If you opened this article, chances are something in your life feels f*cked. You are probably at a spot where you feel stuck and are asking yourself, "How do I escape this hellhole?" I'll share some insights from how I have lived my life over the last decade and a half.
If you hate reading long articles, stop here.
If you are still reading, then this is meant for you.
I want you to start with the strongest objection to everything I've written below: most of what happens to you is not your fault, and advice is a poor substitute for capital, citizenship, health, and a functioning family. A boy in Ajegunle who follows every instruction in this article will still face a harder road than a boy in Bethesda who follows none of them. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
That is true. It is also useless as a way to live. The structural argument explains outcomes at the population level. You are not a population. You are one person with a finite number of Mondays, and the only variable you control is what you do with them. So hold both: the game is rigged, and you still have to play it well. There are places you come from that seem practically impossible to escape. But that defeatist mindset is also partly why many never escape those places. I don't know anyone who achieved something they didn't believe they could achieve.
I grew up in Ajegunle, raised by a single mother. I started my first business at 17, selling greeting cards on campuses that were not my own, and paid my way through university. I have since built a company that became Africa's first online printer, shut down ventures and took my L, met presidents, advised mayors of US cities (and got paid for it), and now spend my days helping entrepreneurs and talents at the top of their fields move to the United States. I have been broke, and I have sat across from people who will never be. I also grew up around wealthy first cousins I could never share the same room with as a kid. (Who dashed money banana?) A lot of that is history now. I know a couple of people with similar stories too.
I try to put my thoughts in writing here.
Poverty and privilege break you in opposite directions and leave you in the same place.
Poverty trains you to survive the next 72 hrs. It compresses your time horizon to what you can see today. It shrinks the valuable hours in your day into solving problems that won't make you rich. Every decision gets evaluated against immediate cash, because it has to. The cost is that you become structurally incapable of the moves that pay in three years, which are the only moves that change anything. "The wealth of the rich is their fortified city, but poverty is the ruin of the poor. - Proverbs 10:15"
Wealth removes consequence. If nothing you do can hurt you, nothing you do can teach you. Many kids with money arrive at 30 with an excellent education, a good network, and zero evidence they can make anything happen. They are not lazy. They have never been forced. I promise you I have met people like this. They became poor by 60 despite inheriting wealth.
Same output, opposite causes: a person who cannot move.
The fix is symmetrical. If you came from scarcity, you must deliberately install a time horizon. Make one decision this year that pays you nothing for 24 months and defend it like rent. A new course, a certification, a new skill, a new relationship, a personal project. Anything that compounds. If you came from comfort, you must deliberately install stakes. Put your own money in something. Take a job where you can be fired. Tell people what you are doing by a date, in public, where failing is visible.
You are not fixing your personality. You are installing the input your upbringing never gave you.
**Diagnose why you are fucked before you prescribe a way out.
**Most people are solving the wrong problem, loudly, for years.
The man who says he needs more discipline usually needs more sleep. The woman who says she needs a better strategy usually needs to stop working with someone who drains her. The founder who says he needs funding usually has no customers, and funding would only let him be wrong for longer. The person looking for a break in life likely needs to try more new things.
Run this properly. Write down the outcome you want in one sentence. Then ask what single thing, if it were solved, would make everything else easier or unnecessary. Not the top five. The one. Then ask it again about that answer. You are looking for the binding constraint, and you will know you have found it because it will be the one you least want to touch.
Almost nobody works on the binding constraint. It is usually boring, socially awkward, or involves admitting something. So people optimize things that are not binding: the logo, the morning routine, the second degree, the Notion system. Productivity that avoids the real constraint is just procrastination in a nice font.
MOVE! Change your market before you try to change yourself.
This is where I spend my professional life, so keep that bias in mind.
The same skill, at the same quality level, is priced differently in different markets. A developer in Lagos and a developer in Austin write the same loop. The pay difference isn't talent. It is the market. A physiotherapist, a plumber, a pastry chef, a researcher: all of them are priced by where they stand, not only by what they can do. Can't move physically? Use the internet to your advantage.
That is why I say immigration is a wealth-building strategy rather than an escape plan. Moving is not running away from a country. It is repricing your existing skill in a market that pays more for it, with better legal protection for what you build and better access to capital when you need it.
But do not read "market" as only "country." Most repricing available to you doesn't require a visa. Changing industry while keeping your function can double your income. Changing from employee to contractor can double it again. Changing from serving small clients to serving large ones is usually the same work for four times the fee. Moving from a room where you are the most capable person to a room where you are the least is the highest-return move most people never make, and it is free.
If you already have money, this is your blind spot (but it's also your advantage). You inherited a network in one market, and you assume it is the market. It is one of many, and it may be the one where your specific advantage is worth the least.
**Trade wages for things that compound
**Wages stop when you stop. That is the whole critique. Hourly logic works until your body or your attention runs out, and then it stops working.
Here are four things that compound:
1. Equity: Own a piece of something. Build something that makes money for you (and other people).
2. Skill that appreciates with use: You are not learning and building valuable skills; you are working backward. The world is moving, and the people you are competing with are not sleeping on things.
3. Reputation: There's a place for people who can be trusted to get things done, not to squander money. People who deliver. If you are poor and you have a bad reputation, there's no place for you in the world.
4. Relationships: The people you work for and work with, the community you build, the people you marry. Everything compounds with time. If the closest 10 people to you are going nowhere, you are going nowhere.
Let me tell you a story that connects points 3 and 4
Early this year, I hired someone on a part-time basis because he told me he could write SEO articles, I saw the evidence that he wasn't bluffing. We agreed on the fee, and he was onboarded. Then he stopped responding and stopped being active. Stopped joining weekly calls. I tried to reach out to him and still no response. I made sure he got paid even though he didn't deliver. Then closed the chapter. He still likes and retweets my posts on X as if nothing happened. I don't hold grudges, but I am sure you'd agree it would be hard for me to vouch for him in the future. On the flip side, I hired another dude to build an application for me last year. A simple CRM. Halfway through the project, he reached out to explain he couldn't deliver and was willing to refund; I asked him to keep part and send the rest. I ended up vibecoding the app myself with $200 Lovable credits. I am sure you know which of these two still talks to me was able to get a reference letter for Global Talent last month. I do hope the SEO guy isn't doing this to everyone out there. You can't go around burning relationships and reputation and expect to win.
Optimize for these four even when the cash is worse, which it usually is at the start.
The trap for poor people is that they cannot afford to take the compounding option, so they take cash or instant rewards every time and stay flat for a decade. The way through is not heroism. It is a split. Keep the wage that pays rent. Put 20 percent of your week into the compounding thing. You are not choosing between survival and ambition. You are buying ambition in installments.
The trap for many rich people is the mirror image. You were handed compounding capital, mostly in the form of a name and a network, and you are consuming it instead of deploying it. A network you only spend is an inheritance. A network you invest is a business.
**Proof beats potential
**The world does not pay for what you could do. It pays for evidence.
I see this in my work every week. Two people with identical careers get opposite results because one has documentation and the other has a story. Awards, published work, press, revenue figures, a record of people who will vouch. One person has a folder. The other has a memory.
So build evidence, deliberately, starting now. I call these BRAGGABLES (Things you can legitimately brag about). Ship small public things on a schedule. Write the thing down. Keep every offer letter, every contract, every screenshot of a result, every kind email from a client, every mention of your name in print. Save it the day it happens, in one place, with the date attached. This takes ten minutes a month, and it is the single highest-return administrative habit I know of. Five years from now, when you need a visa, a loan, a board seat, or a client, you will either have a folder, or you will have a memory.
Potential has an expiry date. At some point in your life, "promising" stops being useful on your CV.
**Shrink the loop
**The only durable advantage is how fast you learn, and cycle time sets your learning speed.
Most people run one experiment a year. They think about the business for eleven months and try it for one. They meet someone new every quarter. They ask for feedback annually, at a review, from someone incentivized to be vague.
Cut the cycle to weeks. Launch the ugly version. Ask the uncomfortable question directly. Send the message today instead of drafting it for a fortnight. You are not trying to be right. You are trying to find out, and finding out is cheap when the loop is short and ruinously expensive when it is long. I have killed products I announced publicly, and I have done many privately. None of it felt good, and all of it was correct. "A moving man will meet his luck." (Read that as a moving woman too)
**Know the things to cut. Then cut them.
*Sunk cost is the most expensive bias you carry, because it operates on the things you are proudest of. The years you have already given to a job, a company, a country, or a relationship are gone, no matter what you decide next. The only question is whether the next five years are better spent inside, outside, or what's in your past. If there's any book you should read on this, It's The DIP by Seth Godin.*
This includes people. Some of the people around you are load-bearing, and some of them are ballast, and you almost certainly know which is which. You do not need to announce anything or stage a confrontation. You just stop investing. Attention is the currency, and quietly reallocating it is both kinder and more effective than a speech.
Ending things well is a skill. Pay people what you owe them. Tell the truth about why. Do not disappear. You will need these people again, and the world is smaller than you think. In 2007, I worked at an ad agency. But I wanted more. So I went to my boss to explain that I wanted to leave and start my own thing. He asked if I could give him 6 months, with a deal to use his office as my business address in exchange for overseeing the transition and hiring my replacement. We still spoke two days ago.
**Money is oxygen, not meaning
**You need enough money that you stop thinking about money. That number is real; it is lower than the internet suggests, and it matters enormously.
Below that line, everything is harder: your judgment gets worse, your time horizon collapses, you take bad deals because you need the cash this month. Get above the line with genuine urgency.
Above that line, more money stops buying much. People who came from nothing often keep running the scarcity program long after it stopped being useful, chasing a number to fix a fear that a number cannot reach. People who started above the line often confuse having oxygen with having a reason to breathe.
If you have a 9-5, you have to start seeing your salary as capital to build the life you want.
Money, they say, buys options. Options are not a life. You still have to choose one.
**What to actually do this week
**Pick a 90-day horizon, because a year is too long to feel and a week is too short to matter.
Write one sentence describing the outcome. Name the binding constraint honestly, including the part you do not want to write down. Choose the single highest-leverage action against it and put it in your calendar three times a week at a fixed hour. Start the evidence folder today. Identify one room you should be in where you would be the least capable person, and find your way in. Cut one thing that is only alive because you have already spent money on it.
Then do it while it is boring, because the middle is always boring, and the middle is where the outcome is decided.
None of this guarantees anything. You can do every item on this list and still get hit by something you did not choose, and if you have lived where I have lived, you know how often that happens. But the person who has installed a time horizon, found the real constraint, moved to a market that prices them correctly, built assets instead of wages, and kept the receipts is much harder to keep down. That is not a promise of a good outcome. It shifts the odds, which is all any of us get. Your goals for making moves that unf*ck your life should not be about a guaranteed outcome. No one can guarantee that. It should be about shifting the odds in your favor and increasing your luck surface area.
I have taken that bet from both sides of it. It is still the best one available.
