There was a machine at my hotel in Paris. It was at the breakfast station, just sitting there among the pastries and the fruit, and it dispensed sparkling water. Not from a bottle. From itself. You pressed something and out came cold, carbonated, lightly flavoured water that tasted like someone had finally figured out what water was supposed to be. I stood there probably longer than was reasonable for someone who was supposed to be getting breakfast. By the time I got back to

I spent almost two hours in a waiting room once, holding documents I had not been told I could read. The meeting was with the head of the then Marina Securities. My boss needed certain papers and I had been sent to collect them. That was the entirety of my brief. Go there, wait, collect, come back. So I sat in that reception and I waited, and I did what I always do when I do not have enough information. I turned it over. I tried to assemble the picture from the fragments I ha

I am someone who reads rooms for a living. Not in a mystical way. In the way that anyone who has spent enough time presenting to people learns to do. You watch the face of the person in the third row who crossed their arms twenty minutes ago. You notice when someone stops taking notes. You feel the energy shift in a way you cannot always name but you know, and you adjust. You slow down, you find a different entry point, you make eye contact with the person who looks lost and

This week, someone asked me what it’s like to live in my estate. I gave her my honest review. She listened carefully, then told me she had heard the complete opposite from someone else. She was polite about it, genuinely considering both accounts. Yet, the conversation lingered in my mind, much like certain small things that carry deeper meanings. Because here is what nobody tells you when you are researching where to live in Lagos. There is a house just outside my estate. It

Two slightly unsettling things happened this week. Not the dramatic kind of unsettling. More like a quiet nudge. The kind that makes you put your phone down for a second and stare at nothing. A vibrant market stall brimming with colorful fabrics and diverse goods, arranged in a lively, densely packed display under a patterned canopy. The first one came from watching people move between AI tools - which I wrote about earlier this week. What I’ve noticed is that everyone seems

Call it trauma, but as a child I was always scolded for not finishing my food. --- My mum would make me sit there through the tears until it was mostly gone. For her, the sign of a healthy child was a chubby child who ate everything on their plate, even if they didn’t serve that quantity for themselves. The rule was simple: finish what is in front of you. You don’t waste food. You don’t leave the table. You finish it. It’s funny how these things stay with you. Because lately

Having been a chubby child with people pulling my cheeks at every turn and telling me how much they loved them (I hated the cheek pulling by the way, it hurt so much), I grew up watching my weight like a hawk. If I ever dared to stop checking the scale for a while, a family event would roll around and some aunt or cousin would comment on how I had “added weight” and needed to watch it. So the scale became a quiet companion in my life. When I reflect on those years now, I have

Nine years ago I entered what I now call my “shut up and build”  phase. Long before Covid, I had already begun withdrawing from most social circles. I stopped talking about what I was building and started working quietly instead. Someone once told me something that stayed with me. If a man plants an iroko tree in his backyard, the day will come when you will finally notice it. And by then, it will be too late to cut it down. Majestic Iroko tree stretches skyward with the sun'