Those who have a ‘Why’ to live can bear almost any ‘How’.

— Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning

Over the last couple of years, I have written about each of these strongholds separately, and I knew they were among the ingredients that make for success. While I understood that each one of these ingredients is important for a life of success, I believed there was more to it.

And then something clicked. These three, while they matter in themselves as separate values, when combined, they work as a magic formula.

And I’m now presenting the Three Winning Cs: A Formula for Success.

Clarity

Some time ago, I wrote that clarity is king. Clarity in itself is powerful, because it’s the hallmark of direction. When you’re unclear about where you want to go, everywhere will look like it.

Have you seen a man who isn’t sure what to do next, where to go next, what to become? Such a man is like a ship without a rudder. Now picture it.

A rudder is what directs a ship at sea towards its true north. Take the rudder away, and that ship gets lost at sea. All things being equal, nothing will ever be equal about the person’s journey.

A person without clarity is a person who will never be motivated to say No. He’ll be a fine tool for other people’s journey, and he’ll go everywhere other people want to go, but never where he wants to.

In short, there’s no destination without clarity. It’ll all be a haze, and nobody who lives life in a haze ever becomes successful.

However, a person with clarity? A person who knows where he’s going? That person will go far. He doesn’t necessarily need to have it all figured out. He doesn’t need to yet know all the how-tos. He just needs to be clear about what he wants to do, and he’ll see the immediate path highlighted in front of him.

I’ll draw on Grey Keller’s book, The One Thing, where he talks about the fact that clearly defined goals don’t just provide direction, as is popularly known, it reconstructs perception.

Grey explained that when you give a target to the brain, the reticular activating system of the brain starts to filter reality in order to focus on the most relevant information. You then begin to see opportunities that you didn’t even know were there.

So in short, clarity doesn’t only tell you where to go; it shows you more of what you need to see.

A person whose path is clear in front of him knows what not to do, and that makes all the difference. Clarity informs laser-like focus, and that’s what makes all the difference between a great man and an average one.

Conviction

When I first started thinking about this formula, I thought, of course, conviction should come first. Conviction, in its very nature, is something everyone says that you’ve got to have first, before you can move with certainty through life, but I beg to differ.

Conviction comes after clarity. Conviction, as I’ve said once before, is the hill you’re willing to die on. It is what you believe with all your soul, regardless of the evidence in front of you.

It is what makes a man head in the direction of the sea when everyone else is running away from it — well, as long as he isn’t suicidal.

It is what makes your ‘No’ firmer. It gives a person fortitude. Conviction is the branch upon which the fruits of perseverance, tenacity, endurance, hope, and resilience are grown.

You cannot be tenacious about what you don’t strongly believe in. You cannot endure for a hope you are fickle in its belief. Conviction is the ingredient that births staying power.

Two years ago, in the community, Emprinte Readers Hub, we read a book that taught me more about conviction.

It was A Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. He spoke about life in the Nazi concentration camps, and how prisoners who survived weren’t necessarily the strongest ones. They were the ones with the deepest sense of conviction. They had a reason to live, and they believed that their lives had a meaning.

It was this book that made famous the quote, “Those who have a ‘Why’ to live can bear almost any ‘How’.”

While clarity is knowing what to stay in and keep at, conviction is what gives you the power to stay.

And then there is consistency.

Consistency

You can have clarity, you can be convicted about it enough to go at it with all your might, but if you are not consistent, you will not win.

Consider a planting analogy. You got mango seeds; that’s clarity. You knew what you wanted to plant even though you didn’t have the land and material resources to plant the seeds.

Now you look around, and you see that you don’t even have the necessary resources, but because you desire it so much, you want it with all your heart, you start talking about it. You start singing songs of it. Everyone you meet knows that you want to grow mango trees. And so, your conviction begins to pull resources to you, in the form of people who have land, in the form of farmers in clusters, in the form of volunteers, in the form of even more seeds.

Oh yes, that’s possible, and we saw it in Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, who said, “desire, held with a deep conviction, begins to attract conditions required for its fulfilment.” We also saw it even more beautifully in The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, who said, “Whatever you want with your whole heart, the universe conspires to help you achieve it.”

So you get what you need, but then you do not build the discipline to be consistent. To wake up every morning to do what needs to be done takes discipline. And discipline is a habit that you build, more than the first two.

The first two C’s take a mental knowing; the third C requires physical discipline, and that discipline is built from active work. Unfortunately, this is where many people falter and vanish.

That’s why you see one-hit wonders everywhere. They didn’t develop the physical fortitude to be disciplined enough to chip at something consistently.

James Clear in Atomic Habits even warned against this. People with conviction are intense, but without discipline, they aren’t consistent. And borrowing from the researches of James Clear, “It is not intensity that produces long-term achievement. It is consistency.”

Often, it’s at this third C that the men are separated from the boys; however, you need to understand here that it is all connected.

Success requires consistency; consistency is easier with conviction, and conviction never surfaces without clarity.

Now, I want you to understand that, perhaps, the sequence of the three Cs in this newsletter might not be your holy grail, and you could rearrange them and reinterpret them, and still be correct, one thing is a fact, and that’s the most important point in this text; if you acquire these three C’s, you will unmovable even in the face of the devil.

You will become an unstoppable force.

Do you want to become an unstoppable force on the way to success? Start here.

To your growth,

Your Coach,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired 🍃

I’ve been struggling to write. In fact, for the first time in more than eight years, I went an entire month without writing to you.

I have been through life-altering milestones, different upheavals, seasons of extraordinary pressure — and through all of it, I never failed to write at least once a month. Writing has been my constant. My discipline. My way of making sense of the world and sharing my learnings and what I find with you.

Now, this isn’t because I didn’t have things to write or I didn’t have things to share with you. No. In fact, I’ve learned much more in the past month than I have the entire year combined, and this is because I’ve read even more books in the past month — yes, I’ve been on summer holiday from school! And I have always been a big believer of the fact that if you put things inside you, you’ll bring things out. If you consume quality, you will produce substance. And yet, every time I sat down to write, I stopped in my tracks.

Why? Why haven’t I been producing? Here’s why. Like many other people in this age, I’ve fallen into a very dangerous trap. And I’ll explain.

I used to think — and I still do, that my biggest strength was communicating through written text. In simple form, I write. I can express myself, thoughts and ideas to perfection through writing. And I loved it. I loved that it differentiated me. It was a skill to be proud of, one that only a select few had. When you read something, you could tell the difference in quality if it was written by someone who really does know how to write, and someone who didn’t even know the basics of writing.

And I used writing as a tool for transformation and development, both of myself and of everyone else who takes the time to read my body of work. You’re reading this right now, which means you get the point. You have been transformed in some shape or form from a writing I did at some point in time.

However, these days, it’s quite difficult to differentiate. Writing is no longer a valued, differentiated, unique skill like it used to be. I am sure that people who used to write as a means to earn a living are today at an all-time low on patronage, and this is because of the big elephant in the room, Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial intelligence has made it possible that anyone can publish a body of work and express thoughts in writing in the most pitch-perfect of ways. They don’t even need to put pen to paper. They just need to probably type in a one-sentence prompt, one paragraph thought, and then they can get a full article, heck, an entire 500-page book about the subject matter.

I read an article the other day, and I almost could not tell the difference between whether it had been written with intention, if every word in the article had been crafted with feeling and emotion, or if it was just a generated article from someone who just wants to put something out and tick a box.

It doesn’t change the quality of the writing; in fact, you can argue that the quality of the writing is 2x, 3x better than what a writer would have originally written. The flow could even be better, the nodes hit properly, the grammatical points captured exemplarily, again, pitch perfect. But you have to point at some point and ask, what really is quality? Is it just correct grammar with a good flow? Or the ability to produce transformation?

And so every time I sit down to write to you, I think, why spend my time writing these thoughts, pouring my feelings and sweat into this when every article out there today, or at least 90% of them, are AI-generated? Why do I want to put in this amount of work and time to deliver an output that other people are delivering in 2 minutes, and you can hardly even tell the difference? I’d rather do something else with my time, or write and keep it with me.

That’s the trap. And I fell into it. Which led to the writing paralysis that made you wonder where I have been for the past month.

Then I started to realize something.

I was reading one evening, one of the many books I had consumed that month — and I noticed something that I had started to take for granted. I could feel the writer. Not just their ideas, but their presence. Their doubt and their conviction living in the same sentence. Their excitement at a discovery. Their struggle to find the right word. Their humanity, bleeding through the page.

And I thought.., that is what has been missing from everything I have been reading lately that felt hollow. Not information. Not structure. Not even argument.

Soul. The beating heart. The emotional part. The feeling. The soul. The heartfeltness, if there’s any word like that.

Readers feel that. They feel the intention. They feel the emotion the writer feels. They experience the joy he deploys in creation.

You see, when I write, I do not just produce text. I feel the growth happening in real time. I feel thoughts shifting as I type them, ideas I did not know I had until my fingers found them. I tweak and edit and circle back because something does not feel true yet. I experience, in the process of writing, something close to what I hope you experience in the process of reading. The intention and the feeling are inseparable from the output. They are the output.

And that’s something that will always be absent in entirely AI-generated content. AI has no soul. But don’t take my word for it.

While writing this, I looked up the internet to see if there’s any science around this, and I saw one from Paul Zak, a Neurologist at Claremont Graduate University. He found that narratives written with genuine emotional authenticity trigger the release of oxytocin in readers — a neurochemical tied to trust, empathy, and behaviour change. The soul of the writer, it turns out, is not just metaphorical. It is biochemical. It produces a measurable response in another human being. And it cannot be faked. AI has no emotional experience at the point of creation, which means it cannot produce that response, regardless of how perfect its sentences are.

An entity without a soul cannot inspire. While it gives you the knowledge, and builds your bank of head knowledge, it cannot, in itself, catalyze the needed change in you.

Another study I found, a 2023 study by the Reuters Institute, stated that readers now detect AI-generated content not through grammatical errors but through an absence of personal voice and lived experience. In short, we feel the difference. We have always felt it. We just now have language for what we were sensing.

And this is what makes writing to you even more valuable. And this goes beyond writing. It spans across hundreds of industries. Design, art, teaching, storytelling, you name it. AI creations don’t make your work redundant or relegated. They make it even more valuable.

Because you see, in a world where 95% of published content is AI-generated — technically sound, rich with information, lacking in emotion — the 5% that carries a real human heartbeat will be searched for, shared, remembered, and returned to. Not because it is more grammatically correct. Because it is more true.

And you can do even better than choose between the two. Write it first. Feel it. Pour yourself into it. Let it be imperfect and alive. Then optimise — feel free to use AI to sharpen the grammar, tighten the structure, catch what you missed. The combination of human soul and AI enhancement does not water down your work. It elevates it without hollowing it.

In the end, that makes your work even more valuable to the market, for generations to come.

I sat in that trap for a month. And I am glad I did — because coming out of it, I understand something I only half-believed before.

My writing is not less valuable because AI exists. It is more valuable, precisely because AI exists.

And so is yours. Whatever your craft, whatever your art, whatever the thing you produce that carries your real thinking and your real feeling. Design. Teaching. Storytelling. Leadership. Idea creation. The soul you bring to your work is not a quaint remnant of a pre-AI world. It is the thing the AI age cannot manufacture. It is your edge. It is, ironically, your gold.

Don’t let the realities of today’s age stop you from creating your work. Don’t fall into the trap of watering down your work and ideas by joining the masses to AI-generate the entire thing.

Create your art, feel it, experience it, breathe upon it, and optimize it.

The world doesn’t need more content. It needs more of you.

To Your Growth,

Your Coach,

Abiola Okunsanya.

What did I learn today?

Get in the habit of asking yourself that question at the end of every single day.

Not as a formality or as a journal prompt you fill in half-heartedly before sleep, no. As a genuine reckoning. Because the answer, or the absence of one, will tell you more about the trajectory of your life than almost anything else.

Here is what I mean.

Growth Does Not Happen By Accident.

If you are like most people, you have a picture in your head of who you want to become. Some version of yourself that is more capable, more impactful, more settled in purpose and direction. A future self you are, in varying degrees of consistency, working towards.

The distance between who you are now and that person is closed by one thing: growth. And growth, real, compounding, life-changing growth, is nothing more than deliberate additions to yourself. Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. Socially. Spiritually. Every area of your life in which you want to be more than you currently are requires you to add something to who you currently are.

But here is the part people don’t get: every single one of those areas traces back to the same source. The mind.

Think about physical growth. What does it actually take? You need to eat the right things, train the right muscles, and recover with the right habits. But before any of that can happen, you have to know what the right things are. You have to have learned what foods serve your body and which ones work against it. You have to understand which muscles to train and how. And beyond the knowledge, it takes a trained strength of mind to do what is needed consistently, especially on the days you do not feel like it.

Physical growth traces back to the mind. Always.

What about emotional growth? The ability to regulate yourself, to respond rather than react, to hold space for others without losing yourself, none of that is innate. Daniel Goleman, who brought the concept of Emotional Intelligence into mainstream conversation, was explicit about this. He explained that, unlike IQ, EQ is not fixed. It is developed. Through deliberate practice, through reflection, through learning how to read a room, how to name what you are feeling, how to choose your response instead of defaulting to your reaction.

His research found that emotional intelligence accounts for nearly 90% of what separates high performers from their equally skilled peers. Ninety percent. And it is learnable.

The same is true of spiritual growth, social growth, professional growth, and even financial growth. Every dimension of the person you are trying to become requires the same starting point.

Learning.

Learning and By-Chance Learning.

Here is where I want to stop and make a distinction that I think matters big time.

Some people, when they hear me say that intentional learning separates the top 20% from the rest, will push back. “Come on, Abiola, everyone learns something every day. You learn from conversations, from experiences, from just moving through life.” I used to think so too, which is why I understand why that feels true. But I have learned enough to understand why it isn’t true.

You see, what most people call learning is actually what I call now By-Chance Learning. It is the interesting fact you scrolled past on your phone. The half-absorbed podcast that was playing in the background while you made breakfast. The conversation that went in one ear and out the other. It is the information you encountered but didn’t engage with. The knowledge you nibbled on but didn’t retain. And By-Chance Learning, however much of it you accumulate, does not produce intentional growth. At best, it produces a By-Chance Shift; movement in a direction you never chose and cannot control.

Neuroscientist Dr. Michael Merzenich, widely regarded as the father of brain plasticity, found in his research that the brain physically rewires itself in response to deliberate, focused learning. The structural changes, the new neural pathways, the deepened connections that we associate with genuine growth do not occur through passive exposure. The brain changes when you engage intentionally. When you bring focus, purpose, and application to what you are learning. Intentional learning is not just more effective. It is a different thing entirely.

A study by the Jenkins Group found that 42% of university graduates never read another book after finishing their degree. Eighty percent of families did not buy or read a single book in the previous year. And while the exact figures shift depending on the study and the region, the consistent finding is this: formal education does not produce lifelong learners. Intentional habit does. And intentional habit is rare.

There is a quote I love and always go back to. Usually attributed to a Spanish writer, Miguel de Cervantes. He stated that, “By the street of By and By, one arrives at the house of Never.” My interpretation is that, without a direction, you will never arrive at your destination. If you are not intentionally learning, then you are not growing.

And here’s the scary truth. What are you doing if you are not growing? Just guess?! Yes! You are correct! You are dying! You are either green and growing, or you are brown and dying.

Build Your Own Learning Curriculum.

What am I saying in essence? Your level of intentionality in learning determines whether you become a top 20% person or fall in the least 80%. Those who spend more time intentionally learning are more likely to close the gap between who they are and who they want to be.

This is why you have to make learning the core of your daily life. Add it to your list of things to do each day. Be more intentional about your learning, your curriculum. Build a learning curriculum for yourself that serves as a map to who you want to be and where you want to go.

I would call this map a personal learning curriculum. A set of intentional directions. The books you are working through, the skills you are developing, the areas of your life or your field where you know there is a gap you are closing. A curriculum that serves your own aspirations. Not someone else’s definition of what you should know, but your own answer to the question: who am I becoming, and what does that person need to know?

Let me tell you an interesting fact. Darren Hardy, in The Compound Effect, shows mathematically that a 1% daily improvement compounds to a 37-fold improvement over the course of a year. Applied to learning, this means that one deliberately learned thing per day does not merely produce 365 units of growth. It produces compounding growth, growth that accelerates, that builds on itself, that makes you someone fundamentally different twelve months from now than you are today.

365 days. 365 deliberate additions to who you are. 365 inches closer to the person you are trying to become.

So, What Did You Learn Today?

I am not asking about what happened to you or what you stumbled across. I am asking, what did you deliberately, intentionally add to yourself today?

If you have a clear answer, you are among the few. Keep going. But if you don’t, and there is no shame in that, only let today be the day the question starts to matter. Let it sit with you. Let it make you slightly uncomfortable. Because that discomfort is the gap between who you are and who you want to be, making itself felt. Close it. One intentional learning at a time.

This is how people shoot themselves into the top 20%. Not by working harder than everyone else. Not by being more talented. But by choosing, every single day, to add something, deliberately, purposefully, to who they are.

You can be one of them.

Will you?

To Your Growth,
Your Coach,
Abiola Okunsanya
Handzinspired. ✨🍃

If you are like me, you have at some point sat in a classroom and thought: What is the point of any of this? Not as a passing frustration, but as a genuine, sitting-in-your-chest kind of question. Like something wasn’t adding up. Like the gap between what was being taught and what life actually required was so wide you weren’t sure a bridge existed.

I remember one Accounting class during my undergraduate days. I looked around the room and felt, not boredom exactly, but disconnection. Like I had wandered into the wrong story, it felt like an epiphany of the wrong kind: that I was supposed to be doing something else, somewhere else, and that nothing in that room was going to get me there.

Perhaps I was looking through an ignorant lens. A lens that didn’t yet understand what learning really is, or what it is for.

I still believe, genuinely, that there is a lot wrong with the educational systems of today, particularly across Africa. Too many stale concepts. Too much that has no bearing on real life. Too much that needs to be ejected from the current curriculum. That is something I have dedicated significant energy to addressing through the work I am building.

But this piece is not about what is broken. It is about what works. It is about the moments when something you once dismissed as useless suddenly reveals itself as exactly the tool you needed. And it is about one concept in particular that quietly changed the way I approach every single day.

Here is what I have come to believe: you do not truly learn something the moment a teacher explains it to you. You learn it the moment you can apply it to your own life. The moment it stops being information and starts being a lens. That is the AHA, and once it happens, you cannot unhear it.

For me, that click happened with a concept from Economics class.

The first time I ever encountered maximum utility, I was sitting in a lecture, half-engaged, trying to follow along without getting lost in the dy/dx notation I had already decided was not for me. I found Economics genuinely interesting, the ideas, the logic of how the world works. It just became complex when all the graphs started to look alike.

The concept of utility is essentially the satisfaction you get from a product you buy, a service you receive, or even an action that you perform. In terms of economics, it makes total sense, as at the basest level, economics is about scarcity and how it affects the demand and supply of goods and services, from the smallest unit of the economy (an individual) to the largest (trade between countries and continents). It is a great framework for understanding markets. Interesting in a textbook. But on its own, for daily life? It felt like information with nowhere to go.

Until it didn’t.

There was a Saturday, I think a year before graduation, when I was staring at a list of things I could do with my time. I had a few things on the horizon. A social event. A book I had been meaning to read. A business conversation I kept postponing. A rest I genuinely needed.

And I caught myself thinking, which of these gives me the most return? Not financially. But in terms of who I am becoming, what I am building, what I will feel at the end of the day when I look back at how I spent those hours. Which choice delivers the most satisfaction, not just immediate satisfaction, but the kind that compounds?

That was maximum utility. Applied not to a market, but to my life.

I chose the book and the business conversation. I postponed the social event. I did not feel guilty because I had a framework. I was not being antisocial; I was being intentional. I was optimising. And when the day ended, I felt the particular satisfaction that comes from spending time in alignment with your values and your vision. That feeling, I have come to understand, is maximum utility delivered.

What The Maximum Utility Lens Actually Does For You

When you start approaching your days through the lens of maximum utility, something shifts in how you make decisions. You begin to ask different questions. Not just, what should I do today? But, what can I do today that puts me in the best possible position, for my growth, my values, my future? Not just, should I say yes to this? But, what does this cost me, and what does it return?

And here is the distinction that matters most: there is instant utility, and there is delayed utility.

Instant utility is the satisfaction you get right now, the laugh from a scroll, the comfort of avoiding a hard conversation, the ease of rest when you should be building.

Delayed utility (or as it is popularly called, delayed gratification) is the satisfaction that compounds, the growth from a book read, the relationship built through a difficult conversation, the result produced by the work done when you didn’t feel like it.

The most intentional people I know are masters of delayed utility. They have trained themselves to defer the small, immediate satisfaction for the larger, longer-lasting one. They read instead of scrolling. They build instead of consuming. They invest instead of spending. They choose the harder action today because they can see the utility it will return tomorrow, next year, a decade from now.

This is not about punishing yourself or denying yourself joy. It is about becoming someone who can see further than the moment. Someone who is not ruled by the nearest source of pleasure, but guided by a clear sense of what actually satisfies, deeply, lastingly, meaningfully.

Here’s How You Can Apply This Immediately

Look at your hands. Look at your day. Look at the task in front of you, the resource you are holding, the time you have between now and when you sleep tonight.

Ask yourself: how can this deliver maximum utility to me?

Not what is easiest. Not what feels best in the next ten minutes. But what, if done with intention and clarity, if done in alignment with who you are becoming, gives you the most return on the investment of your time, your energy, and your focus?

The person who thinks this way consistently does not always get everything right. But they end up with more than the person who never asks the question at all. They end up, over time, with a life that reflects what they actually value, because they kept choosing it, one maximised decision at a time.

As it seems, our Economics teacher was teaching us how to live. Perhaps the same applies to other courses.

The important thing is, would you listen, learn, and apply it to life?

To Your Growth,

Your Coach

Abiola Okunsanya

Handzinspired.

I learned quickly in life that moving in the wrong direction is two, sometimes three times better than not moving at all. Yes. Every time you make the decision to move, chances are, you are moving in the wrong direction, but even wrong directions build a man more than staying in one place.

At certain points in a man’s life, there would be a lack of clarity for the next step. There would be moments when you aren’t sure of what to do next, what you are capable of, where to go, how to get there, who to meet with, or what to do. If you are by any chance feeling something similar right now, you are not alone.

There are days when the fear of the unknown, the fear of uncertainty, or lack of ability cripples and makes us doubt every single thing that we have ever been sure of. These days will happen. These days are happening to so many people, right in this moment even. And again, it is completely fine.

What is not fine, however, is sitting around and waiting to be sure. And that’s the mistake many people make. They sit around waiting to get it right. They get so scared to commit an error that they never do anything. They stay indoors, trying to get it perfect, trying to not only be sure of where to go, but even how to get there, so they wait, and wait, and wait, until it becomes irrelevant for them to move.

Many times, this waiting is disguised as patience, but in truth, it’s just being a slave to fear. Some people also disguise it as perfection, but even that is a myth. What is really keeping a lot of people from moving, what is keeping them hemmed to the familiar, to where they have always been all their lives, is fear of what would happen if they move.

They have these goals and dreams in their heads, and they live in there — they prefer to live in there, in the guise of trying to make things perfect, when in truth, they secretly fear that they won’t achieve those things if they move, or even worse, they fear what would happen, and what would change if they indeed succeed in those dreams.

My advice? No matter what, no matter how you’re feeling, no matter what you think, know, don’t think, or don’t know, always move. Even if you aren’t sure of the direction, still move, while trying to discover if it’s the right or wrong direction. Even if you aren’t sure of how you’ll get to the destination you have set for yourself, still move. Take one step forward. For it is in moving that you become.

When you move, you learn, you develop, you grow, you fail, you learn things that don’t work, and that adds to your knowledge. You pick up gems, dark and golden ones along the way that help you become the person who eventually is capable of seeing the right path and walking in it.

I am sure you have heard the modern proverb by now that says, “A moving man will one day meet his luck. The road favors the traveller.” Nothing is truer than this. My advice is that you be the moving man. Be in motion. Be active. You won’t always be correct, you won’t always hit all the goals, you won’t always be on the right path, but that’s fine. You will be moving, you’ll be learning, you’ll be growing, and there’d be a higher chance of getting it right sooner than later.

There’s likely a 1 in 100 chance you’ll become a smashing success. Would you rather wait for that 1 chance of perfection, or would you rather take up 100 chances in motion? Which would be more likely to make you a resounding success?

A few weeks ago, I was listening to a podcast, and the guest said something that’s stayed with me. He said, “They say one in seven businesses fail. So I started nine.”

Be the Moving Man. Not because the path is clear, not because you’re ready. But because the person you are becoming exists only on the other side of motion. Start. Adjust. Keep going. One day, sooner than you think, you will look back and be grateful you didn’t wait.

To Your Growth,

Your Coach,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired

This newsletter is a leaked conversation with a friend. I can’t help but feel like I am doing something wrong and not being a good friend. Even though I already asked for permission to write about this, it still feels like something I shouldn’t be doing. However, the feeling that this would do your growth a world of good certainly outweighs my conscience. You know what they say, the end justifies the means, aha. I hope the end of this is your growth, a trigger that leads you into the life that you should be living now!

If you’re not interested in listening to someone else’s struggles and the potential solution to that struggle, you can close the newsletter at this point.

A few days ago, I was talking to a friend who told me he felt like he was at a fix in his life where nothing makes sense. Let’s call him Abdullah.

Abdullah explained that in the past few weeks, he hasn’t been waking up as he should, tackling life the way he was used to attacking it, and following the routines that he has set for himself.

In his own exact words, “It feels like I am losing a grip of what I used to call purpose. I remember I used to have something that kept me up late into the night, and even woke me up in the early hours of the morning. But now, it seems as if the bed is more attractive than anything else I am doing at the moment. It seems like scrolling through X for nothing in particular, or looking for movies on Netflix, feels more interesting than anything else that can be termed productive at the moment. All in all, sleep is what has dominated most hours of my life in the past few weeks. It’s crazy, but I used to be more productive than this. I don’t know what changed.”

I paused for what seemed like five minutes before I responded. I knew exactly what he was feeling, what he was going through, even all the thoughts he had yet to express to me. I understood perfectly because just a few months ago, I felt the exact same way. But it was going to be too cliche and might even come off as insensitive if I simply said, “I understand, here and here is what you need to do.”

So I asked him, “Hmm, I can’t say I fully understand what you’re going through, but there must be a reason why you have shared this with me, so would you like to work through it together, and hopefully, we find what’s wrong and how to fix it?”

He nodded, and I proceeded. “Abdullah, take a moment to look back at the time that you used to feel productive. What exactly were you producing?”

From the way he looked, it was obvious that he didn’t understand the question, so I explained, “What was it that made you feel productive all those months ago? What were you working towards? What was your end goal?”

“Ohh! I was mainly working towards gaining admission into the university for my master’s degree, and that happened.” He affirmed.

“So it seems like you achieved that one goal, and then you hung up your boots.” I paused again to see if he’d figure it out. After a long while of silence, I asked him, “Would you say that gaining admission for your postgraduate degree, or whatever your next goal is, is the purpose of your life? The reason you’re living?”

“I am really not sure of the answer to the question you’re asking me. I believe the reason why I am living is to simply live, be happy, be fulfilled.”

“But the reason you’re feeling this way is that you aren’t feeling fulfilled. Think of it like a big drum of water. The purpose of the drum is to hold as much water as possible. When the drum is filled up to capacity, you can say the drum is ‘fully filled,’ or as you call it, fulfilled. Every drop, every action, all the bits and pieces that made the drum fill up to maximum capacity are the goals, the milestones, the ‘postgraduate admissions,’ etc. One bucket of water doesn’t fill the drum. Also, the drum never remains filled forever, especially when it’s still in use.

“Think of yourself as the big drum of water. You have to identify what you are meant to hold; what your water is, what your exact purpose is. I believe you pretty much already know what it is, and that’s why you set a goal to get a master’s degree, right?”

“Errm, it just felt like the next right step. Everyone is getting a master’s degree. Plus, I want to be more valuable in the marketplace for jobs.”

“Abdullah,” I said to him, “if that’s all there is to it, I am afraid, it’s not good enough. You have to find what your ‘water’ is, and how this current phase of your life fits into it. That’s how you will be able to identify what the next bucket of water to fetch into your drum will be. Identifying that and attuning yourself to it will inspire you to wake up every day as you should, and work through the day as you should.”

“It all still feels like a parable, AB.” Yeah, Abdullah calls me AB.

I sighed when I realized I hadn’t been communicating in a way that he could understand. “There’s a reason why you’re existing in the first place. The reason can change as you change, but there’s an overarching reason. Now, the reason isn’t something that can be perpetually or permanently fulfilled as long as you’re still in existence, but you certainly can feel fulfilment as you go. Think of it as a journey. There are so many things you have to do on this journey towards your purpose. Examples could be getting a master’s degree, relocating, starting a business, or passing an exam. You have to determine what those things are. These things are milestones. Once you achieve it, there’s the next thing to achieve on your journey. Working on these things is what will make your bed less attractive than it currently is.

“There are several reasons why you could be in this rut. It could be that you have not identified your next milestone on your journey, or you haven’t even identified your journey, or the milestone towards your goal isn’t strong enough to inspire you out of bed earlier than most people.”

“Hmmm, I am not sure I have identified my exact journey. What do I do if I haven’t identified my journey?”

“It’s completely okay for you not to have identified your journey right now, but what is not okay is you not doing anything to identify that journey. And I think identifying your journey, the reason for your existence, should be more than enough inspiration to keep you up at night, and keep you away from spending half your day in bed. It’s the one most important thing in life.”

“That makes sense. What if I have found my journey? What if I already know what my purpose is? But I am still finding myself sleeping for longer than a person who wants success should be sleeping?”

I could sense that Abdullah genuinely wanted a solution to his predicament. “It means you have to find your next milestone. It’s easier. You know where you are headed, you know where you are. What is the next junction? Identify it and make it potent enough to keep you up at night. If you haven’t identified that milestone, identifying it should also be the reason why your bed loses its attractiveness.”

“Wow. It’s clear enough. One last thing that isn’t clear, though,” he adjusted, “in finding my purpose, what my journey is, where do I start from?”

I smiled, because this is a question people often ask me. “Somehow, it’s easier than you think. It lies in exploring five questions. What are you passionate about? What is something that gives you so much joy and also causes your gravest anger? What are your skills? What’s something you’ve realized people would gladly pay you for? What is one thing people compliment you on the most? What is an experience that has defined most of my life? Your journey is at the intersection of the answer to all of these questions.”

Abdullah repeated it as if he was largely talking to himself. Counting with his fingers.

“What am I passionate about?

What can I do better than most people?

What will people gladly pay me for?

What’s the object of my happiness and anger?

What’s one compliment I have received the most from other people?

What is an experience that has defined most of my life?

That’s six questions.”

“Well, same difference. Answering these questions will get you on the right track.” I said, thinking, what does it matter if it was six or five questions?

“Thank you so much, AB. At least I have something to think about that’d keep me up tonight, and make me wake up early tomorrow morning.”

“Yes. Win-win situation.” I grinned.

“Win-win?” Abdullah frowned, confused. “You pretty much helped me unravel myself. It’s a win for me. I don’t plan to pay you, so how is it a win for you?”

“Other than the fact that I find joy in helping people grow, I have also been recording this. I will leak this conversation. I think it’ll help someone going through the same thing you are experiencing.”

“Fairs.”

During this entire conversation, I thought about you, yes, you reading this now. If you feel in the slightest what Abdullah felt before this conversation, please find your next milestone, or find your journey. Millions of lives might depend on it.

To your growth

Your Coach,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired.

This is for those who sometimes feel zero inspiration.

For those who know they have been made for more, but can’t seem to make themselves do more. For those who have found purpose, and they feel it strongly enough in their hearts, but that feeling, that knowing, hasn’t been enough to push them through every day. For those who truly believe that somehow, slowly, time is slipping away, and they are missing out for lack of inspiration.

This is for you.

As we step into the second quarter of 2026, I want you to cast your mind back to the beginning. Where did it all start? How did it all start? When did it all start? Who or what did it start with?

What inspired you at the beginning? Pause. Reflect.

You don’t need to take a lot of time to figure out where it started from. We hardly ever forget the day our lives changed forever. Unless you are in denial, you must know exactly what I am talking about. I want you to lay hold of that reflection, the place, the moment that pushed you into action. Your initial trigger. Some call it the spark. In this newsletter, we’ll call it the source.

The Concept of The Source

There’s an adage in the Yoruba language that says, ‘Odo to ba gbagbe orisun e, o ma gbe danu,’ roughly translating to, ‘A river that forgets its source will surely dry up.’ And it is mostly used in the context of forgetting cultures, backgrounds, sparks, triggers, really, the starting point of everything.

The extent of success you have today, the number of awards, the distance you have traveled up to now in your journey, the achievements you have garnered, and the person you are, right in this moment, started from somewhere. It was caused by something. It has a source. And many times, the reason you feel uninspired, knowing you could be doing more, but not being sure where to start from exactly, the reason it seems like you can’t even get any ideas to start with, even when you’re surrounded with gnawing opportunities, is because you have spent a long time away from the beginning, away from the source where it all started.

Think of this version of you as a river, and feeling uninspired is feeling ‘dried up’. The only reason you are feeling dried up right now isn’t that the source no longer exists; no. It is because the connection between you and the source has waned. It is because you have not taken a deliberate step to reconnect yourself with the source of the river. The source is what feeds you and keeps you flowing.

Many rivers have many sources. Your initial source of inspiration could have been a place, a practice, a presence, a person, or even a state of mind. It could be anything, and the truth is, you’d know, deep down inside of you, where your inspiration comes from, and what you need to do to get back to that place and draw your inspiration again.

Disciplined Inspiration

Disciplined Inspiration is when you resolve that, despite all the barriers, embargoes, and all the excuses that you have let stop you in the past, you are going to reconnect to your source again. This is when you maintain enough discipline to be inspired again. As much as it seems like it, the truth is, inspiration isn’t haphazard or random. It is intentional, requiring specific ingredients and deliberate action. It requires discipline.

It’s going to be difficult, maybe even painful, maybe even expensive to reconnect. Discipline always is. But you need to ask yourself, what is the alternative? Isn’t the alternative more difficult? More painful? More expensive? The alternative to building discipline to be inspired once again is living an uninspired, unfulfilling, undignified life. You don’t want the alternative.

In the voice of Jim Rohn, “You are going to have either of two pains in life. The pain of regret or the pain of discipline.” The pain of discipline will sting only for a short while. The pain of regret will last a lifetime.

Now you know, just like everything else, inspiration requires discipline. If you are feeling uninspired, now you know it’s not an uncontrollable situation. It is an issue of discipline. Make it your mission to develop the discipline to go back to the beginning, to where it all started.

Growth requires purpose. Purpose requires inspiration. Inspiration comes from a source. Going back to that source requires discipline. Discipline is in your control.

This quarter is in your control. What will you do with it?

To your growth,

Your Coach,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired. ✨

Time and time again, I have meditated on this phrase. I have wondered why, throughout the entire world, there must be people who will remain poor. Not because they have been predestinated to be poor, I don’t think that exists, but because they will work their way into poverty. And the good teacher, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, clocked this more than 2,000 years ago.

It sounds almost like a prophecy, but when you think through those words, you’d realize that there isn’t anything else that comes close to it in the arena of facts. It is almost like having two options, always and forever, and making the decision to choose one of those options. Just like life and death, in that phrase, there’s ‘the poor’, and there is ‘you.’ Not ‘You’ as in a second person pronoun, but ‘You’ as in a subject matter, as another option.

We see so many options in the holy book: Life and Death, Obedience and Sacrifice, Law and Grace, Good and Evil, Truth and Falsehood, Knowledge and Ignorance, etc. Then there is The Poor and You, in that same parallel.

The Poor and You have a lot of similarities, not so many striking differences, but defining ones. The Poor have dreams, just like you. Sometimes, even a higher quality of dreams. The Poor have ideas, skills, talents, and attitude, the same way you do. They want things as much as you do; in fact, many of them have raw belief in themselves for days. Both categories have resources, a lot of them, not starved, not denied, completely stuffed with all they ever could need.

The only tangible difference between the Poor and You isn’t what they have, but what they do with what they have. Scarcity and plenty are relative, and the one who never thinks in terms of the former will always have the latter.

There’s an entire world in your head, and in that world, there’s who you want to be, who you believe you are still alive to become, who you are currently supposed to be to attain what you are striving for, and what you should be doing on the journey to being that person in your head.

Then there is an entire other world in reality, and in this world, there’s who you are right now, who you are in fact, going to become if you continue on the journey of who you currently are, and then there’s what you are actually doing.

These two worlds aren’t only different, they are the exact opposite of each other. One is Mercury, the other is Pluto, and it is the extent of this difference that defines your category. It is the extent of this difference that makes you among the Poor or the ‘You.’

A friend of mine would say, ‘knowing better doesn’t necessarily translate into doing better,’ and I think I know what’s missing now. There is a hollow between knowing and doing, an emptiness that needs to be filled up. And the property that fits into that space perfectly is ‘wanting.’

You could know better, but if you don’t want better, you will never do better. Which begs the question, how badly do you want not to be among the Poor? Is it showing in your actions? Your conduct? The way you show up for your dreams every single day? No, tell me, is it? To what extent?

Today, I dare say that all we have in this world is information. We are past the point of knowing. This means that we all know better. You know exactly what you need to do to close the gap between the person in your head and the person you are today. If you don’t know, then it means you have made a deliberate effort not to know, and it also means that you have made a deliberate effort to be among the Poor.

You see, that divorce between knowing and doing, that’s where the stench of dissonance lies. Knowing who you are meant to be, but not wanting it bad enough to get off your bed and do it? It smells. It smells so bad, you would know that you are tending towards poverty.

And the sad thing is, it first smells to you and you alone for a long time, before the stench begins to diffuse and other people start to see the difference, a disagreement between who you say you are, who you say you want to be, and what you are doing to achieve it.

You would know, if you are being truthful to yourself, that you are tending towards the point where you begin to realize that perhaps, when the good teacher said, “the poor you will always have with you,” He wasn’t talking to you. He was talking about you.

I think this is why they say, you first lose the battle in private before it is lost publicly. The man who falls in public has fallen long, long ago in private.

You are probably at a point where you are beginning to perceive the stench of dissonance; nobody else can smell it right now, just you. The ideal you is headed south, and you are in reality, heading north. Consider this a wake-up call, and do a ninety-degree turn towards the life you truly believe you are meant to live—the life and growth you picture attaining for your future self.

Perhaps it is time to find your desire. You’ve got to find the obsession for the life you know you should be living, because that’s the only way you can put yourself in the conversation. Make that obsession the driving force that bridges the hollow between where you are right now and where you should be. Grow that obsession to a point where the stench you’ve been perceiving due to your apathy is dispersed.

That’s the only way, when they talk about the Poor in your presence, the context will be about what you can do to help them.

To your growth,

Your Coach,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired.

What was your dream as a child? For many of us, due to our realities, the kind of environment we grew up in, the kind of schools we attended, what we saw could be achieved, we had very small dreams. Our dreams growing up were what we believed could be achieved. And so we dreamt in line with our realities, and that has kept us small—a lot of us.

The day I grew up was the day I recognized that there is more along my path, and I must expand and stress further than the immediate environment. It was the day that the command God gave Father Abraham took on new meaning: ‘As far as your eyes can see.’

The day I grew up was the day I decided that I was going to stop playing small, playing along the lines of the domestication that I received growing up where I grew up and with the people I grew up.

You see, our environment primed us to go to school, learn archaic skills and thinking patterns just enough for us to find and hold a job, provide for our immediate family so that we will not be accursed, and live the life that the education we have been provided with by the environment and society affords us. Sadly, more than 80% of people in this world have fit into this category, into this bucket, and even as time passed and they grew older, too old to be domesticated, they began to domesticate themselves and live in line with the priming of the environment. Sadly, 80% of the people in this world have refused to grow up.

Very few people found this secret. Jim Rohn was one of them, which was why he stressed, every chance he got, to say that we should “work more on ourselves than we do on our jobs.” Many live pathetic, average lives, not because it’s any fault of theirs. It is because that is what life can afford those who cannot break out of the cycle of mind-control they have been imprisoned in. They live through their lives being dependent on what someone else decides to give them, living from hand to mouth, just enough to provide something for the month, living for their jobs, or, as Prince EA would define a ‘job’ to be, living “just over broke”.

The day I grew up was the day I realized that life is meant to be lived, the messiness of it all, the riskiness of it all, the anxiety, pain, hunger pangs, life is meant to be lived. Not securely, but passionately, fulfillingly, daringly, impactfully. Not quietly, avoiding trials, but audaciously, ravishingly, fully, edgily. Not just offering yourself to be bought, but delivering solutions for humanity.

The day I grew up was the day I realized that I hadn’t been seeing enough. I hadn’t broken the limits of my background, of the environment I grew up in, of the bad habits I learned over time. I was still living through the lessons that had been drummed into my mind over many years; that I must get into the labour market, I must have grades good enough to earn barely decent wages under good employment so I can take care of my family. It is the day I realized that deep was calling, and for a life that believes that there are deeper things, it must break out of what it had been primed for all those many years.

The day I grew up was the day I started asking questions, and the first question I asked myself was, what exactly is my purpose? To truly impact, to truly establish that which becomes a solution to the lives of many? To give myself in service that directly eases the journey and progress of millions of people? Or to simply be an escort along on the purpose of other people? A hireling in someone else’s legacy just for the sake of earning enough to provide for my family?

It was the day I realized that I was either working for money, or working for a purpose, that I was either earning a living or making a life, and that to make a life, I must see beyond what I see now, I must cross bridges with the eyes of my mind, long before I even get within meters of those bridges. That I must work harder on myself than I do on my job, demand more of myself, find a cause that gets me up with the first crow and makes me eager to go again the next day.

The day I grew up was the day I realized that nobody cares for me as I care for myself. Nobody will love me as I love myself; nobody thinks of me as the primary actor in their lives. There is only one movie in which I am the main actor. That only movie is the one I am directing with my life. Nobody else sees my interests as the most primary one in their lives. Not my parents, not my siblings, not my spouse, not my friends, not my colleagues, not my employers, not my employees, and to think otherwise is to play the fool. It was the day I found that to do anything else but that which satisfies your soul, fulfils your spirit, and enhances the quality of yourself is to betray the integrity of your being.

This is not to sound like a nihilist, no. It is not to say that other people don’t care for me, no. God knows I have the best people in my life. I have people who’d put themselves in discomfort to ensure I survive. Dare I say, there are people who’d even put themselves in harm’s way to ensure I do not die. These are the best people in life, and yet, it’d be a gross delusion to think that I am the primary person in their lives. Even I shouldn’t want that. Who’d have thought that growing up also meant demanding or expecting less from other people who aren’t you?

The day I grew up is the day I discovered that Jesus’s admonition in that room, the day the lady Mary washed his feet with her hair and with oil, wasn’t a mere proverb. It was a fact. “The poor you will always have with you.” The kind of conviction in this statement proved that he knew that the very fabric of some people’s souls would keep them poor. Somehow, I cannot help but feel like there was an implicit meaning to that sentence. Almost like he was saying that you can choose who you’d be: the poor or the rich.

We all have the same life, but the sad truth is, some people’s lives will be spent within the domestication that serves the needs of a very few people, while some others? Some others will find their way into the class of those ‘very few people’ because they have dared to challenge the norm, break rules, and design for themselves new rules for the poor to follow. Don’t you find it ironic that the ones who create rules are the ones who dared to break the ones that existed before?

I draw again, on the wise sayings of Jim Rohn. He sounded it constantly, that we might all be equal in soul value, but we are not equal in economic value. To know the difference is to have grown up. And each one of us has the opportunity to increase our economic value, if only we would dare break out of the cocoon that the learnings of our past years have built around us.

The day I grew up was the day I discovered what life is all about. To spend a time seeking within one’s self, one’s purpose, then find that the purpose is tied to the service of other people and also ever growing, and then to spend each day increasing one’s value, not for a job, not for an employer or within an employment, not to grease the ego of other people, but to expand one’s self in constant pursuit, trying to catch up with the purpose for which one is alive. To continue to do the hard things, close the gap slowly between you and that ever-growing purpose; that person you want to be.

Living is you making sure to cast more daily votes towards becoming the person who can carry on the purpose you have identified than you cast votes against. And finally, to never shy away from demanding more, and also saying no to exploiters (in the form of clients, friends, employers, family, customers, business partners, etc.) who would not mind using your worth and lifetime just to be paid a miserly fee, below your worth, to the extent that they are allowed to.

The day I grew up was the day I realized that my purpose is to see people grow, and to know that, no matter how little, I have been a part of that growth.

I hope this piece qualifies as another installment towards making that happen.

To your growth,

Your Coach,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired.

In 5 years, you will arrive. The question is, where? Will you arrive at a designed destination, or an undesigned destination?

— Jim Rohn

I have been doing you a disservice. I have been wrong, and I am sorry. I hope you find it in your heart to forgive me. Here’s why.

The one thing that has been a recurring theme in my life, which has caused me to grow sporadically and also to share with you some of the things I have learned through my growth, is the community I belong to: Emprinte Readers Hub.

This is a community that has been responsible for more than 80% of the growth I have experienced in my life in the past three years, and even though I have mentioned this community in pockets, quietly and subtly across many newsletters, I am sorry I haven’t been very direct about it. I think that has been my way of protecting the place where I am being formed, no, the place where I am being transformed. Please feel free to explore Emprinte Readers Hub. But that’s not the focus of this newsletter.

There’s a reason why I decided to start this newsletter introducing you to the community is that, as I sat down to write this newsletter, every single subject, topic, and even idea worth sharing with you today, I could directly trace it to something we learned in the community, so, even though I will still be writing and sharing fish with you, because I do this for selfish reasons—my fulfilment, I thought it was best to show you where I catch the majority of my fish as well.

Since the beginning of this year, the focus has been on the inner life, on becoming the kind of person capable of achieving our aspirations. We learned about habits in January, read Atomic Habits, and even built a system to form new habits, which will bring us closer to becoming the person of our dreams.

We had learned the previous month from Jim Rohn that if we don’t change, nothing will change. For anything to change, we must change, and we have taken that seriously, built structures and systems that would make staying the same almost impossible. We want to be remembered as the ones who lived impeccable lives.

Now, ‘impeccable’ here doesn’t mean perfect. It means striving for perfection every single day, knowing fully well that it is a journey, like purpose, and the day we eventually achieve it is the day we are laid to rest. It means being impeccable with our speech, with our actions, our reactions, our habits, with our goals, even when no one else is watching.

Practicing impeccability is stamping your foot on the ground and deciding the kind of person you want to be, and then pausing in your tracks when you find yourself slipping into old habits, and retracing your steps. It is picking yourself back up when you eventually slip into those old habits, apologizing when you need to, and meaning every ounce of it, because it is not about anyone else. It is about you.

However, before I get ahead of myself, I’d better take a couple of steps back and explain exactly what I mean.

I like to think that we have different areas of life that culminate into one big whole. Our physical health, finances, mental health, careers, habits, productivity, our spiritual life, academics, and so on. Many experts have categorized it differently. Robin Sharma even split it into four: the Heartset, the Mindset, the Soulset, and the Healthset.

In all, regardless of how you choose to categorize it, for structure purposes, you can organize your life along these pockets, and when you do, you’ll find out that every single one of your goals, past, present, and future, falls into at least one or more of these categories.

Now, picking a category, setting a goal in that category, and choosing to go at it with the highest standards possible, that’s what it means to live impeccably. It is leaving no stone unturned. It is going at it until it is impossible to go at it anymore. It is saying that you will change something and actually do everything in your power to change it.

The impeccable life is the life that is fulfilled, and before long, achieves every conceivable thing. It is the life that picks a goal and decides to pursue that goal with the highest standards ever known.

We are currently reading the Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, and it is no surprise that the first thing the author demands is to be impeccable with your Word. You must have heard time and again that your word is your bond, it is what shapes your environment and essentially transforms your life.

Being impeccable with your Word is as simple as refusing to say anything untrue or unjust, anything that is capable of casting aspersions upon someone else. It is instead, forcefully choosing to use your word for only that which is true, just, and kind.

However, impeccability, as you have seen, goes beyond words. You can be impeccable with your environment, making it look exactly like where you want to live in the future. You can be impeccable with your actions and reactions, constantly demanding the highest standards of yourself. You can be impeccable with every single goal across different areas of your life, doing that which you have decided is the right thing to do, for yourself, and for every party concerned.

This goes beyond one religion or morality, far from it. This is about you, and the kind of life you want for yourself. And yes, you must have heard it again and again, but you can design the life that you want to see in 5 or 10 years. Jim Rohn will say, no matter what, you will arrive. The only question is, where?

If you spend your days designing where you want to arrive at, by setting agreements and decisions with yourself and going at them with the highest standards possible, doing the very best with what you have and know, you will arrive at a well-designed destination; a destination designed by you.

However, if you don’t spend your days designing intentionally and showing up impeccably in all areas of your life, you will, in fact, arrive at a destination you didn’t design, living in a country you don’t want to live in, working a job you hate, married to a wife you never chose, driving a car you hate, and living a life you detest.

My only charge in this newsletter is for you to live impeccably. Allow impeccability permeate every single area of your life. Take pen to paper, design the life you want, break down that life into milestones, craft the goals to achieve within a given timeframe, and set action points that will get you that life, and then go at every single action point with the highest standards possible.

So that at the end of the day, the answer to that question would be, “I lived impeccably today. I pursued the highest standards, and today I got a step closer to the life I want for myself.” And then on days when you fall short, be impeccable about it. “Today, I didn’t make progress. I didn’t hold myself to the standards I set for myself. I will make up for it tomorrow by going twice as hard. I will live the impeccable life.”

You must now understand why I had to apologize at the beginning. This is just one tiny droplet of many things I have learned with Emprinte Readers Hub just this year alone, and I hope you find a community that does the same for you, a community that teaches you that a transformed life is facilitated by impeccability, and impeccability begins with truth.

To a life of impeccability,

Your Coach,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired.

Ironic, but consistency can be the very ingredient stalling your success.

— Abiola Okun

I have been thinking a lot about why seemingly hardworking people often fail to succeed, especially in our part of the world. People toil day and night, working tirelessly, waiting and hoping that someday, the light will shine on them, but sadly, it never does. And recently, I have been asking myself, why? Why? Why?

It would be very deceitful to hang everyone’s failure on their inability to work hard, or even work smart. There are more people who have succeeded without ever having to toil as hard as a lot of people who have remained in the proverbial captivity of the stagnant life. A life where the more you earn, the more you need to spend. A life where the higher you earn, the more broke you actually are, the less happy you really are, and the less healthy you get because the system, the economy, has been designed to keep you that way; ever wanting, ever pursuing, never seeming to get ahead of the curve, stuck in the rat race. I ask myself, why? It’s not for lack of hard work. It’s not even for lack of smart work. It’s the waiting. That’s the real issue.

I come from a place where everyone is waiting around to ‘blow’, hoping that some day, their work will speak for them, praying that perhaps, someone somewhere is watching the work they do and will reach out. That maybe if they put out the same work every single day, one day, they will ‘break out’. Well, I hate to break it to you, many, too many people have done this and never broken out. Maybe only a very few of them do, maybe only 1%. And even that 1% didn’t just sit around to break out. It’s the sitting around. That’s the real issue.

Many of us are waiting, hoping, for life to happen to us. For our fortunes to change. We hope that this year, things will turn around for the better, and the work we do will eventually speak for us. Maybe. But most likely not.

You have been consistent, I get it. Consistency is one thing. It’s just one part of the formula. Heck, it’s only one part of a nonexistent formula. Nonexistent because, just when you think you have hacked the success formula, you find that there’s one extra ingredient. Consistency is just one of the numerous ones.

Please, remain consistent, but this is more than just consistency. In fact, as ironic as it sounds, dear reader, consistency can be the very ingredient stalling your success. Someone once said that it is the very definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result. Leaving your becoming to hopes, to chance, that one day, if you are consistent enough, the tide will turn for you. Maybe it won’t.

The issue is the waiting around, the doing the same thing, the trying not to offend, the hoping upon hopes, the longing for life to touch you, the praying that someone else sees the value that you bring, the leaving life to chance, and waiting for it to happen you. It is living life on deferral.

Yesterday, I heard someone call it living ‘the deferred life’. And it all made complete sense. Many of us are living on deferral. Most of us.

It is why you never turn things around and live the same life year in, year out. In safety rather than fulfilment. In certainty, rather than taking big risks. Many of us are living the deferred life, doing things we don’t want to do, just to retain the comfort that we are so used to, and then hoping that, by doing things we don’t want to do, things we know for a fact we aren’t meant to do, we will ‘blow’. Or even in cases when we know that it is what we were meant to do, the ‘how’ is stuck in time, because of comfort, because of all kinds of fear. We relegate ourselves to a terrible, terrible place. A wormhole where nothing ever comes out of. A life waiting for things to happen, pushing things we are meant to do, further and further down the line, until we are 75 and realize we never lived. Or rather, what we have done is live life on deferral.

To understand what this means, we need to understand the word ‘defer’. It means to ‘put off an action or an event to a later time’. It is a fancy word for ‘postpone’. Now you might consider it an insult. I dare suggest you have been postponing your life? Yes! Yes!! That’s why you aren’t living the life you want! You are postponing the life you want to live down the line, after everything else has been put in place.

You have been saying, ‘I need to get a job,’ ‘I need to leave the country,’ ‘I need to get my masters,’ ‘I need to get married,’ ‘I need to hit this number of views,’ ‘I need to have this amount of money in my bank account,’ then I will begin my life! Ironic, your life has started! You cannot keep treating the time you have as a means to an end, living toothlessly for a life that is up ahead, while kicking the same life down the road, so you can ‘set up.’

Wake up from your pretense! You are already living a part of that life, doing things you don’t want to do or consistently doing the same thing, hoping that the life you want will eventually come, and you will eventually blow. Hehe. You are living the deferred life, and you don’t even know it!

Sartre Jean-Paul put it perfectly when he said in his book, The Age of Reason, that;

It hurts at this realization, but this is the life many of us are living. Toothless lives, conforming to the system that was built to keep men small, and hope that we will be the next person to come out of that system by playing the same game; deferring life. Living down the line, living in our thoughts and hopes, but never truly living.

Look at everyone who’s in fact, successful today, and by success, I am not talking about people who try hard to convince people they are successful — somehow, I believe we all know the difference, we only often choose to pretend that we don’t. I am talking about people who are, in fact, successful. You’d see the one common theme in their lives. And it’s the fact that they never waited to be discovered. They never waited to be found out. They never sucked it up and hoped for a better life to find them. They went in search. They dared. They didn’t care about taking care of what society told them to take care of now, so they can live later. Image? What image? They decided to live life right now.

More often, this has paid off. Even in times — depending on the life they care about — when it doesn’t pay off in material wealth and increase, it pays off in the richness and fulfilment of their lives. And when you are drawing your last breath, what will matter more than fulfilment?

Happy New Year.

I deeply hope that this year, you don’t live life down the line. You live. Truly, daringly, boldly.

To your growth

Your Coach,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired.

PS. I am learning to go back to being comfortable with em dashes. I hope you do too.

What do you do when you have to climb a mountain without legs? Simple. You don’t.

— Abiola Okun

2025 was the year of big changes. And if there’s something big changes are rife with, it’s big risks, big uncertainties, big courage, big hope, and more importantly, big faith.

I sat down a few days ago when it dawned on me that this is the month that ushers us into a new year. As I glanced back, I started to wonder how I was able to navigate this year without breaking apart, or even falling away. I began to ponder what the biggest ingredient was throughout this navigation.

I combed through some of the things I had written, the structures I had built for myself, the value systems that held me bound, trying to give the credit to one major factor, but it was a herculean task.

I thought it was clarity, knowing exactly what I wanted to do with my life, knowing what not to do, knowing the choices I needed to make to arrive at my desired destination. While clarity is king, even kings falter in the face of war, and what I went through this year was nothing short of war.

I thought it was my morning routines, but if I am to be candid with myself, I wasn’t as committed to my morning routines as I would have loved to be. Perhaps I averaged my routines three times a week, and that’s me being generous. Morning routines are great. Being a member of the 5 AM Club does wonders for the mind. Owning your morning surely elevates your life. But what happens when your life is completely uprooted? What happens when your routines are totally dismantled, and you cannot separate morning from the rest of the day? Surely, owning your morning isn’t enough.

Audacity. Audacity almost does the trick. Being courageous enough to ask for what you deserve from life. Being bold enough to go despite other people telling you that you don’t deserve so much. I practiced enough audacity this year to know that it wasn’t the wind beneath my wings. Audacity is good. In fact, it is a must-have if you want to achieve anything and take all that belongs to you, and then some. But it isn’t enough.

It wasn’t the competition I had with myself either, trying to be better every day than I was the previous day. I still do that. Compete. But competing can be exhausting and hopeless sometimes, because I really don’t improve from my previous day all the time. There are days I turn my to-do list into a to-watch list and watch them go unattended. So I wasn’t doing the needful all the time.

Surely, it would have been the intentional connections I made. Boy, did I make some. I connected with high-value people, founders of global startups, C-Suite executives, young professionals, students, entrepreneurs, and people who have gone on to become friends and valuable parts of my growing network. They have helped push me to become better through conversations, teachings, advice, feedback, and even frank disagreements. But frankly, it wasn’t. As strong and helpful as these connections are, they weren’t the reason why I was able to navigate the year 2025.

This year, I gained a lot of knowledge from the books I read and podcasts I listened to. I planned to read 45 books, but I ended up reading 28, and those 28 books were really something. My readers’ community, Emprinte Readers Hub, was a great source of help with this, and I can’t begin to tell you how lucky and blessed I am to be a part of the community. And this year, I found Jim Rohn. Listening to Jim Rohn was easily one of the learning highlights of the year. But these books and podcasts weren’t enough. Knowledge from them wasn’t the ingredient that worked the year for me.

After a deeper search, I found what it was, and the minute I found it, I berated myself for how long it took. It should have been pretty obvious. It was rest. As simple as that.

Somehow, somewhere in 2025, I came to the realization that the journey ahead of me could not be manipulated or maneuvered by all these systems and structures. There was absolutely nothing I could do that could make any difference in what I had in front of me. It wasn’t an issue of skill. It was like attempting to climb a mountain without legs. What do you do when you have to climb a mountain without legs? Simple. You don’t. You simply rest on the force that can either carry you or level the mountain before you.

REST.

I learned the art of rest. To sit still, in full faith, and know that all things are conspiring in your favor. For me, that force was God. I learned to rest in God. I worked hard at what I could control, and I mastered the art of resting on God, surrendering everything, both things I could control and the ones I couldn’t, to Him.

Was it easy? No. Because the human mind ordinarily likes to worry, and I mean that literally. It was a lesson on faith, to simply believe that everything has worked out, and if, in any case, some things end up not working out, they were still for my good.

So I rested. In God’s love, in His grace, and in His promises. That was the main ingredient that helped me navigate 2025 successfully.

Just so you get why I am raving about this year:

• Emprinte Readers Hub, the readers’ community I built with friends, was successfully converted into a paying community

• Successfully launched the BuildAReader Initiative, giving 200 books to high school students across three states

• Doubled my income

• Chose respect, integrity, and audacity over an extra source of income, so I lost it, and I would do the same thing all over again

• Pretty much abandoned my podcast midway through season three

• Broke the boundary of Africa and traveled to Europe for events through Instollar, a clean tech startup I have been a part of from scratch

• Hit a milestone with Instollar by finally raising funds, which more than quadrupled the value of the company, and by extension, the value of my work

• Got a scholarship to study abroad for my Master’s degree and had to decide on taking it and leaving everything I have built and achieved, both at work, my MBA, and the community

• Relocated to Morocco for my Master’s degree in International Management, at the expense of my MBA, my family, and my high-profile job, whose value essentially had just quadrupled

• Now, navigating life in the most unfamiliar place, thriving

• And these are the things I can remember.

In all of this, what kept me on, what kept me pushing, what kept me sane, was rest. The Art of Rest. Keeping my soul at rest in the Greatest Force in the universe, believing earnestly that He is breathing in my direction and orchestrating everything for my favor. A song that brought me back to a state of rest each time was MY SOUL IS AT REST by Faith Owolabi.

You are probably shocked that for someone who builds, teaches, and abides by harsh, disciplined systems, habits, and structures, I would round it all up into this one simple thing: rest.

Well, this is because while all the systems and structures are important, without which you will never achieve the greatness, productivity, and development that you pursue, life is spiritual, and you have to reach down deep inside you, or look up far above the seen, to draw water for your soul, so you can rest and surrender all you cannot control.

And when all is said and done, you take all of the glory, all of the rest, all that is left, and you return it to the Greatest Force in the universe, from where your source of rest comes. For me, that source is God, through His Son Jesus, and by the Holy Spirit.

Wherever you can, I implore you to find that rest and master the Art of Rest through it all in 2026.

It’s been one amazing, unforgettable year, but somehow I feel like it was the calm before the storm. 2026 is going to be a prophetic year for me, and for you. I can feel it already.

Thank you for sticking with me through the year. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year in advance.

See you in 2026.

To Your Growth,

Your Coach,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired.

Treat everything you do like an egg that will break if you treat it carelessly. That’s the highest kind of life. That’s Zoe.

— Abiola Okun

You see, this month, I have been learning about a subject matter that spans across every area of life, more than anything else. It is specific, yet broad. It is exact, yet evident in different aspects than meets the eye. This subject matter is pace. Or you could even say it is time, expressed in pace.

Courtesy of the Readers’ Community I belong to, Emprinte Readers Hub, I am currently reading The Art of Public Speaking, and one of the chapters that bore its light to me was the chapter about Pace, where the author talked about pacing yourself when you are speaking in public, it’ll help you concentrate more, both on the audience, on your subject, and your manner of delivery. The author implores that you should not speak like you have a hot potato in your mouth, like you’re rushing to get somewhere, or you’re trying not to waste anyone’s time, because God forbid, what you say is hogwash.

That, in itself, is enough education for a lifetime, but this newsletter isn’t about pace in public speaking. Please follow me.

Somehow, dear reader, the universe has been subtly putting lessons about pace in my life. I have been getting express instructions about pace from other books I have recently read, from podcasts I have recently listened to, from movies I have recently seen, and even from people I have met in recent times.

I thought, maybe if I put all that I have learned in writing, perhaps even in a newsletter to you, I will assimilate it a little more, further apply it, and even share the knowledge with you so we can grow together.

Pace matters in everything you do; in speaking, as learned from Dale Carnegie’s classic, in movement, in living, in breathing, in conversations, in actions and reactions, in everything. Pace represents quality; the longer something takes, the more phenomenal that thing is — except on rare occasions where you pace yourself to say rubbish, rubbish is still the same thing that will come out.

When you step out on the street and see a man who’s rushing and hurrying to get to work, what impression of that man do you form? Certainly not that he cares about what he’s rushing to, but that he’s not in control of his time anymore. I would think he probably woke up late, and now he’s running late for the bus. One thing is certain: he has lost control.

Pace represents control. When you pace yourself, slow down while the world is rushing, it means you have planned yourself in such a way that you have enough time to get to where you need to be. It shows you’re in control of yourself and everything in your reach. You would never see CEOs rushing to a meeting they set. Your pace gives your position away. Are you the one who sets the table, or the one who simply comes to meet any table that’s been set? The one who sets the table never rushes. Pace is control.

In a conversation with friends, who do you appreciate more? The guy who starts responding to you before you even finish talking? Or the guy who pauses to think about everything you have said before he starts responding? The former was clearly waiting to respond, while the latter, in fact, was listening, and his response will be more calculated, more concentrated, more valuable. Pace represents concentration.

When you give yourself space between speech and response, you come off as one who has fully concentrated and given it a thought. It means you are in control of your response, you have ruminated over the delivery, and it aids the quality of response you want to give next.

The same applies to actions and reactions. Nobody doubts Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Not to take anything away from the man, but I believe it was obvious even long before Sir Isaac was conceived. Of course, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction..., however! The space between action and reaction is what determines whether you’re in control or not. Better put, the pace between an action and your reaction is everything!

Regardless, don’t take only my word for it! Take the words of Viktor Frankl, the legend who wrote ‘Man’s Search For Meaning’. He put it perfectly when he said, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Pace is credibility. It makes you sound like an authority. When you rush through a delivery, you communicate many things to the audience, all of which will not help your cause. You sound like a phony who is hoping he doesn’t get caught if he breezes through his delivery. You sound like you know what you are saying will waste the time of everyone who’s listening, so you’d better get on with it and rush through it so everyone can go on to do the more important things they have to do. That does a disservice to your gospel! It shoots down not only your credibility, but also your confidence!

In fact, confidence is often one of the gifts wrapped in the box of Pace. Without the box, you don’t access the gift. Oh yes, behind the door of Pace lies the gift of confidence.

Beyond all that I have said, everything in life is action and reaction, whether it’s speaking in front of people, or it’s attending to a matter, or responding, or trying to get to work, or trying to solve a problem, or nursing a broken heart. Everything is action and reaction.

Give yourself the gift of time, of pace, of control. As much as it lies to you, never put yourself in positions where you have to rush or hurry through anything, because when you hurry, you run the risk of overlooking essential things that will strengthen the quality of whatever you’re doing.

Don’t sacrifice quality at the altar of speed. Don’t sacrifice control at the altar of haste. Pace yourself. Intentionally. Go from 1.5x to 1.0x. Treat everything you do like an egg that will break if you treat it carelessly. That’s the highest kind of life. That’s Zoe; the God-kind of life.

I believe the whole newsletter has been summed up in that sentence by Viktor Frankl. If you give your pace away, you give your control away, you give your concentration away, you give your credibility away, you give your confidence away, and by implication, you give your quality and your goals away.

I hope you remember this the next time you have to act on anything. I missed writing to you. Graduate school is harder than I thought it would be.

To Your Growth,

Your Coach,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired. 🍃

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As someone who holds himself to a very high standard, someone who chases after knowledge at every opportunity he gets, I have come to realise that, while it generally is a good thing, it puts me at a disadvantage, especially when I couple that standard with my bad habit of overthinking. I'll explain.

You see, for the longest time, when I am in a group, in a conversation, whether it's in a corporate meeting or a very informal setting, every time a question is asked, or a subject comes up, I always try to provide answers and chime in the best I can, even with subjects I know next to nothing about. Why? Because I always feel like, "I should know this thing." "People expect me to know this."

While that has birthed the kind of tenacity where I always go back to my room — after spewing nonsense, of course — and research about that particular subject, right in that moment, I feel some type of shame that makes me recoil and retreat.

Instead of saying "I don't know it," "I don't know how to use it," "I cannot operate it," "I have never seen it before in my life," “Yes I come from a bush, and in my bush, we don't use something like that,” I go ahead and fumble, when I could just listen to others who have done it, because somehow, I long believed that it's a shameful thing not to know something everyone knows, or something people expect me to know — being the well-exposed, digital-savvy, knowledge-monger that I am. Until one day.

I worked in a start-up doing something spectacular in the renewable energy sector. As a result of my role, I was constantly fortunate to sit in rooms with unbelievably high-quality, peak performers in different fields. I was in one of such meetings on this day.

As you can already tell, I was the least experienced, least exposed person in the room. It was a meeting where I could regard every single person present as a mentor in different fields. That meeting became a working session, which then became a brainstorming session about a project we were bringing to life.

During that meeting, we stumbled on a technical task. While we were working through that task and I was busy feeling 'ashamed' that I didn't know that particular thing, one of the other peak performers present in that meeting said, 'We don't know this. I think we can leave it to the experts to figure it out. After all, it's not our jobs to know.' Everyone agreed. We don't know this. There are experts whose job it is to know certain things, technical things.

If all these prim and proper, high-performers who have worked their way to becoming top echelons in their fields don't know this thing, and were comfortable not knowing, why was I always beating myself up? Why had I been feeling ashamed all my life whenever I didn't know something? Why do I think everyone expects me to know everything? That's borderline insane.

I don't know everything, so why do I act like I do? Nobody knows everything, so why should anyone expect me to know everything? If I already know everything, what would be left to learn then? Why live a fake life when it's not even my job to know? Of course, I can learn about it. Of course, there are times I don't know something that is my job to know, but that's how I learn and improve, no?

From that moment, I started getting comfortable saying I don't know something or I don't know how to use something. I am now comfortable just listening and admitting I don't know, without necessarily feeling awkward or any other negative way about it. Instead of rambling in the moment, I can just listen and learn what I can, ask questions, and then later go and do some research about it if it is important for me to know.

The more I thought about it, especially from a high performer’s perspective, I realized that it is even more of a disservice to try to know everything, because then you won’t give other people the opportunity to shine, you won’t be able to concentrate on one thing that makes you a genius, at the top of your field.

Serial entrepreneurs, global employers and leaders, people who are at the top of their fields—like the ones I was in a room with that day—get there because they got to a point where they realized they needed people in different fields who know things they do not know to complement the things they know.

A businessman doesn’t necessarily need to know anything about cybersecurity. He only needs to concentrate on what makes him a businessman, while he hires someone who knows about cybersecurity. A leader doesn’t need to be a Change consultant. He simply needs to recognize when he needs a change in his organization and hire the right person to lead that change. An entrepreneur doesn’t need to be a graphics designer, too. The list can go on.

This brings me to the Master Mind practice that people like Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Andrew Carnegie used in their time, referred to in Napoleon Hill’s book, Think and Grow Rich. People cussed out Henry Ford for being an uneducated man, and he shut them up by saying something along the lines of, “Why concern myself with things that I employ experts to concern themselves with?” AHA!

The point I am trying to drive home is this: You have no business feeling ashamed or awkward because you don't know something or aren't exposed to something, whether it is your job to know or not, whether everyone else but you knows it or not. It is fine to rest and admit that you don't know it, keep mum and learn, then further research later, if it is a subject you care about or should know.

In fact, it is a thing of beauty not knowing something because either of these amazing things will happen:

1. Active Learning: You get the opportunity to learn something new at that point that will help you going forward, something you’d potentially want to go and do some more research about to increase the quality of your work.

2. Passive Learning: You expand your horizon by learning something at that point that doesn’t necessarily show up in your daily life; something that you’d categorize as “nice to know,” rather than “need to know.”

3. Drive for Value Enhancement: You discover that you need to make more money to hire people who are experts in that subject matter to increase the impact of your work.

So, dear reader, enough of feeling ashamed about not knowing something. The person you are speaking with, who knows that thing, didn’t know it a couple of hours, days, or weeks ago.

It’s completely fine to not know. You aren't God. You aren't perfect. You don't know all things. Be done with that life, and embrace your growing process.

To Your Growth,

Your Coach,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired. ✨

It's been almost a month since I last wrote to you. Technically, it's the longest I've gone without writing a newsletter since I started writing them some 8 years ago. How I've missed this! How I’ve missed you!

You see, since the last time I wrote a newsletter, the most amazing things have happened in my life. I would have said that you should permit it as an excuse for why I haven't written to you, but even I wouldn't permit that right now, with all I have learned. For I now understand that nothing, absolutely nothing, can get in the way of you and what you want.

Perhaps in another newsletter, I'm going to tell you all the amazing things that have been happening in my life, but this time around, I want to share what I have learned in the past three weeks; what everything that has happened to me and around me has taught me. I know without a shadow of a doubt that this is stuff that will transform your life if you heed it.

The last newsletter I wrote to you was about respecting your desires and not delivering yourself like a chicken into the hands of people, respecting and alluding to their desires, while spitting on yours. Remember I called that foolishness? Oh yes! You do! Remember I also said how foolish I had been, and I needed to learn a little selfishness, too? Yes! You remember!!

I learned something that would put you in the top 5 percent of the top 5 percent of any journey you have decided to embark on in life. The special ingredient necessary to be able to put yourself first, regardless of other people's position. That ingredient is called Audacity.

A-U-D-A-C-I-T-Y

This is the ability to freaking go! Go go go go go home, Cynthia Ofori! You know what? It was the same audacity that made Cynthia Ofori stand in front of the principal to say that her mommy said... She didn't care if her mom had the capacity. She wasn't going to let the fact that other students who were being sent home didn't try to stand up for themselves. Cynthia Ofori stood up to speak. That's Audacity!

Audacity is courage on steroids. It is showing up to where you have no business showing up to. It is applying for opportunities you do not qualify for. It is demanding for what you believe you deserve, regardless of what other people think you deserve. Heck, it's about asking for things you don't even deserve and seeing how the world responds!

Audacity is tenacity on steroids. It is showing up again and again, even after you have been rejected. It is stifling your ego, sacrificing it at the altar of your goals. It is pulling a Thomas Edison and failing a hundred times, a thousand times, just to go again. It is showing up to the company with your CV even after getting an email that you didn't make the second stage. It is responding to the HR's email, rejecting their rejection, and demanding a chance to prove your quality.

Audacity is hope on steroids. It is jumping off the cliff even though you're not seeing the floor, in hopes that someone catches you, or you land on soft ground. It is paying for a flight ticket when you haven't even received the visa. It is spending your very last cash on a gamble, hoping that it becomes a success. It is showing up at the airport even though you haven't booked a flight or have any money to do so, in hopes that somehow, you will get on a plane to your destination.

Audacity is the arrogance needed to put the kind of value on your brand that nobody else thinks you're worth. It is the arrogance that makes you say no to offers that you know, at the core of your heart, are beneath you. It is the arrogance that makes you say to an employer that they need you more than you need them, and if they don't give you what you want, you can get out there into the market and find who will. It is the arrogance that makes you quit a job without anything to replace it immediately.

Audacity is also respect on steroids. Respect for the people you are negotiating for. Respect for yourself and your desires. Respect for that child you want to set up a trust fund for, which is why you know you need to lock in. It is respect for your family, the people you are responsible for.

That's audacity!

Audacity can go wrong; in fact, more often than not, audacity does go wrong or yields nothing. Still, knowing that audacity can go wrong and still going ahead to do it, that is audacity in itself. The only way you can live the kind of life that you want is by going at it, regardless of what the outcome would be. The kind of person who achieves all is the person who determines and says to himself, 'I will get it or die!'

Some time ago, Jim Rohn told a story about a man. I’ll repeat it here:

The man says, "I will climb the mountain. They've told me it's too high, it's too far, it's too steep, it's too rocky, it's too difficult. But it's my mountain. I will climb it. Pretty soon, you will see me waving from the top or dead on the side because I'm not coming back."

Time, Faith, and Circumstance all called a hasty conference, and they all agreed that they might as well let this man have it because he says he's going to get it or die."

That's the kind of fearlessness, or even recklessness, needed to make anything of yourself.

We have read from the Alchemist how if you want anything with all your heart, the universe will conspire to get it for you.

We have also read from Think and Grow Rich how desire, backed up by faith and a strong will, gives you anything you want.

That's audacity. The preparedness to throw it all out and continue throwing it out until it works. To put all your eggs in one basket and keep your eyes peeled on that basket. To rather die than continue to live like this. If you are not mad enough about what life looks like right now, you have no incentive to change it. No audacity!

If you are an active X user, you'd have seen the thread about asking what the most unhinged thing people have done to get ahead. Every answer on that thread affirms all I have been learning in the past few weeks. You need some type of stamina, some type of sitzfleisch to pull off unhinged things like that. You need audacity. If you go through the thread, you'd discover that none of those things are conventional or rule-abiding. They require audacity. A-U-D-A-C-I-T-Y!

Finally, one thing you need to know about audacity is that it is a muscle. Nobody is born with it. It needs to be built and exercised. And the only way you can build audacity is to be audacious. What's the worst that can happen? What is the very worst that can happen? Death? Come on! What's so bad about that? You wouldn't even know it if you died. If you are not prepared to die for something, then you don't deserve to have it. You might as well stop chasing it. Martin Luther King Jr. hinted at it when he said, 'No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they'd die for.'

And the truth is, there's no death in many of these scenarios, so why are you scared? Think about it.

Build enough audacity to break the rules set by society to keep you small. Everyone who follows these rules will only be that — followers! You've got to become a maverick. Make your own rules. Change the game. Be unhinged. Exercise your AUDACITY. Get ready to do it or die!

Otherwise, what's the point of it all?

To your growth

Your Coach,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired.

You gats guide first, before you fit guide your family.

— Abiola

I might be sounding like a broken record now, but listen, nothing, absolutely nothing good will come out of depriving yourself for everyone else. There is no sense in constantly remaining on the giving end and never the receiving end of your love. It's absolute hogwash!

We have conflated selflessness and service with a lack of self-regard. And I will explain in a bit.

You see, we grow up learning that putting everyone first will make other people put you first, but the truth is, it doesn't work that way in the world we live in. Maybe it would have worked in an ideal world, but not the one where everyone else is out for themselves.

Selflessness is not the complete dissolution of self. In fact, the term starts with 'Self', still emphasizing putting yourself into consideration. Selflessness doesn't tell you not to consider yourself. No. It tells you to consider yourself, and then consider other people, too. Selflessness doesn't tell you not to think of yourself first or not to think of your betterment. No. It tells you not to put other people at a disadvantage just so that you can benefit. Selflessness tells you to take one pie and share the rest, instead of taking three pies and not giving a damn about whether the pie goes round.

That is why I beg to differ; selflessness isn't the opposite of selfishness. Selfishness is taking at the expense of other people. The opposite of that would be not taking at all, just so that other people can benefit. That's not a brand of selfishness that will make you sleep at night. That is simply foolishness.

How do you steal from and deprive yourself just to fulfill the desires of others? It's the same as giving to people without thinking of the possibility of giving to other people in the future. Pheww! It got a lot complicated faster than I wanted. Let's take it a few knots back.

The opposite of selfishness is foolishness. Think of it like a scale, illustrated in the image below. There's selfishness (which is the same as greed), there’s selflessness (or service), and then there is foolishness.

I already explained what selfishness is earlier. It is simply taking at the expense of other people. Meaning, because you took more than is expected of you, someone else will probably go home without anything. That's greed, witchcraft. It's giving 'Only Me' syndrome. What you need is home training and a little bit of prison sentence here and there.

Then there's foolishness at the other end of the line. Foolishness is you giving up your time for other people after they have used theirs for their benefit. It's the basest of all self-regards — a lack of it.

You have a box of ten slices of pie to share amongst ten people, including yourself. You share all equally, and then just because someone throws a tantrum, saying that the one slice isn't enough for him, you go ahead and give your pie to that person, and go hungry. You know what you are telling your subconscious there and then? That the person deserves it more than you do. That the person is worth more than you are. That the person should be satisfied, and you should go hungry.

Sadly, this is what many of us have been doing all our lives. We have spent decades pouring from ourselves and not pouring into ourselves. We have spent years not respecting our desires, so much so that those desires have now become stale, and what remains inside of us is resentment and discontentment. Because we think, why can't everyone else be like me and sacrifice for me too? Why isn't this person considering all the things I do and deprive myself of, just so that they can be happy? Hello oo?! It's because they are wise enough to respect their desires and even go all out for it. Even at your disadvantage!

For God’s sake! How are you leaving space for everyone else in your life other than you? All that will be left in the long run is discontentment, resentment, lack of boundaries, the inability to say no, and it will be no one else's fault but yours, because you never respected your desires to begin with!

You're not selfless. You're foolish. And oh! I was foolish for many, many years.

True Selflessness

Here's what selflessness looks like: It is balance. It is still putting yourself first, but also considering other people. It is not considering other people more than you consider yourself. It isn't 'Othersmoreness'. It is using your resources on yourself first. Count yourself among the ten beneficiaries. Take a slice of the pie and share the rest.

Selflessness is not self-arbitraryness. It is self-justice. It is boundaries too. It isn't relegating your desires just so that you can champion the desires of other people at the detriment of yours. It is making sure your desires don't suffer, even while you help others fulfil their desires too.

That's selflessness at its simplest form. That's service. The only way to grow other people around you is to grow first. In fact, the early years of selflessness can look like selfishness — it should look like selfishness, because to become the kind of person who will grow a million people, you have to first grow a million times. Why do you think a building that is 100-feet tall must first be constructed 100-feet deep into the ground? The simple answer is in our local parlance. You gats guide first, before you fit guide your family.

It means you must put it inside of you before you can pour it out to others. An overflowing cup is first a filled cup. To meet the desires of others, you must first respect your desires, rather than relegate them. It is when you know how desires feel if met, that you will be able to efficiently and empathetically help others fulfil theirs.

To Your Growth,

Your Coach,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired.

The most important asset you will ever have in your life is the thing inside your head.

— Abiola Okun

I have just been reminded, again, about the power that lies inside us, as humans. Too bad, many of us forget. Heck, even I forget sometimes, but thanks to the one constant thing in my life that happens to bring the fact about this power to my remembrance very often; the books that I read.

In the past week, I have questioned why we forget what should be the most important thing of all. This is the one factor that is constantly working, nonstop, whether acknowledged or not, whether consciously put to use or not, to shape the course of our lives. And I think I found the reason why.

This newsletter will be in three parts; I will reintroduce you to the thing inside your head that has the power to transform your life — no, that works every minute of every second to transform (or deform) your life, with or without your permission. Then I will explain why we constantly forget the power that it holds, and finally, what we must, henceforth, do about it.

The Thing Inside Your Head.

Have you heard the bleakly popular saying that everything that exists today exists twice, and you are seeing the second existence of that thing? No matter what it is, just pause and reflect on it; the phone in your hand, the laptop on your desk, the chair you're sitting on, the table right in front of you, the books in your bookshelf, the building you're in, the clothes you are putting on, the car you drove to work this morning, the bridge you drove through, the plane that flew over your car as you drove through that bridge, even you, yes, you who is the independent entity of choice. You were made twice.

Everything is made twice. First as a thought, then as a physical equivalent. There is nothing in the physical world today that didn't first exist as a thought. That's the thing inside your head. It has different names: idea, concept, notion, nudge, impression, sense, etc., and when it gets intense enough, it becomes meditation, mutter, ponder, obsession, fixation, rumination, etc., and that's why I have decided to simply stick with 'The Thing Inside Your Head.'

You see, there's the question of whether it is your reality that shapes the thing inside your head, or it is the thing inside your head that shapes your thoughts. I had the conversation a few days ago with a colleague, and she argued that it's a case of 'the chicken and the egg, which came first,' but I disagree. It is not a "Chicken and Egg" scenario. You don't think what you become. You become what you think. The birthplace of everything is The Thing Inside Your Head.

Thoughts create everything, and reading through Think and Grow Rich again, it became even more pronounced how human beings all around us have turned ordinary thoughts into billions and billions of dollars. Just a random thought that must have been dismissed by hundreds of people would go on to make another person into a stupendously rich individual.

The only reason why animals aren't wealthy is because they do not have the same thing in their head has we have as humans, but unfortunately, we misuse, disregard, and move through life hardly ever recognizing that our startup capital to a wealthy life is not our second kidney like we always joke around, but it is the thing inside our head.

There's a saying made popular by the book, The Alchemist, that 'What you think about, what you want with all your heart, the universe conspires to get it for you.' I know you don't believe in the universe. Perhaps you believe in God, well, I have something similar from the Holy Book (across multiple holy books, in varying forms), 'As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.' And maybe you don't believe in God either, and you're a logical human who only believes in your actions, cause and effect, etc., well, get this, what you think about, continuously, is what you do something about. Your muscles, veins, and body all react to the things you become conscious of and obsessed with.

You know the not-so-surprising thing, though? None of the things you've read so far is new to you, right? But somehow, you haven't really leveraged this start-up capital like you know you should have. You haven't brought as many thoughts as you know you should have to life. You always think about a lot of different things, but you haven't applied the kind of laser focus, deliberate effort needed to turn thoughts into their physical equivalent. Why?

The Misconception of The Thing Inside Your Head

I will tell you why. It's because you have been taught, albeit unconsciously, to disregard the thing inside your head. You have been labelled an overthinker or a worrier, and that has somehow made you devalue your thoughts, not taking them seriously enough to even care enough to intentionally direct them.

Allow me to change your mind by saying this once: the most important asset you will ever have in your life is the thing inside your head. That's why I always emphasise learning, reading, and travelling, because that's how you can intentionally feed your greatest asset with quality.

It's not a bad thing to use your most valuable asset to think through things, to ponder, to meditate. What makes it terrible is when it is misdirected. We have the ability to pick one thought and think on it so much that all the muscles in our body function in line with it, and then situations begin to fall in line, your legs begin to lead you in the direction of that thought. This happens! Now you must use it diligently.

What To Do With the Thing Inside Your Head

Lead it. Direct it. Control it. Deliberately start thinking about the things you want to see, and what you want your life to become, and you will naturally gravitate towards that thing.

This is the very essence of what Murphy's Law is about: what you fear the most eventually happens. It is not the fear that makes it happen; it is the meditation on it, the fixation of your mind on it, that gravitates you in that direction. So, the same is true for what you love and desire the most. It will eventually happen.

Listen, it's not the thoughts that magically transform into physical mutations, no. What happens is that, the thing inside your head jerks you up and aligns every other function of your body towards that goal you have held inside of it, and then you begin to talk like it, take actions that drive you closer to it, pull people that will believe in you to perform it, attract investments that will help you build it, consciously and unconsciously, and before long, it becomes a reality.

This is the power that the thing inside your head wields. It is now up to you to lead it, direct it, manipulate it, and control it into your desired destination.

If you don't take anything else from this newsletter, take this: pay attention to your thoughts. Direct it to think about what you want from your life, constantly. Visualize and create pictures in your heart. Then meditate on it, constantly. Your life goes in the direction of the things you meditate on, think about, and continuously ponder. If you constantly think about messy things, your life will gravitate into messiness. If you constantly think about success, the same will happen.

Enough said; Control the thing in your head, and lead it in the direction you want to go. The future belongs to those who saw it before it arrived.

To Your Growth,

Your Coach,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired. ✨

I recently had an opportunity to minister in my religious organization. It was such a huge privilege and also a once-in-a-blue-moon type of opportunity, one that I've always craved. But I turned it down.

At least, I almost did. And it would have weighed me down for the next couple of weeks, knowing who I am and the standards I hold myself to.

About two years ago, I had pitched myself as a spoken-word artist to one of the pastors I was fortunate to talk to. I simply told of how I used to perform spoken word poetry during my undergraduate studies in my school fellowship, and it'd be good to do so again on such a huge platform. It was just a conversation that I didn't even think would be remembered. Although I led a small unit of social media content creation, I was as far away from the pulpit as far away could get, so I didn't think much of it.

Fast forward two years, and a lot of things had changed. I now had too many responsibilities at work and school, working through certain transitions in my life, so I had taken a step back from my involvement in church activities. If I thought I was far away from the pulpit at the time that I was very involved, imagine how far away I had now been.

This background is important so you understand why I turned down the opportunity of a lifetime, at first.

Last Thursday, I was in my weekly ministry meeting, and all of a sudden, I was called upon that I'll be doing a spoken word ministration on Sunday. The correct word is "sprung up." It sprang up on me, and every element in my body said no. How do I write up a piece, memorize it, get into character, and deliver in front of an audience north of 300? An audience I had never faced before, only in pockets? Uhhh?!

Even though I had been shut down during the meeting and had to swallow my protests, I made up my mind, there and then, that it was not going to happen. Not because I didn't want to, but because I couldn't even see how I would prepare enough to make it happen. It was impossible.

I forgot that all you needed was the right amount of motivation, someone saying the right thing at the right time, to jerk you into doing what is impossible.

That's exactly what happened. Friday evening, less than 48 hours to when I was supposed to minister the spoken words poetry, I reached out to the pastor in charge who had given me the opportunity, and I told him how it wasn't possible, and I won't be able to go through with it as I hadn't prepared or even written anything.

He spoke for just 4 minutes in response to my plea (or excuse, depending on how you look at it), and those 4 minutes changed my entire reasoning of the situation. So rapidly, I went from being so sure it wouldn't happen to excitedly looking forward to the event. And Boy! Was it glorious!

And this isn't just a single event. There are certain things I have achieved in my life that have been on the strength of the connections I've built. There are things I've done, not brazenly or out of 'Big-Boy' courage, but on the back of people I have dined with.

There are ideas I'll come up with, and if I truly want it to become tangible and leap off the paper, I know who to speak to about it that won't let me rest until I get it done. There are things I would have canceled, perhaps because of my unbelief in my ability to see them through, that end up being a beacon simply because there was someone who believed I could do them.

There are more men than there aren't, who are built on the strength of their relationships. There are people today who would have remained at Point A, except for the people who are in their lives that have somehow dragged out the kings from inside of them.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that you should focus only on trying to build connections rather than on your mental talents, physical advantages, and character strengths. Not at all. We have men who have stood out based on their individual brilliance.

What I am saying, instead, is that there are people who are amplifiers. They amplify what you have on the inside of you. They are the fire behind your gunpowder, the mic behind your voice. They multiply and amplify the gifts you have spent time building.

Many people remain in obscurity today because they lack amplifiers. There is a formula to this thing, and it can be intentionally cultivated. Some people are lucky. They have amplifiers gravitate towards them naturally, because unknowingly, they have hacked the formula. Then there are some of us who must intentionally work out the formula to have people like this around us.

The brilliant formula to have amplifiers around you is for you to be an amplifier yourself. Intentionally be the person who pushes other people to be the best version of themselves, and then you'll find that people who are naturally amplifiers will gravitate towards you and push you out of your comfort zone into a success zone.

Another formula to try is to seek out people who are amplifiers. You'll know them by how well people around them are doing, and how they somehow happen to be a part of the growth of everyone. You could seek them out and intentionally insert yourself in their circle of influence. However, this isn't a long-term solution. Short-term fixes don't guarantee long-term solutions.

Here's the crux of this newsletter to you; to convincingly make it big, to truly achieve everything you hope to achieve, to break out of a cycle or a pattern you must have now identified, you must go beyond individual brilliance and intentionally surround yourself with amplifiers, and the surefire way to do that, is by being an amplifier yourself.

Be intentional about your connections. Don't spend your lifetime with every Tom, Dick, and Harry. The age-old, "Show me your friends and I'll tell you who you are," is still applicable even in the 21st century. And to expand the quote further, I'll say this, "Show me your friends, and I'll show you exactly where you're going."

Final question: Look at the people you have around you; do they believe in, and more than that, do they champion the journey you have embarked on?

Meditate on this, and act accordingly.

To Your Growth,

Your Coach

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired. ✨

The stories we tell ourselves about our situation are more important than the situation itself.

— Abiola Okun

Oh, the stories we tell ourselves! They are at the very crux of the kind of people we become and the kind of lives we end up living.

Haven't you ever seen two people experience the same things, under the same conditions, with the same boss, in the same household, at the same time, and turn out differently? Not only different, but they turn out to be exact opposites. The factor responsible is the story they tell themselves after going through that.

Two siblings grow up in a household filled with domestic abuse, where their father beats their mother every other Sunday, or where their mother doesn't spare any chance to abuse their father. One tells himself that he would work harder than anyone else in the world to never become like his father. That he will make a conscious effort and grow himself into the exact opposite of the kind of husband his father is to his mother. While the other sibling tells himself a different story, that this is how to treat a spouse. That a spouse is inferior and must be treated as such, as a dog that must be kept on a leash. Or a similar story, that it is hereditary; since her mother is like that, she has her mother's genes and has no choice but to turn out an abuser too.

From this same situation, one goes on to build an inspiring family, the other goes on to replicate what his or her parents had.

Stories.

Two people grow up in the same neighborhood, say, in the trenches, with the same resources, or lack of them. They experience the same smells, the same vices, the same insecurities, the same societal problems. One tells himself that he'd get out of there, do everything he can to change his life, and then come back to act as a panacea to the problems he grew up in.

Another looks at the situation and sees what he can gain from it. He tells himself the story of how he can milk the situation to his advantage. And so he builds local structures around every pothole to extort drivers and passers-by, increasing the tendency of crime in the area, all the while profiting off the degeneration.

Then another looks at the same situation and resigns to how unfair the world is, and how there's simply nothing he can do, while hoping for his luck to change one day, maybe, just maybe Mother Universe will shine on him.

Stories.

A couple of employees find themselves under the same boss, who has a unique personality type. One person thinks and constantly talks about how terrible of an attitude her boss is; how nothing can ever grow under that condition; how he uses his employees and discards them as scrap; how he never gives space for his employees’ growth and progress; how she is a narcissist, takes on the ideas of her employees without giving credits where it is due, how he doesn't pay them well, lacks empathy, and on and on and on! The employee goes on about all the unhelpful attributes of his boss, and to be fair, he's not telling any lies. If you look closely, you'd see that most of what he complains about daily isn't unfounded.

But then, there's another employee, under the same boss, experiencing the same things each day, but tells himself a different story. He's learning under the harshest conditions, and he will become a flower that blossoms in adversity. Yes, his boss can be a lot of things, but his boss often leaves room for you to learn from the things he does, if you’re willing. His boss is finicky and pays close attention to details. Something that can be a big trouble for the employees, but is teaching them, unconsciously, to pay attention to excellence. This employee is learning and will go on to attribute the excellence that eventually turns him into a success to the years he worked under that Boss.

He focuses on how unsatisfied his boss is with the status quo, how he never leaves good enough alone, and makes sure that what is good can be better, and what is better can be the ultimate best. Each time this employee holds up what he's learning to how his boss behaves and treats him, the latter pales in comparison, eliciting gratitude from this employee. And gratitude enhances grace, which further improves learning.

Stories.

There's a great competition amongst three teams composed of two team members. Team C wins, and one of the team members says to himself, "I am the best. I have arrived. Look at the rest of them peasants. They need to come and learn from me. I'm the greatest! The world champion!" The second team member says, "I must enjoy the win, but this is not all there is. We made some mistakes that would have derailed our win if the other team had been more clinical. We must learn from this, keep practicing, and be better in the next competition. There's always a better score to be had. There's always more to achieve. And if there isn't anything else to achieve, we must keep practicing to retain our world championship."

Team B comes in second place. One team member is super unhappy. He wishes he had come first. He thinks that all the efforts that he put into it are wasted and believes that all the practice yielded nothing. "I hate a second-place medal. Stupid. If only my teammate did better. If only the grass were greener or the spear were longer. If only the umpire were fairer. Then I would have come first. This competition is pointless. Stupid!" He dumps the medal and makes for the door.

The other team member wishes he had come first, too, but is glad he didn't come in last. He knew it could have been worse. Perhaps they deserved the first position, but the truth is, the team that came first deserved it more. "What a tournament! I will celebrate this, cut my losses, learn from the top team and ask them how they prepared and what the secret to their focus was, learn from my mistakes in this tournament, and hopefully do better next time."

Team A comes in third place. One team member says, "Cool, we came third. Good enough for me. I am young. To make it to this tournament was success in itself. I have a lot to learn. I will learn and certainly be better next time." The other team member says, "We came last! We came last! We came last!!" and goes on to have a meltdown.

Stories.

The same situations, different stories. We often forget that what we focus on expands. Many times—if not all the time—the stories we tell ourselves about our situation are more important than the situation itself. The single responsible factor that separates people in the same situations is the stories they tell themselves about that situation.

This means, indirectly, that you're fully in control of your own story, regardless of what life has thrown at you. You don't have to stay stuck on one story, especially now that you know that stories determine lives. You can begin today, dear storyteller, by choosing to change the narrative. Start telling yourself a different story and watch your life advance in the direction of your new story.

To Your Growth,

Your Coach,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired. ✨

Do you remember how you were always striving everyday to be better than you were the previous day? How all you lived for was to make sure your next project was bigger and better than the previous one? How you made sure you looked better, felt better, acted better than who you were in the past?

Do you remember how you were always pushing to learn new skills so you can be even more valuable than you were in the past year? How you would create a tracker for the skills you want to learn and then you start learning them and ticking the items on the tracker off, one after the other? How you'd reach out to friends to ask what they were learning and you'd query yourself on how much you have learned in comparison?

Remember those days when you actually competed with the previous version of you, and pushed yourself to do better and be better than you were? What happened? Why did you stop competing? Oh! You didn't even realize that you had stopped competing? AHA!

I know that you've been told that competition isn't really good, as it is an offshoot of comparison, and you shouldn't think much to compete. In the new corporate lingua, we say, rather than compete, collaborate. We say, rather than show yourself to be agressive, you should be open, friendly, and accepting of everyone that you meet.

While that is good, while it helps keep the peace and avert you from undue pressure and unhealthy competition, it must never water down the spirit and idea of competition. You must always compete. You must always be fighting and guiding. Not against other people, no. Against yourself. Against the previous you. Against the slow and comfortable you. Against the basest form of you.

We all have that side of us that wants to stay in bed, that craves comfort and arbors the hellishness of work. The side of us that wants to stay with the familiar as long as the familiar isn't looking like it'll let off any time soon. We don't think the cheese would be moved to a different cheese station, so we build brick houses around one cheese station. We are wrong, and this is why we need to always be competing.

Look, other than the fact that those who stop competing stop growing, and those who stop growing have started dying, the only one reason why anyone should ever stop competing is if they believe that they are already at the top and would never be surpassed again. They have done all they need to do with their lives and they don't think they have any more capacity to do anything else.

Now, I need to ask you, dear gentle reader, is that you? Have you arrived? Where you are right now, in that work or business, with those skills, is that where you only ever want to go? Is the season you're in right now the only season you always want to be in? No? Please, no! For the love of God, NO!

If your answer is otherwise, you should stop reading the newsletter here and move on to something else. In fact, please unsubscribe because this newsletter won't be useful to you anymore. There's no need for it. You have grown all you ever can and want to.

However, if your answer is No, and you haven't arrived, and you still want to do more, go to more places, become more, achieve more than you have, my question to you then is, why did you stop competing?

For the most part, the reason is that you have probably been consumed with work, going about your quotidian tasks at work, quelling fires, making sure invoices or materials don't fall into the wrong hands, hustling for daily bread just to get by, making sure you survive the day, getting overwhelmed and overworked on the job that you got with the skills you once gained.

In all of this, we forget that what we have now is the result of who we were or who we became to get it, and if we must get something better, higher, bigger, we must focus on becoming someone better, higher, bigger than who we were.

They say you cannot pour new wine into an old wineskin. You must tear up the old wineskin and find a new wineskin to receive the new wine. In the same way, you cannot receive a new level with an old skill.

I said all of that to say this; you have been consumed by the workings of this present level that you stopped competing with yourself to be better so you can climb up the ladder. Give yourself space to compete with the previous you and best the previous you, else, you'd stay where you are for a while, until you start declining.

Learn a new skill to better yourself, increase your value and improve your chances to climb up your career ladder. Don't be too consumed by where you are and using the skills you have currently that you ignore where you want to be and what you want to build.

If you are not building new skills and learning new habits, it means you are stuck in collaboration with what is meant to be a previous version of you. Picture waking up every day and still remaining the person you were the previous day! That's the reality of many of us.

Instead, we must actively be in constant competition, and actively conquering who we were the previous day, because this is how we can grow to become all that we desire to be.

My question to you is, the version of You that is in existence right now, when did it come to life? The time between then and now is how long you have been stuck for. How long have you been stuck for? How long have you stopped competing for?

Time to get unstucked! Time to join the competition again and compete against this You that you've been stuck with. Time to go back to your growth tracker and put in the new skills you need to develop for the next phase of your life.

Compete again. Or Die.

To your growth,

Your Coach,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired.