March & April 2022:
Hi there,
Sorry for the delay. March and April were stressful months. The weather was scorching hot and Nigeria’s power grid just couldn’t keep up with the demands so it collapsed—multiple times.
I’m just glad I made it out alive. In April, the weather got cooler, then I had to deal with the demands of work and the whole Flutterwave quagmire.
Highlights of the Month
- I signed up for a gym, after being hit by a bike while jogging on the road in February. The incident wasn’t anything serious but I didn’t want to wait till I experienced something serious.
- I came first in the D4D essay competition, out of 175 journalists/submissions from 36 countries. Excited about this win and the conference in May.
- I painted another masterpiece in celebration of the world oral health day.
- I’ve written 10 editions of Rupt Weekly, a new newsletter on the Blockchain and Web 3.
- I did an interview on two cents, where I answered a few questions on journalism and the tech industry.
Helpful stuff I came across
📚 What the Dog saw and other adventures – Malcolm Gladswell
A compilation of 19 articles by Malcolm Gladwell that were originally published in The New Yorker.
“The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell. I say trick but what I mean is challenge, because it’s a very hard thing to do. Our instinct as humans, after all, is to assume that most things are not interesting. We flip through the channels on the television and reject ten before settling on one. We go to a bookstore and look at twenty novels before we pick the one we want. We filter and rank and judge. We have to. There’s so much out there. But if you want to be a writer, you have to fight that instinct every day. Shampoo doesn’t seem interesting? Well, dammit, it must be, and if it isn’t, I have to believe that it will ultimately lead me to something that is.”
📚 Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better – Will Storr
Recommended by Morgan Housel, it’s quite a long and insightful read. It takes a scientific approach towards exploring what makes stories an important medium for conveying ideas.
“We experience our day-to-day lives in story mode. The brain creates a world for us to live in and populates it with allies and villains. It turns the chaos and bleakness of reality into a simple, hopeful tale, and at the centre it places its star – wonderful, precious me – who it sets on a series of goals that become the plots of our lives. Story is what the brain does.”
🗞 The untold story of how ThriveAgric survived a turbulent 2020
It took me 7 months from when I had my first interview till when the story was published.
American serial entrepreneur Elon Musk once described the experience of running a startup as being similar to the act of chewing glass and staring into the abyss. “After a while, you stop staring, but the glass chewing never ends,” Musk said. ThriveAgric’s experience validates this description.
🗞 How to excel in tech without learning to code
…Although we hear a lot about how we’re in the golden age of software engineering — nobody can hire developers fast enough — an underappreciated reality is that inside startups and tech companies, most roles aren’t technical. Every organization employs marketers, salespeople, recruiters, and executives whose job descriptions don’t involve any meaningful knowledge of computer science or even basic HTML, but whose professional lives and workflows are dominated by software nonetheless.
🎥 This video of dogs running is delightful to watch.
+ A useful reminder that all the recent conversation about Gen Z and their working style isn’t peculiar to this generation. It sorta comes up every few years.
“We didn’t know how to celebrate heroes, except when they won.”
This documentary takes you on an emotional journey to Nigeria’s first appearance at the FIFA World Cup.
📱: I’m excited about the launch of the How We Feel App (only IOS for now). I’ve been using it to keep track of my emotions and regulate them. It’s such a beautiful (love the design) and useful app.
Favorite Quote 💭
“You would never choose to only use half your talent but when you dismiss useful ideas because you don’t like someone, that’s effectively what you’re doing.”
Shane Parrish
Thank you for reading!
See you on the last Saturday or Sunday in May 2022 – so help me God!
Did you come across anything helpful or something that got to you? Please share with me. Also If you have any feedback please reply via email
Have a dope May!