softech @softechZ3

@hackSultan @asemota 🙏

The VC fraud said this first. Others are still repeating the trope. Ray Kroc, who created the current McDonald's, said: “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful individuals with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” The only true test in life is perseverance and satisfaction from the result. Success can also be largely due to luck, which fools people into believing they are more intelligent. The cemeteries are full of unfulfilled intelligent people.

Ben X @Benn_X1

7 days ago

The only true test of intelligence is whether you get what you want out of life.

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@hackSultan x.com/asemota/status…

Osaretin Victor Asemota @asemota

12 months ago

So many things we do in Africa in the name of helping to alleviate poverty are useless to poor people. All poorer people need is for the odds against them to change. The odds against them are sometimes created by those who claim to be helping them, particularly the government.

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@hackSultan “So many things we do in Africa in the name of helping to alleviate poverty are useless to poor people.” ~ Big Chief It’s funny how big Chief actually tagged you on that thread over a year ago

"If there is one lesson I have learned throughout my journey, it is that success is rarely determined by who starts first or even who starts strongest. More often, it is determined by who remains committed long enough to see their vision become reality." Ray Kroc, the "founder" of McDonald's as we know it today, said this - "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated failures. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." That quote alone inspired me to pursue entrepreneurship.

Tony O. Elumelu, CFR @TonyOElumelu

7 days ago

What defines success? And how can you replicate it? Luck, as I often say, plays an important role. I have been lucky on my own journey. But with all that, we still face uncertainties, surprises, reversals.   What really distinguishes an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur who

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My final take on this olodo uprising topic is that most of the Nigerians who had their big break in the last 10 years don’t seem to understand, in fact, they can’t relate to how things have changed for the 16 year old fresh out of secondary school or the university graduate going into today‘s labour market in Nigeria. It is sad that an entire generation of young Nigerians have turned to creating social media content and doing all sort of ridiculous things online for money. There are 30-year-olds without any professional experience. They’re smart and have been applying for jobs since they graduated from university. For many of them, NYSC has been their only 'employer'. Social media monetisation presents a legitimate lifeline, but Ycee sat in an air-conditioned room to talk about Olodo Uprising after releasing a new album in which he sang about breast and nyash. These young Nigerians will repay the loans FGN has been accumulating. They’ll be left with no skills, no professional experience, absolutely nothing, but will repay the loans anyway. They’ll be taxed to death and have no pension or retirement benefits. Your idea of decorum and intellectual content is the least of their problems. Let the poor breathe!

Now that the Ikorodu frozen-food shop brouhaha has died down, how can someone who wasn't rich before and is starting from scratch aspire to make $1m in Nigeria and remain liquid without going broke? Two parts to this. Making money and maintaining a consistent level of wealth.

@soladaloris @Heislionn People want new experiences every now and then, the fans are right to demand for new music from their favorite acts.

Success has no formula except for grace. I’ve seen all sorts of people succeed. I have seen hard-working people succeed, and I have seen lazy people succeed. I have seen the truthful win and liars triumph. Seen the poor get rich, and the rich get even richer without explanation.

I have been entertaining the thought that, to a great extent, men and women can live without getting into a commitment with each other. Previously, I used to think that’s not possible. That creates the question: if men and women can live without a romantic relationship, why get into one. I still don’t have a concrete answer. But I have some ideas. One is for provision and protection. As a baseline, whether men and women are in a relationship or not, human adults will have sex, and children will be born. But then, when children are in the equation, things change. Naturally, men invest very little in the procreation process. They actually contribute their smallest cell, and are capable of producing 100M -300M a day. So it’s really not a big deal. The female contribution is disproportionately high. They give their biggest cell, the ova, released once every moon*. They also provide the body, nutrients, child birth, lactation, etc. Human kids are born before maturity, making them the most neurologically and cognitively helpless young ones compared to other animals. Mothers have to dedicate at 2 or so years before human babies can survive without their them. Gestation and lactation make women very invested in the life of the fetus/baby, which makes the mother very delicate. This is one period they really need men’s protection and provision. For a lady, this is the thing she would look for a man for. This is the period where most women can’t do much. Things are usually very messy here. Back to initial thesis. Men and women can function independently, and can live complete lives without relationships and marriage. But there’s time when the lady will need a man to take care of her. And that is what she is scouting for. The other things are secondary and can be achieved outside the relationship. The ladies I have interacted with oft claim that a man’s future is more important to her. She calculates how you are likely going to compound over time. This feels offensive to me sometimes. Like, why can’t you love me for me now. The thing is, that’s not her concern biologically. She can intellectualize it, but I don’t think it’s something her systems cares about. And evolutionary, the female brain, the society and later the government had to form ways to make the man invest in bringing up children. Not to make the man loved. So far, majority of them have been effective. Some of the ways are like making the men feel like they own the children. Technically, that’s untrue. Women invest the most, and the highest investor is the owner. Easy math. But if we do that, men won’t invest. Overtime, the government had to intervene. I opine that this is what makes a marriage certificate a financial contract, and less of a love commitment. That’s why countries like Sweden which have solid systems to ensure kids are well taken care of also has the highest number of single people.

Everybody who fought me 3 years ago when I mentioned that Afrobeats was headed for a decline, should now hang their head in shame as they complain about today's stagnation. At no point did I take a gamble or a guess to arrive at that conclusion and sound the alarm, as early as I did. And what did I get for it? I got your insults. I received your derision. You branded me -– who has served this culture with a duty of care — a hater, and went about business as usual. Ignoring all the warning signs as I screamed them daily. Since 2018, Afrobeats to the world has been my life's work. I've told stories of ascendancy, celebrated projects and documented our milestones. After "Calm Down," when my models went off, the data prediction informed me of the future. That grim future is now here. To find solutions, I obsessed over numbers, and ran multiple models to find out why the Latinos did it, how the Koreans are ruling, and what broke the Caribbeans. And it all pointed back to one thing; A healthy home market. Without making money at home, we're playing a game where we have no control. The zeitgeist is fickle, and pop tastes are on a rotational cycle. Add that to our abandonment of local sounds to become an outpost of Amapiano, we were bound to experience this. It was so easy to see as people failed to recoup, and we celebrated technical wins and vanity metrics over actual growth. Many albums did not hit. Many did not scale for the level of investment thrown into them. We stopped creating at the highest levels, and engendered an insidious culture of production. What you call saturation, is the result of formulaic over-production overtaking raw creativity at the highest levels. The result? An incoming generation of underfunded creators having to "build community" while their elders squabble over contracts and what would have been. Music is surging around the world, while you shrink with passing the blame. So yes, your latest tweets about "Afrobeats is in a decline" or "see my neighbour, they are suffering too" aren't original. You knew it 3 years ago when you called me "troublemaker." You rebuffed the evidence before your eyes, and played ostrich. And now? The sands beneath your feet have stopped shifting.

@asemota 😂

“Wealth Porn” is alluring. We love to live vicariously through the rich. Nigerians are very much like Americans when it comes to glorifying and deifying the wealthy. People believe it is inspirational, but it is more damaging than we think, as it creates reductive aspirations.

@Benn_X1 Many people don’t understand friendships and how to build healthy relationships. I don’t know if this is peculiar to just Nigerians but I see this a lot

The $1M conversation on Nigerian Twitter is funny because the first thing you should do when you come into money in bulk is to leave it. Pretend it doesn't exist for at least 3 months. Never jump into investing in anything you don't know very well. I am talking from experience.

The chances of you giving yourself the life you want is higher than outsourcing it to the generosity of a stranger.

Building has made me realize that when you’re creating a solution that involves transactions between people from multiple countries, you can’t build only with the knowledge of how onboarding or registration works in your own country. For instance, I’m currently working on a big project, and it has given me a clearer understanding that during registration, different African countries have different administrative structures. Some countries don’t use “states.” They use districts (Uganda, Malawi, Botswana), regions (Ghana, Tanzania, Senegal), or provinces (Rwanda, South Africa). These are things you might learn about, but the deeper understanding comes from years of actually building products and encountering these real-world differences. Experience from building over the years is what exposes you to these complexities and teaches you how to design solutions that work beyond your own environment.

Nigeria hasn’t exactly been blessed with leaders. This shouldn’t surprise you at all.

Abiodun @bin_gbada

3 weeks ago

What level of absolute self-destruction is this? Why is he acting like a three years old kid that they took his lollipop? This isn’t a leader. wtf

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Quality doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it’s mostly a downstream of a lot of factors which includes incentives, infrastructures and most importantly economics. So when we say Afrobeats lack funding, it’s not just money to promote singles or albums or the advances, it’s the whole ecosystem structure. You can’t separate music from the environment that creates it, and in many ways the current state of Afrobeats is a reflection of the same structural issues affecting every other Nigerian industry; if the inputs are poor, the output won’t suddenly be world class.

The important thing to note here is that it is more about friction and function than expenditure. There is a level of comfort you need to be much more functional, and sometimes (not always) that comfort usually requires spending more or moving to a more expensive place that removes friction. Yesterday, as I was driving between Ghana and Togo, I realized how important NOT being afraid of the police or criminals appearing suddenly was to my ability to think and be functional. I could also plan my time better with stable infrastructure. Sometimes you don't need to spend more; you simply have to remove yourself from the source of friction that's preventing the function. That move could even be lateral. I have told many friends to move away from London to other parts of England after seeing them struggle and achieve limited results. When they did, not only did they save money, but their productivity quadrupled. In Accra, I moved around a bit. From East Legon, to Ridge, now in the mountains where I found peace and quiet. This place is cheaper than the other places I had lived, but makes me more functional. I figured the UK and most countries out early enough. When I was in Lagos, I was away from Lagos most weekends and it kept me sane out of the rat race. I saw Late Otunba Balogun doing it every weekend and finally understood why he did and why he lived the way he did for people famously known to be frugal. He was a very functional person. Many people think hustling and living under hard conditions are virtues in themselves, but they are not. Effort without exponential reward is stupidity. If you pay more and can get more, it is a better way to be on the path to getting even more.

Tosin Olugbenga @TosinOlugbenga

4 weeks ago

I remember this conversation I had with @asemota on the TL sometimes around 2020/2021. And that concept has been working for me. As your financial responsibilities increases, the higher success you also make in a bid to meet up with those financial responsibilities.

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