focus on how to use it as fuel. And choose carefully who gets to be your witness. The fix was never to need people less. It’s to put yourself in front of people who believe in who you’re becoming.

Being such an introspective, depend-on-myself person, I now know without a doubt that we are never meant to build our lives in a vacuum. We need people to lend us their belief, to put a mirror in front of us so we can see versions of ourselves we haven’t been able to see yet.

Wayne Dyer put it this way: “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

Keep going,

Ije

For those who drive, you have probably noticed the disclaimer on the driver’s side mirror that says “objects in the mirror are closer than they appear”.

Car mirrors are designed differently from regular mirrors because they cater to blind spots in our line of sight that regular mirrors can’t capture, which would otherwise leave drivers exposed to accidents because they can’t see cars or other objects in those blind spots.

To solve this, automotive engineers use convex mirrors that curve outward like the exterior of a dome. Curving the mirror bends light rays inward, letting it cover a wider area for the eye to see.

In trying to cover more areas, they kind of distort the scale of the objects. They appear smaller and further away than they really are. Our brain, however, uses relative size to calculate depth and speed. So, when an image shrinks or appears smaller, our mind automatically registers it as far away.

While convex vision saves us from spatial blind spots, it distorts how we think about objects in motion relative to distance. An optical illusion of sorts, but a good kind of illusion. Not the 419, the more you look, the less you see kind.

Not a perfect solution. The way they think of it is that the bigger problem they are trying to solve, i.e., making sure we can see things outside our blind spots, outweighs the distortion; hence the disclaimer for us to bear this in mind as we zoom in and out of lanes.

But I digress. Why am I going in about automotive engineering and physics?

In life, without knowing it, we adopt a convex vision lookout, in how we operate. How we think about work/careers, our health, investments of any kind (financial, relationships, etc.). We tend to have a distorted view of time.

We think we are on top of things till we realise it’s almost late.

It doesn’t help that our lives don’t come with a disclaimer or someone actively reminding us that things are creeping up on us or going downhill faster than we think.

This is very dissimilar to what the character Mike Campbell in Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises said when he asked how he went bankrupt.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, and then suddenly.”

Things we put off, thinking we were miles away, gradually creep up on us, and we find ourselves suddenly grappling.

Like with cars, a car you thought was still far off and you had enough time to overtake, you find is at your tail, and you are colliding with it or giving yourself a massive fright.

Technological shifts have happened gradually and then, all of a sudden, taken over our lives.

Small careless habits, missed health goals or checks, and missed opportunities to fix relationships gradually grow to become this massive tipping point with big crashes that are too late to salvage.

Like the disclaimer, we need to set safety buffers that help us with our relationships with time, pace and the important things.

Keep going,

Ije

Ever been to a fancy restaurant and they bring you a drink shot to start? A free shot of a drink, usually non-alcoholic, that you didn’t order just to get things.

That drink is called a palate cleanser; it’s meant to remove lingering tastes and oils in your mouth so you can properly taste and appreciate whatever culinary “masterpiece” they are about to heavily bill you for.

They are usually served at the start of a meal and at times in between courses. The whole point is to reset your taste buds and “clean the slate”.

With the way we are constantly bombarded by content and information, whether we go looking for it or not. The world feels so noisy. It’s the news, podcasts, unsolicited opinions, people with data, smartphones and opinions with their personal TV broadcasting licences. It’s hard to know where your own original thoughts start and where ones foisted on you end.

My son, ever the cynic, was taking a jab at his sister for mouthing a political opinion she heard from her friend as fact; on trying to defend herself, she dug the “grave” deeper by saying it’s all over TikTok, and he says, “I feel bad for you if you’re getting your news from TikTok.”

I saw a post by The Roe Magazine up in metaphorical alms in protest of the new iPhone. It says we don’t need smarter phones.

Enter koans, usually called Zen koans; this is the brains version of a palate cleanser.

A koan is a question, statement, story or exchange used in Zen practice. Some are paradoxical, usually strange; most would appear outrightly nonsensical.

Its whole point is to break up our usual thinking loops. Zen monks use them as dynamic tools during meditation to disrupt the ego and exhaust the analytical mind that is constantly seeking answers or tidy frameworks.

It forces the brain, when it can’t make sense of something logically or can’t rely on its default thinking patterns, to free up “space” to either just wonder or get new insights.

Examples of some popular koans are:

• What is the sound of one hand clapping?

• What is the colour of wind?

• When you can do nothing, what can you do?

• What is the colour of the wind?

• What did your face look like before your parents were born?

• When the many are reduced to one, to what is the one reduced?

• A goose has grown up inside a bottle. How do you get it out without breaking the bottle or hurting the goose?

• A monk asks if a dog has Buddha-nature. The master answers with one word that is neither yes nor no.

• Two monks were arguing about the temple flag waving in the wind. One said, “The flag moves.” The other said, “The wind moves.” They argued back and forth but could not agree. Hui-neng, the sixth patriarch, said: “Gentlemen! It is not the flag that moves. It is not the wind that moves. It is your mind that moves.” The two monks were struck with awe.

See… nonsensical and somewhat of a nuance, right? But the idea isn’t to answer but to just grapple with something unstructured and give the brain the free rein to run “wild”.

A mental palate cleanser to dislodge the “grease” of information overload, being on autopilot and logical all the time.

Keep going,

Ije

I get off the phone with a friend, and I'm mulling over the conversation and wondering if the counsel I gave was total BS and how we would both know. Context, a friend calls; he has been working through a tricky situation and wanted to know what he should do.

We are always able to give advice when we are removed from a situation, but said advice is mainly through the giver’s lived experience, and might not fit into the “advicee’s” life and context perfectly.

Seeing as our lives rarely follow a linear blueprint. Most of the pivotal moments in our lives are messy, without a script and would punch our best-laid plans in the face. How do we navigate these ambiguous situations without seeming like we are groping blindly in the dark?

I began to wonder if we all should not have something that guides us when we have no one to ask. Something that is our internal compass ( a mental model of sorts), that is customised to fit into your exact life. A working guide that evolves as your life evolves but always remains true to your life’s DNA.

A life Manifesto.

Being a huge fan of all things Stanford University (I need to get myself into that school at some point, God, universe, are you listening?), I have all the books from the D school (so thirsty of me); one of them is You Need A Manifesto, by Charlotte Burgess-Auburn

I have had the book for a while and decided to finally read it; while its primary target was creatives and people doing creatively complex work, the framework works for navigating any form of ambiguity.

“A manifesto articulates your values, keeps you grounded when things get messy, and serves as a north star when you’re navigating complex, uncertain terrain.”- Charlotte Burgess-Auburn

Its function is to “hold” one’s hands when facing competing priorities, tricky situations, friction, or decision fatigue; it predetermines your non-negotiable boundaries. It removes the stress of re-evaluating your core principles under pressure.

She says your personal manifesto can be one of liberation and self-identification, giving voice to individual ideas and beliefs while still participating in a collective culture. It should be applicable to you and your work in the moment, but capable of being questioned and revised before it becomes trite or dogmatic for you or for others.

To create your manifesto, you need to “recruit” yourself, as she puts it, sit with yourself and try to uncover what your core beliefs are and why. What your values are and why. What your non-negotiables, i.e., ethics, are and why.

You could start by collecting the manifestos of people you admire, asking yourself why you like them and what you like about them, pulling them apart, and then putting parts of them together to form yours. (This, she says, should be an ongoing exercise, not a one-and-done thing)

Example to uncover core beliefs: you could ask: What truth about life, work, or human nature do I hold that guides how I treat my time and others?

To set non-negotiable boundaries: What compromises am I explicitly unwilling to make, even under financial, professional, or social pressure?

Then, using these, convert your beliefs and boundaries into short, present-tense, declarative statements that tell you how to act.

Life is like navigating an ocean, incredibly vast and in constant motion; our manifestos help us navigate this vast ocean.

Manifestos needs to be handy when we need them, though, in whatever form we decide to keep them in. I know people have different ways of reminding themselves of what their northstars are. Some of these mantras are literally etched onto them.

That’s it.

Keep going,

Ije.

Music is the most indescribable of the arts, and that may be what makes it the most powerful — the creative force best capable of giving voice and shape to our most ineffable experiences and most layered longings, of containing them and expanding them at once. It is our supreme language for the exhilaration of being alive- Mark Strand

Music! Music!! Music!!! The most universal of languages and the custodian of memories.

I listen to Tuface’s Grass 2 Grace album, and it takes me back to a road trip Christmas of 2008 to Cross River State for the carnival.

I cringe each time I hear this hymn… I can’t even remember the name (that’s how badly I try to put that whole memory in a box and lock it away) because it takes me to the front pew of a church in a billowy white dress, staring at a white coffin that contains my mum in what felt like an out-of-body experience.

Or I hear ‘Pepas’ by Farruko, and it instantly transports me back to a particular night out in Barcelona.

Music could transport you to your first heartbreak, your wedding, or the soundtrack of your life when you first left home.

There is a particular background sound at my brother’s workplace; I jokingly tell him he should record it for when he stops working there. That’s one of the soundtracks of his life.

John Berger put it so exquisitely when he said a song is a “shelter in time”. A piece of music anchors us (much like smells) to a specific moment. And like time travelling, it serves as a bridge to the past, transporting our past selves into the present. A solace or an ache, depending, that can’t be erased by time.

A song can hold a person, a season, a city, or a version of us. We might forget the exact details, but we always remember the music that is anchored to that person or time.

As we move about our lives collecting experiences, music is kind of the scribe documenting these moments. Writing our life's biography through sound and feelings.

Music refuses to let us forget; it’s etched into our subconscious.

John Berger, in Confabulations, wrote that “A song, when being sung and played, acquires a body… Again and again the song takes over the body of the singer, and after a while the body of the circle of listeners who, as they listen and gesture to the song, are remembering and foreseeing.”

This idea of music taking over the body in a visceral way is true because when I listen to some songs, case in point, Jacob Banks Unknown (to you), I know I feel it in my stomach, alwayssss.

Or the chills I feel when I listen to some Igbo worship songs.

The music we listen to tells us something about the worlds we are drawn towards. It can introduce us to cultures we have never experienced. It can make us curious about places, languages, politics, sexuality, spirituality, rebellion, and history. I have been exploring Congolese music. I like Latin music for how sensual it is, and not in a purely erotic way.

I’m particularly drawn to artists who use their music as a political platform, the likes of Fela, Hugh Masekela, Tuface, Falz, Bob Marley, etc.

Music is one of the few things that can make strangers experience something collectively without requiring them to agree on anything. It is an equaliser that, apart from “snob” music like classical music, can be enjoyed by everyone regardless of status or race.

As Susan Sontag put it, “Music is the most alive of all the arts… and the most sensual.”

Alan Lightman says, “Nowhere is the joy of existence so apparent as in music… Intelligent life forms have created a multitude of sounds that express their exhilaration at being alive.

That’s it. My love letter to music.

Keep going,

Ije

Yohji Yamamoto famously said, “I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, and distortion.”

I was talking to a friend the other day about a ganglion on my wrist. I want it removed. He asked if it hurt. I said no, I don’t like the look of it. He said, “Ije, leave the thing alone; it doesn’t hurt, and it makes you relatable. You look like you just stepped out of a magazine.” I laughed. One person’s opinion. But underneath it was something true; flaws make us human.

John Ruskin, a Victorian art critic, made a similar argument. His claim was that imperfection isn’t a flaw in the work but is proof of the work of life.

“Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life.”

“All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyse vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed….

He argued that nothing that lives can be rigidly perfect. Leaves are irregular. Branches are imperfectly symmetrical. Human faces are asymmetrical. To demand perfection, therefore, in his opinion, is to demand the death of expression, because anything still growing is, by definition, unfinished.

And the fact that we are alive means we are still “growing”, not just in the traditional sense of growth like kids, even though that is included, but growing through life.

I look at myself sometimes when going out and dressed in something strapless and see the exposed hyperpigmented spots and the small scars, and my first instinct is to reach for a concealer to cover them up

But these marks are stories. Each one happened somewhere, in a moment, as evidence of my interactions with life, even if I can’t remember all of them. Some from childhood, from accidents. Each mark is a piece of my history. A sort of biography of how I have moved through life.

These battle marks – the spots and scars – are, in essence, signs of a storied life.

The marks life leaves us with are both emotional and physical. But I’m staying on the physical, more visible ones for today. The ones that can start conversations when someone asks, “What happened to you?”

The quest for physical perfection erases that. And I keep asking myself: who are we erasing them for? For ourselves, or for other people? We know the “scars” are there anyway. So when we cover them, are we forgetting, or are we performing for others?

Still, I want the ganglion gone. I know it would leave a tiny scar, but let the scar be the reminder that it was there. I just need to remember that the ganglion there doesn’t make me less “magazine-worthy”, as my friend puts it. Lol.

Parker Palmer writes in his book, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life, about his own idea of wholeness. Wholeness, he says, isn’t the same as perfection. It means embracing brokenness as part of the whole. This is close to the Japanese concept of kintsugi. Where flaws are part of a well-lived life.

The storied life is like a beautiful canvas. Perfection just looks “meh” next to it.

Keep going,

Ije

A friend invited me to her dad’s 95th birthday a few weeks ago, and since my dad turned 70 and is my only living parent, I have been consciously aware of time passing, aware of the limited number of years he realistically has left.

Being a shameless daddy’s girl, the thought leaves me slightly sad. So I tend to want to celebrate long life in others and to “tap into the blessing”, as we Nigerians say, for my dad.

So on a Wednesday morning in the middle of my workday, I went to his Thanksgiving service to celebrate with him and his family.

The high point of the ceremony was when the priest, very animated in his showmanship, started contextualising what 95 years means in terms of months, days, minutes and seconds. He got the whole church very excited and clapping, especially at the millions of seconds that make up 95 years, which is, in fact, 2,995,920,000: two billion, nine hundred and ninety-five million, nine hundred and twenty thousand.

You can understand how excited people would feel at such a large number. While clapping along with everyone and thinking about my dad.

I began wondering what his long life would mean for me. Is it just merely wishing him a long life on some other end of this planet? What do those years, months, minutes, and seconds mean if I don’t get much of that time with him?

Tim Urban has an excellent essay. Please read called The Tail End.

In it, he says we shouldn’t look at life just as the number of years, but more as the number of events/moments left for us.

He says (by the way, I had this same conversation with my brothers after feeling so frustrated that I don’t see them as often as I would like to) that by the time he finishes high school, he will have spent 90 per cent of all the in-person time he can ever spend with his parents and even siblings that he grew up in the same house with before it tapers to a few times a year.

That 90% is what he calls ‘The Tail End’.

For example, at 40, if a person lives to 95, they have only 55 more birthdays.

A 40-year-old who reads 12 books a year has only 660 books left to read.

With a 4-year election cycle, they will only see 13 more.

While it’s sobering, it also helped me see the reason why we should not necessarily just create a sense of urgency in the way we live, but rather create more meaning, especially with our close relationships and ageing parents, to be exact.

He proposes (direct excerpt):

1) Living in the same place as the people you love matters. I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else.

2) Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you—not by unconscious inertia.

3) Quality time matters. If you’re in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious.

I couldn’t agree more.

So the question is, if our future isn’t one big bucket of time but a collection of finite experiences, relationships and seasons, and some of those buckets are already far more used up than we think, what are you already in the tail end of without realising it?

Your parents’ active years?

Your children’s childhood?

Certain friendships?

Your physical strength?

Your ability to spontaneously change direction?

Certain professional opportunities?

Certain versions of yourself?

Because time isn’t as plentiful as we think; we count it in moments and events.

Keep going,

Ije

Have you sat in a room where there is an obvious elephant in the room? Everyone can “see” it; it’s massive and large and takes up oxygen, but everyone acts like they can’t see a thing. They even hold their breath and pray that one person who is usually “troublesome” doesn’t stir up anything for the sake of peace. Everyone leaves relieved that there was no drama.

This is what is called ‘negative peace’, according to Martin Luther King Jr, in his Letter from Birmingham Jail.

During the Civil Rights Movement, many critics; clergymen, argued that nonviolent protests, sit-ins, and marches were bad because they created tension, unrest, and social friction. They preferred order and quiet over confrontation, even if that “peace” maintained segregation and injustice

He wrote this letter from his prison cell as a response to them, arguing that these protests did not create tension but only unearthed pre-existing, hidden tension of racial injustice to the surface so it could be confronted and healed.

An excerpt –
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice...” — Dr. Martin Luther

He is saying, in essence, that negative peace is not real peace; it’s a manufactured illusion of peace. It is simply the absence of visible conflict, tension, or disruption. A society could appear calm, orderly, and stable while harbouring deep injustice in its underbelly.

Segregation in Birmingham was “peaceful” because it meant fewer riots and disruptions, but Black people were denied dignity, freedom, opportunity, and equal treatment. The peace was maintained by oppression.

Positive peace, on the other hand, can sometimes be colourful and uncomfortable because confronting things is uncomfortable, but it ensures the presence of justice, equality, and right relationships.

How often do we equate lack of conflict or drama as the ideal state? In companies, families, and relationships. Couples glory in the fact that they never fight.

A company that frowns at disagreement in the name of “healthy culture”. Then employees look the other way in the face of discrimination, toxic leadership, unethical practices, or burnout. Meetings are run smoothly, but there is no “truth”

We avoid “going there”, aka having difficult conversations, because we fear losing a person’s love. Conversations are nice and polite, but there is no real connection.

Because we are not fighting doesn’t mean things are good. Literally. That might even be the clear sign of “death”. Dead things can’t be bothered to waste emotions.

Creating tension could, in fact, be an act of love if it exposes injustice, deception, harm, or complacency. You care too much not to react or speak up. Parents who intervene when their children are showing destructive behaviours, employees who speak up against discrimination, and friends who confront and call their friends out.

MLK Jr. isn’t asking us to be rebels without causes but to look for the kind of false peace worth disrupting and be brave enough to do so.

What conflicts are we avoiding because we value comfort, reputation, or stability more than truth?

Keep going,

Ije

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My son was telling his sister the other day, while they were arguing, that if her academic ‘prowess’ were removed, she wouldn’t have much to rely on in terms of smarts. I winced internally.

While I know that he knows his sister is academically smart—intelligent in a range of other ways—that didn’t stop me from fixating on what he said.

He touched on something that I have questioned, which is our traditional definition of intelligence. In the IQ sense.

Intelligence is often seen as a thing you have, a storage box of sorts. Measured by

How much do you know?
How quickly can you answer?
How many books have you read?
What school did you attend?
Facts/trivia recalled.
Your test or exam scores.
Degrees amassed.

Intelligence being equated strictly to knowledge.

But I have come to understand that intelligence isn’t a rigid, objective thing but rather expansive and elastic.

A quote often attributed to Einstein says, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” Real intelligence is about adaptation. The concept of evolution tells the whole story.

The smartest people I know are people who are able to change their minds, strategies, and careers. They can change the questions they ask. They question their long-held beliefs and whether it still serves them.

They notice when things and situations have moved, and they move with it.

This can be hard when the world tends to reward consistency. We build our identities around our opinions, professions, beliefs, and business models and have ridden on the coattails of personal stories as a claim to fame. The longer we have held on to these, the harder it is to let go.

A person who knows so much but can’t revise their thinking when it turns out to be wrong isn’t being intelligent in that moment. They’re being stubborn.

Intelligence is not stubbornness and rigidity. Intelligence is nimble.

I remember when I was asked at some event I went to what my success strategy was; I said stubbornness. Because I can be like a dog with a bone sometimes. But there’s a difference between the stubbornness that drives you forward and the stubbornness that keeps you stuck.

There is a kind of stubbornness that is admirable. Paul Graham of Y Combinator once wrote about the “right kind of stubborn,” the persistence to keep working on something difficult despite obstacles. This kind of stubbornness is directed towards a vision or a grand goal.

He talked about another kind of stubbornness that could be dangerous. The one that is wedded to a specific way of doing things. A specific idea. A specific point of view. (This is similar to the traditional form of intelligence.)

Intelligent people can be obsessive about the destination and flexible about the route.

The startup founder who pivots when an idea they were previously excited about isn’t quite what the market wants.

Changing things in your life that work despite all the time and money invested in them currently.

Adaptability is a survival trait, and it is fundamentally what it means to be intelligent.

Evolution is often misunderstood as a story of strength and fitness: survival of the fittest. When it really is, it is actually a story of adaptation. Species survive because they can adjust to changing conditions. Businesses survive because they can respond to changing markets.

The future rarely arrives the way we envision it. Look at us trying to get on top of AI today.

Being elastic is not only a survival trait but also a competitive advantage.

You know what the enemy of intelligence is (intelligence from my point of view, not the 1+1 version)?

It’s ego.

Our egos keep us chained and inflexible. Ego can present as loss aversion. That is trying not to look stupid, shame, humiliation, being seen as inconsistent, needing to be in control, etc.

This is why genuinely intelligent people sometimes appear less certain than everyone else. They are aware that every belief or idea is true until it isn’t. They hold their opinions firmly enough to act but loosely enough to update them once outdated.

So when next we hear the word “intelligent,” we should not look at it through the limiting lens of book smarts—” How much do I know?”—but also from “What happens to me when I’m wrong?”

Do I expand to accommodate the new information/situation?

Am I intentionally putting myself in a situation where I can stretch?

Keep going.

Ije

“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion is starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. Seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there. Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge. They were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around—the opening lines of the 2003 movie Love Actually.

I watched Love Actually again recently, after more than 10 years. It felt like I was watching it for the first time.

It was such an exceptional experience. Apart from how much of a feel-good movie, with a salient message, it is, what was special about watching it this time was the very heavy dose of nostalgia; watching an old movie kind of does that, but the main one was that it was on DVD.

I screamed.

I hadn’t seen a DVD player in years. Even the whole rigmarole of trying to connect the wires of the DVD player to the TV all added to the feeling of nostalgia.

Then eating popcorn out of a customised cinema-style popcorn pack. It was a real escape and the best 3 hours of the entire week.

It made me start thinking about how much of our lives are full of ordinary moments. It’s 90% ordinary, then occasionally broken up by moments of excitement: the vacation, promotion, wedding, birthdays, etc.

We wake up, shower, dress up, eat, go about our business, parent if we have children, speak with family or friends when we can, go home, sleep, wake up, rinse, and repeat.

So if life is filled with the ordinary, how do we have extraordinary lives if we don’t find ways to elevate the ordinary moments? Because if the moments we deem extraordinary are so small, then mathematically, they are not enough to make for an extraordinary life.

We save the special plates for guests. The prettier dresses for occasions, the special soaps, and hand creams for the guest bathroom. Only set the tables nicely for guests. Wait to rest when we go on vacation. Champagne for promotions and special events.

The philosopher Josef Pieper argued that leisure, beauty, celebration, and contemplation are not rewards for work but essential parts of being human.

I just finished reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and one of the parts that stayed with me was when Bill, Charlie’s teacher, told him to participate in his life.

Context: Charlie is brilliant, observant, and deeply sensitive. He notices everything. He reads constantly, writes beautifully, and understands people. He has a rich interior life but mostly experiences life from the edges. Hence the titular name “wallflower.”

His English teacher, Bill, sees this. He knows Charlie is exceptional, but he only observes life. He tells him that he cannot keep living only as someone who watches others live. He encourages him to participate in his life and stop being only the spectator of his own story but an actor too.

I’m wondering if by not elevating our “ordinary” days, we are failing to participate in our lives. Are we fully participating if we treat our lives as something that happens later, when there is an audience or a “real” reason to?

There is another part in the book about accepting the love we think we deserve. That I would translate to us accepting the life we think we deserve. If we deserve special lives, then we should make our days special. The more special days we have, the more special our lives are.

That looks like using our best plates and burning the loveliest candles, playing ambient music, dimming the lights, and watching a movie. Setting tables elegantly for one with flowers just because.

I believe it’s called romanticizing your life.

Keep going,

Ije

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We’ve all probably watched or heard of The Wizard of Oz, written by L. Frank Baum, perhaps as kids or in versions of it as adults. It’s mainly thought of as a children’s movie alongside Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I’m showing my age with these choices of movies.

A story about a girl, Dorothy, who gets lost and, in her quest, finds her way home needs to find answers from the Wizard. On her journey to Oz, she meets interesting companions who seem to be “missing” something in their lives and need help from the Wizard to find; the Scarecrow needs a brain (intelligence), the Cowardly Lion is in search of courage, and the Tin Man is in search of emotions.

What they didn’t realize was that they had all the things they felt they lacked already; they just weren’t seeing them for what they were or didn’t trust themselves.

The scarecrow was convinced he had no brain, yet throughout their adventure to Oz, he was the only one coming up with brilliant solutions. When they got trapped, he solved the puzzle; when they were in danger, he figured out a way to get them out of trouble. He solved problems, noticed patterns, and came up with clever solutions, displaying intelligence that only he wasn’t able to see as intelligence.

The Tin Man needs a heart. He believes he is hollow inside and incapable of feelings and empathy. Yet, he’s always so overwhelmed with compassion for every living thing. He would worry and cry so much that his own tears would rust his jaws shut. He was just misinterpreting what it means to be emotional.

The lion would roar so loudly to hide the fact that he’s scared of everything, including his own shadow. He desperately wants “courage” because he believes himself a coward. But he was always the one stepping up when his friends were in danger. He marched into the Wicked Witch’s castle despite being very scared; he would shake, panic, and hesitate but still act. He assumed that true bravery means walking into danger all cool, calm, and collected. He has never heard of “do it afraid.” Lol

Then there’s Dorothy; in the entire story, she was trying to find a powerful, external authority figure to take her home. She endures a challenging, dangerous journey on the Yellow Brick Road (which, in my opinion, represents the path to growth and personal development) just to ask permission to go home. A power that she had within herself all along.

The wizard is another kettle of fish; he was an illusion. An ordinary middle-aged man who used antics to make himself larger than life. Hiding behind the massive, glowing head; a booming voice; terrifying fire; and pulling levers behind a curtain.

We can probably identify with one or, to a varying degree, all other characters.

The scarecrows lack belief in themselves. These are the classic imposter thinkers. They are the ones who catch on the fastest, who see the flaw in a plan, solve the complex operational issues, or naturally connect dots others miss, yet would refuse to speak up or volunteer themselves or apply for that job because they don’t have the “right” title, degree, or background. Believing they need something external (their version of the wizard) to validate how smart or ready they are.

The Tinmen are the guarded empaths that have locked their sensitive heart away after being dealt some heartbreaking blows. They put on iron suits to protect themselves; they begin to see vulnerability as a sign of weakness, leaning more on logic.

The Cowardly Lions are our brothers, especially, and some sisters, who mix up fear with weakness. “Men don’t cry,” they are told. They will “roar” and display signs of toughness to mask and crush any sign of fear. They think feeling anxious makes them less of who they present themselves to be. They define courage as the absence of fear, rather than taking action despite fear.

Dorothys are the ones waiting for permission from someone else, a boss’s approval, a parent’s, or a mentor’s. They wait for the “right time,” an alignment of the stars, to act. To start living. When in fact, they have been wearing the slippers that will get them “home” all along; all they have to do is click them.

The Wizards are the fake-it-till-you-make-it gang. The ones that use impressive storytelling, shiny personal brand, and a lot of noise as a cover. This has its benefits because the noise sometimes helps them get going on their trainer wheels before they learn to ride the bike without one. On the other side, the noise is to distract from ineptitude.

We spend years walking down metaphorical yellow brick roads in search of external “Wizards”: credentials, mentors, titles, promotions, medals, and awards in the hopes that they will give us intelligence, emotional capacity, courage, or direction.

The Wizard of Oz didn’t give any of them anything “real.” He gave the Scarecrow a piece of paper, the Tin Man a clockwork heart, and the Lion a medal. They were all placebos, props to get them to believe what was already in them (the Scarecrow was already intelligent, the Tin Man was already compassionate, the Lion was already courageous, and Dorothy already had the means to return home), if they only believed.

The ultimate lesson is that we don’t need a “wizard” to give us answers because we have the magic in us already. We just need to figure out how we are getting in our own ways, what is covering our eyes from seeing who is in the mirror.

Which character did you identify with the most?

Keep going,

Ije

Imagine this: you are lying down, staring at the ceiling and imagining all the alternate versions of the life you could have lived.

You imagine or try to imagine what your life would have been or felt like if you stayed back in that country, chose x career instead of y, married this person instead of that, never married at all, chose not to have children, etc.

Very The Midnight Library-esque. If you haven’t read The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, you should. It explores: What if we could live every version of the life we didn’t choose?

We always mourn the paths we didn’t take. We romanticise it, believing that we might have been better off. But the reality is that no version is ever better off; every version has its commas.

The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, in his book Either/Or, argues that no matter what path we choose in life, we will always wonder about the path not taken.

In his words:

“Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it. Weep over them, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it. Do not hang yourself, you will regret that too… This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”

This is about everything, not just major life decisions like whether to get married or not.

So, no matter how rigorous our SWOT analysis, pros and cons charts and the other brilliant decision-making tools we employ when making decisions, we can’t totally free ourselves from the shackles of regret.

He says, It’s not really about the choice; regret is just baked into the structure of choosing. It’s the opportunity cost of choices. Committing to any path means closing off others, and a reflective person will always feel the pull of the road not taken.

He says, instead of wondering, how can we avoid regret? We should rather focus on the question, “What regret can I live with?”

Seeing as we are “doomed” to be plagued by regret whether we like it or not, the aim is to live lives in a way that we can own the regrets when they try to guilt-trip us with “our full chests”. Jeff Bezos’ regret minimization framework gets us closer to that sort of life.

The central idea is, when facing a hard decision, project yourself forward to age 80 and ask, “Looking back, will I regret having tried this and perhaps failed, or will I regret never trying it ?” Make whichever choice minimises the number of regrets you will have in the future.

Like Nora Been, in The Midnight Library, after exploring all her different what-if lives, realises that no life is without its unique issues—the grass was never greener, only different. She understood that meaning comes less from optimising every decision and more from being present, making connections, and choosing to keep living “inside” the life you have “warts and all.”

Keep going,

Ije

There are a few things I find as intriguing as people watching, aka trying to understand how the human mind works or what influences how we behave or do what we do.

Incentives, I have found, are one of the underrecognized modifiers of human behaviour. It’s the invisible puppeteer pulling the strings and deciding how people behave

There are times when we are confounded by how a person is behaving or the decisions they have chosen to make. It’s glaring what the ‘right behaviour or choice’ should be, but you wonder why they have chosen to do the direct opposite.

The incentive is the signal. It’s like the smoke that precedes the fire. Once you get to the smoke, you will see the source of the fire.

We tend to believe that your behaviours are driven by your personality, values, intelligence, experience, character, discipline, etc.

We call people lazy, disciplined, ambitious, unmotivated, generous, dishonest, corrupt, etc., but…

People respond to and behave according to what they’re rewarded for; these rewards are incentives.

An incentive is simply anything that makes one behaviour more attractive than another. Sometimes it’s money. This is usually the more obvious one, but there are others: approval, belonging, recognition, convenience, validation, reputation, autonomy, purpose, safety, avoiding embarrassment, protecting our identity, risk aversion, fear of all kinds (a friend was saying she almost turned down a huge work opportunity because she was afraid of trying new things; her incentive was comfort).

Our decisions are run through our incentives this way;

* What do I gain?

* What do I lose?

* How hard is this?

* How will other people see me?

The economist Goodhart says, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

Here is a story to buttress the fact:

French colonial authorities in Hanoi wanted to reduce the rat population because rats were spreading disease.

They offered a reward for each rat tail turned in. Officials assumed that every tail represented one dead rat.

Instead, people started cutting off the rats’ tails and releasing them so the rats could continue breeding and produce more tail rewards.

Some people even began breeding rats specifically to profit from the bounty.

The incentive rewarded collecting tails, not reducing rats. A better incentive might have been rewarding for actual dead rats.

Goodhart’s law is particularly relevant for organisations as they design reward systems. For example, salespeople are often rewarded for the number of accounts they bring in; because of that, they end up focusing on just numbers, bringing in some “dead” businesses that cause more stress for the business.

Or call centre reps being rewarded for how short calls are or the total number of calls instead of resolving client issues, they end up not getting customers off in the shortest time, whether an issue was resolved or not.

In relationships of all kinds, we say we want honesty, but whenever someone says something honest that the other does not agree with, there is a fight, so people start resorting to the behaviour rewarded in that situation: being politically correct or yes-men.

Charlie Munger said, “Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.”

The fastest way to change behaviour or for people to behave the way you want is to dangle the right incentive.

When we begin to understand the power of incentives, we see human behaviour differently.

The older I get, the less interested I am in asking why people are the way they are. I’m becoming far more interested in asking what their environment is rewarding.”

I’m asking instead,

“Why are people behaving like this?”

“What incentives are shaping this behaviour?”

Because behaviour that once looked irrational often begins to make perfect sense. We start to understand why people stay in unhealthy jobs, choose certain careers, marry, exercise, cheat, volunteer, donate, commit fraud, start businesses, etc.

I’m currently working on a product at the intersection of tech, culture, and entertainment, and the most important question we are trying to answer after checking our assumptions is what the different potential users’ incentives for using the service would be.

Keep going,

Ije

“I’m going to life’s bed wide awake, unaccompanied and without peace, in the ebb and flow of my confused consciousness, like two tides in the black night where the destinies of nostalgia and desolation meet. ”-Portuguese poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa

Have you ever felt a tiredness, a weariness that no amount of sleep can fix? A weariness that is bone deep, a weariness of the soul?

The type, a holiday can’t fix, nor can retail therapy or spa days or all the things we use as “band-aids.”

It is the weariness of:

Carrying too much responsibility.

Pretending to be someone you’re not, the exhaustion of performance.

Making endless decisions, a cognitive sort of exhaustion.

Living without meaning; an existential exhaustion.

Years of disappointment; the exhaustion of hope. e.

Constantly consuming and without creating: attention exhaustion. Taking in other people’s worlds without making one of your own.

It could also be the weariness that chips away at your soul for those tiny, seemingly inconsequential compromises, not speaking up when you should have, staying in places and things that no longer serve you, holding onto inherited or outdated beliefs

This existential weariness of the soul, I think, comes from living out of alignment with one’s core self while running after external goals, rather than mere physical exhaustion; it requires a radical reconnection to self.

It could be that we need to shut off all the noise and face the reality of the gap between the life that feels real and the imagined version. Ask for help; let go of ego enough to acknowledge that we are “lost” and perhaps walk towards that exact same thing that you have been avoiding.

Maybe it’s a signal for us to pay attention, the way physical pain is a signal.

Keep going,

Ije.

In our daily quest to wrestle life down, doesn’t every new day present us with an opportunity to renew our minds, to fight the forces that would rather have us joyless, depressed, comparing ourselves to others, lacking in gratitude, and taking the easy way out?

Every day is a battle that we must win (okay, sometimes we are kicked in the face, but we roll the punches because what is the alternative?)

So, it’s always great when I discover nifty tools for us to add to our armoury for our fortification. This ‘tool’ is from cybernetics, the study of how systems (humans, computers, and social structures) control themselves, communicate, and adapt using information.

It’s the Law of Requisite Variety, coined by W. Ross Ashby, which states that a system’s internal complexity must equal or exceed the complexity of its environment to achieve stability and control

Ashby phrased it this way: Only variety can absorb variety.

Nigerians say aura for aura.

In simple terms, it means that for any system to successfully respond to a changing environment, the system must possess at least as much flexibility and range of responses as the challenges it faces.

The systems that survive longest are rarely the strongest. They are the ones that maintain enough internal diversity to match external complexity. This is how biological evolution, organisations that have survived decades, cultures, societies, etc., have worked.

So in any given situation, you need to have as many, if not more, ways to respond to whatever is coming at you. To “survive,” you need to be coming at it with more than it’s coming at you with.

Does this pass Michelle Obama’s “if they go low, we go high” filter? Because it looks like it’s asking us to play dirty. Lol. I think it does. Ignoring an irritating person who is just looking for attention, for example, requires an emotional maturity that is higher than they possess. So the math checks out.

I made up an equation for this: your arsenal of resilience tools — the troubles = a positive number.

The equation must always be positive.

What does this mean for us in a practical, everyday sense? It means that we must actively be cultivating a wide range of cognitive, emotional, and strategic wheelhouse that is essential for managing complex relationships, personal growth, careers, parenting, and financial blows if we aim to survive.

What tools, capabilities, perspectives, mindsets, beliefs, values, and structures are we developing to navigate the rapidly changing career work, life transitions, building wealth, complex relationships, and managing everyday stress?

Whenever you feel stuck or overwhelmed by a situation, ask yourself: “Am I trying to solve a complex, high-variety problem with a single/low-variety tool?” To get back on top of things, you almost always need to expand your variety.

The law of requisite variety is asking us not to be a one-trick pony. We need to be elastic and adaptable. We need a broad range of skills to make sure we can keep bouncing back up.

I just had a visual of these inflatables that you bunch, and they immediately bounce back.

Keep going,

Ije

Imagine this: you pour salt into your coffee instead of sugar.

You need to get to the airport, and you can’t find your passport.

You send the wrong message to someone.

A surgeon operating on the wrong side (true story)

A nurse giving the wrong injection.

Someone explodes in the middle of a conversation. An explosion that seems disproportionate to the situation.

Constantly going to take a pinch of that chocolate cake in the fridge when you are dieting.

All of these are in your face, visible, happening in real time with real-time impact errors, usually caused by the person closest to the last action. I.e., the ‘accidentee’ (🤦🏾‍♀️)

These sorts of errors are called active errors. Active errors lead to panic, blame, and maybe someone losing their job.

But why did they happen?

They often happen because of latent errors.

A latent error is a hidden weakness in the system that exists long before anything goes wrong.

These are often created by leaders, policies, culture, processes, poor design, or organisational decisions. They could sit dormant, unnoticed, for days, weeks, months, and even years.

These are essentially things that are happening behind the scenes that caused the active error to happen.

Sugar and salt in identical containers without proper labelling

Not having a particular place you put important documents.

Names not properly identified (more than one person with the same name and haven’t been properly differentiated)

The surgeon had no checklist or visual markers to identify the correct surgical site

Overworked and tired nurse

Not discussing issues and leaving them unresolved for a long time

So in the face of mistakes, the knee-jerk reaction is to focus on the mistake and who caused it. It should be less “Who is at fault for this?” and more “What conditions were we not aware of that made this happen?”

Most of the mistakes we make are mistakes that were waiting to happen by unintentional flaws in a system.

It’s said that to err is human. This means that we are fundamentally flawed. We are prone to errors. We are imperfect, so wherever there are humans, there must surely be errors; it’s only a matter of time and the right circumstances.

So, to fix latent errors that then manifest as active errors, we need to design systems (not just at work or in society, but at home too) that remove the human element from errors—human elements of distraction, tiredness, absentmindedness, forgetfulness, busyness, and disorganisation.

Let me use the salt and sugar example again. They are both white substances, sometimes with similar texture and no smell to distinguish them.

How do you make it almost impossible, idiotic, for that error to ever occur?

Obvious ones are different types of containers, properly labelled and facing front, kept in very different places.

When all these are done, it becomes almost humanly impossible to mix both up. Unless that was the intent in the first place.

That is how we should see errors, especially the ones that occur frequently. What hidden flaw do we need to work backwards to rework so that the mistake is almost impossible to happen again? This way we are creating better designs and systems.

Solve for the latent, not the active. “Latent” is long-term sustainability thinking. “Active” is short-term, band-aid thinking.

Keep going

Ije