Abdul

My story actually begins before I was even a thought. My mother’s firstborn son was named Abdulhameed Hassan. He was deeply loved, but he passed away when he was 10yrs old. As the years went by, my mother had my siblings, built her family, and assumed her childbearing years were far behind her.

But the Almighty had a different script. At 45 years old, she had me, an absolute surprise. An unplanned, unexpected addition to the family. When it came time to name me, my parents chose to honor the son they had lost. They gave me his name, passing the baton of his memory down to me.

Growing up with this story, wearing a name that carries so much history, changes how you view life. Because my arrival wasn’t planned by human hands, I’ve always felt a profound certainty that it was orchestrated by divine design. I am here on purpose.

That is why, in every room I enter, in every journey I take, and in every piece of work I do, I leave nothing on the table. I give it my absolute best. I don't just live for myself; I live with the deep-seated knowledge that the Almighty placed me here for a reason, and I owe it to Him to fulfill it.

So today, at 30, I’m not just celebrating getting older. I’m celebrating the gift of existence, the strength of my parents, and the beautiful, purposeful journey that the Almighty has set me on.

Cheers to 30 years of living on purpose! 🥂✨

That principle matters, especially at moments like this. New years invite reflection, but they also reveal character. When something significant happens, what we choose to add to the conversation, clarity or noise, understanding or performance, is usually a mirror of who we are.

This essay is about that distinction.

The Performance of Insight

When news breaks, two very different things tend to happen, even though they look similar on the surface.

The first is genuine analysis, like this one (https://techcabal.com/2026/01/05/flutterwave-mono-acquisition/). Credit to TechCabal, they did a surprisingly good job here. This is slow, cautious, and often incomplete. It tries to understand why something happened, what constraints existed, and what trade-offs were made. It is comfortable saying “I don’t know yet.”

The second is something else entirely. It’s what I’d call the performance of insight. It’s easy to find on twitter. It’s not worth pointing at.

The performance of insight is about sounding informed rather than being informed. It favors confidence over accuracy and speed over depth. It shows up quickly, speaks definitively, and rarely revises itself. Its primary audience isn’t the truth, but the crowd.

This is why you often see people explain complex deals with a single screenshot, a valuation range, or a confident sentence that leaves no room for uncertainty. The goal isn’t to understand the decision. It’s to look like someone who understands.

The problem isn’t that people have opinions. It’s that this kind of performance crowds out real thinking. It turns complex, multi-dimensional decisions into simple narratives that fit neatly into a tweet.

Over time, ecosystems that reward this behavior stop learning. They mistake confidence for competence and noise for signal. And the people actually closest to the work increasingly disengage from the conversation.

Valuation Isn’t the Story

Valuation has become the easiest hook. It’s a single number that feels concrete, comparable, and tweetable. So naturally, it becomes the center of the conversation.

But valuation is rarely the most important part of a deal.

When an acquisition happens, the interesting questions are usually elsewhere. Why does the deal make sense strategically? What constraints or opportunities led both parties here? What changes for customers? For employees? For the market?

In most emerging ecosystems, the uncomfortable truth is that the median outcome for startups is failure. Not dramatic failure. Quiet failure. Companies run out of money, stall, or enter a kind of suspended animation where nothing really grows anymore.

Against that backdrop, an outcome where shareholders don’t lose money, employees are taken care of, and the product continues to live is not trivial. It’s progress.

Obsessing over valuation alone turns complex decisions into scorekeeping. It encourages founders to optimize for optics instead of durability. And it teaches observers the wrong lesson: that the only thing worth discussing is the number.

To the guy circulating screenshots about valuation, I hope you enjoyed the 24-hour attention. All it did was shift the conversation away from the real crux of the news.

Timing Is Not a Guessing Game

Another common thread in sideline commentary is timing. Why now? Why not later? Why not earlier?

These questions assume timing is arbitrary or driven by fear. In reality, timing is usually the result of constraints, opportunities, and alignment.

At the time of acquisition, Mono had significant runway. Even without generating new revenue, the company had years of operational headroom. With revenue growing roughly 15% month over month, the runway was effectively unbounded.

This wasn’t a company running out of options. It was a company choosing among them.

Deals like this don’t happen by accident. They require board approval, shareholder alignment, legal diligence, and strategic clarity. If it didn’t make sense to the people who approved it, and who are most exposed to the outcome, it simply wouldn’t have happened.

Many of the loudest takes here come from a simple habit: reading headlines instead of articles. Announcements are skimmed. Context is skipped. Nuance is ignored.

Reading is a skill. And in ecosystems like ours, it’s still undervalued.

Spectators

The further you are from the work, the simpler everything looks.

From the sidelines, decisions appear obvious. Alternatives seem limitless. Trade-offs disappear. Confidence increases.

Spectators aren’t malicious. But they aren’t accountable. Their cost of being wrong is low. Builders carry the weight of payroll, customers, and long-term consequences.

When you share information publicly, there’s a question you should ask yourself honestly: what is the real purpose of this? Is it to help people understand, or to be seen as the person who knows?

In the last 24 hours, most of what I’ve seen has been performative. Confident statements made with little context. Assumptions stacked on top of assumptions. Commentary that does little to inform anyone, but succeeds in signaling certainty.

And the thing about assumptions is that they reveal more about the person making them than about the situation itself. From the tone of some reactions, you can usually infer the underlying incentives driving them.

When Bad News Feels More Comfortable

As I write this, I can’t help but laugh.

If this were a different kind of story, if Mono had shut down, if there were whispers of fund mismanagement, or any form of bad news, you would see a very different reaction. The timelines would be quieter. There would be fewer hot takes. No long threads explaining why things happened.

Instead, there would likely be private messages. WhatsApp texts to me expressing sympathy, support, and encouragement. “Stay strong.” “This too shall pass.”

What a farce.

Last year, I wrote a tweet that said: support comes when you seem behind, resistance when you seem ahead. It resonates more now than it did then.

There’s something uncomfortable about success in our ecosystem. We seem far more united in the face of failure than in the presence of progress. Bad news attracts sympathy. Good news attracts suspicion.

That’s why there’s often silence when a company quietly dies, drifts into zombie mode, or collapses under poor management. Cricket sounds. No analysis. No moral outrage. Just acceptance.

None of that happened here. This wasn’t a shutdown. It wasn’t mismanagement. It wasn’t failure.

And perhaps that’s what made it harder for some people to process.

A Personal Note

Finally, on a more personal note.

I just sold a company I started in the middle of COVID, before my 30s, for millions of dollars. I’m incredibly proud of that. Not because of the headlines or the speculation, but because of what it represents. We returned value to the shareholders who believed in us early. We created real liquidity opportunities for employees who dedicated years of their lives to the work. And most importantly, we now have a much bigger playground to pursue even more ambitious plans.

That outcome didn’t come from commentary. It came from building. And that’s still where the real work is.

The game’s already underway. All that’s left for the spectators and doubters is to watch the results unfold. If you knew what I know, you’d be bullish on us 🤣🦋🌊. Time for me to enjoy some well-deserved rest before the work continues! ✌🏾

I’ll leave you with my two favorite verses from the Quran.

“So be patient. Indeed, the promise of Allah is truth.” (Quran 30:60) “And do not pursue that of which you have no knowledge. Indeed, the hearing, the sight, and the heart — about all those [one] will be questioned.”

This year dragged me through that kind of road. It was a long stretch. It squeezed lessons out of me that I hadn’t learned in decades. Strange how one year can teach more than a lifetime.

And I’m glad I went through it. Not in some heroic way. Just in a quiet, honest way. Because I came out different. Sharper. Calmer. Less naive. More aware of myself and the world.

Because hardship molds you. It strips away the shallow comforts that often cushion people from reality. When everything works, when skills, luck, privilege, or timing always align, it’s easy to go through days without ever questioning your strength. But when the ground shakes under your feet, you discover what you’re really made of.

I wish you a hard life so you learn to build from scratch. When you lack resources or connections or clear paths, when every step demands something of you, you become creative. You learn to find the brittle plank to steady the next step. You begin to see opportunity hiding in the debris.

I wish you a hard life so you don’t take kindness or comfort for granted. When everything is handed to you, it becomes easy to expect more. But when nights are long, and food or shelter or hope is uncertain, you learn to appreciate even a small flame of kindness. You honour those who help you. You treat their generosity not as an entitlement but as a gift.

I wish you a hard life so you learn compassion. When you have walked through your own storms, you begin to recognize the limping step of another. The hungry stomach, the cracked voice, the fear in their eyes. You no longer see yourself above others; you see yourself as someone who has known. You reach out because you know what it is to need.

I wish you a hard life so you learn humility. Pride becomes harder when you feel the cold wind bite at your back. When you are reminded daily that you don’t control everything. You’ll come to know that luck can shift, that comfort can disappear, that you are but one decision, one misstep, one twist of fate away from being humbled. And in that knowledge you learn to hold your ego tenderly.

I wish you a hard life so you learn persistence. Because hardship does not let you rest. It interrupts comfort, it destroys complacency. You fight each day because you must, not because you want recognition. You fight because you owe it to yourself to keep going. You fight until you find the plank, the spark, the new breath.

But I don’t wish you a hard life to break you. I wish you a hard life to make you. I wish you those nights when nothing seems to move forward, so that on the quiet morning after you can sense, faintly, the strength creeping back. I wish you the days that seem to end before they start, so you learn to build your own sunrise.

And after you walk through that fire, when you look back, you won’t ask “Why me?” You will say “Thank you.” Because you will know how easy it is to be lost in comfort, to take stability for granted. You will know that the hardest paths lead to the clearest view.

So I wish you a hard life. Not cruelty. Not despair. I wish you the grit to grow. I wish you the storms that force you to stand. I wish you the nights of restless doubt that make you remember what it feels to breathe.

Because once you survive the hard life, you become someone few know someone strong, alert, soft in the right places, unbreakable where it matters.

First, never decide what you actually want. Drift. Say yes to things because they are available, not because they matter. If someone asks what you are aiming for, answer with a foggy sentence that sounds reasonable. Vague goals age well because they never get tested. Clarity is dangerous. It creates a standard you might miss.

Second, mistake motion for progress. Stay busy. Fill your calendar. Attend meetings that end with “let’s circle back.” If a week feels exhausting, you must be doing something right. Output is optional. Visibility is enough. When nothing works, add more activity. That usually hides the problem long enough.

Third, avoid finishing. Start projects with enthusiasm, then abandon them quietly. Keep many things at 80 percent. The last stretch forces you to confront reality. Shipping creates feedback. Feedback creates learning. Learning ruins failure.

Fourth, outsource responsibility. When things go wrong, look outward. The market was bad. The timing was off. The team did not get it. Users are irrational. This works especially well if you sound calm and analytical. Nothing preserves failure like the belief that it is never your fault.

Fifth, consume more than you produce. Read threads. Watch interviews. Save quotes. Develop opinions on topics you have never tried. Preparation feels like work, but it carries no risk. You can spend years getting ready. The trick is to call it research so it feels noble.

Sixth, ignore feedback unless it agrees with you. Compliments are signals. Criticism is noise. If several people point to the same issue, treat it as coincidence. If results contradict your beliefs, question the measurement. Reality is often wrong in the short term. Stick to the story you prefer.

Seventh, optimize for comfort. Choose the option that preserves your routine. Avoid conversations that might get awkward. Delay decisions that might close doors. If something feels hard in a quiet, lonely way, you are probably close to growth. Step back immediately.

Eighth, copy without understanding. Mimic what worked for someone else, stripped of context. Apply their tactics to a different problem, in a different place, at a different time. When it fails, conclude that the whole thing is a myth. This saves you from doing the slower work of thinking.

Ninth, chase validation. Pick goals that impress people who are not affected by the outcome. Count likes. Track applause. If the work feels empty without an audience, you are on the right path to disappointment. External approval is volatile. Build on it anyway.

Finally, never look back with honesty. Do not run post-mortems. Do not write down what broke. Memory is flexible. Rewrite the past so it flatters you. Growth depends on accurate recall. Failure thrives on selective amnesia.

The comforting part is that none of this requires talent, resources, or bad luck. Anyone can do it. You can fail slowly, politely, and with good explanations. From the outside, it can even look like progress.

The harder path is the opposite, and it is strangely specific. Decide what you want. Finish things. Listen when reality disagrees. Own the result. Produce more than you consume. Get uncomfortable on purpose. Remember accurately.

Show extreme care

Care is visible. It shows in the neatness of your file names, the tone of an email, the frame you set for a meeting. Care is not a performance. It’s the internal standard that makes you check one more time, tidy one more thing, and refuse to ship sloppily. Example: if you send a report, open the PDF yourself on another device before you hit send. If you build a product, use it for a week as a user. These micro-actions are cheap and they compound.

Know your first solution is probably terrible; rethink it

Your first idea will often be the easiest to reach for. It’s the surface answer. Treat it as a draft, not a final. After you map out the obvious path, force a second pass. Ask: what would a cautious skeptic change? What would a rookie miss? Rethinking can be quick. Wait an hour. Sleep on it. Sketch three alternatives in twenty minutes. Real creativity is iterative, keep refining until what you have resists being improved by a small tweak.

Pay extreme attention to small details

Most excellence lives in the parts people call boring. A single misplaced decimal, a misleading label, or an awkward transition in a talk breaks trust. Pick one domain and obsess over its details. If you design interfaces, polish the microcopy. If you manage accounts, make reconciliation painless and on time. Small details mean fewer errors, faster feedback loops, and a reputation that travels: people notice precision and tell others.

Always follow up

Promises are worthless unless they’re kept. Follow-up is the bridge between intention and result. When you say “I’ll get back to you,” put a time on it and follow through. Use simple systems: a short to-do list, calendar blocks, or a single follow-up folder in your inbox. Follow-up includes returning calls, reminding teammates of deadlines, and circulating outcomes after meetings. Do this consistently and you become the person others rely on when things matter.

Own up to your fuck-ups

Mistakes are inevitable. Hiding them ruins trust. Own the mistake quickly, state what happened, and outline how you’ll fix it. Avoid long justifications. People forgive competence and candor faster than clever excuses. Owning up also speeds learning. When you name the error, you can prevent it next time. Example: if a launch fails, write a one-page post-mortem with facts and a single corrective action. Distribute it. Move on.

Practice these habits together, they reinforce each other. Care makes follow-up credible. Rethinking minimizes the size of failures. Attention to detail reduces the number of things you need to own up to. Owning up builds the trust you need to take bigger swings. Start small: pick one habit this week and do it deliberately. Measure one concrete outcome. Repeat.

Disregard is quieter. It’s someone acting as if you aren’t there. Your ideas, your effort, your presence, ignored. That’s worse, because it erases you. You could spend years doing things no one notices. You could speak up in a meeting, write an email, post online, and nobody registers it. Nothing hurts like being invisible.

Most people try to avoid disrespect. They walk on eggshells, nod too much, stay small. But the truth is, being invisible is far more dangerous. If no one notices you, you have no influence. You can’t shape anything. You can’t be part of the conversation that matters.

The people who end up changing things don’t avoid disrespect. They get mocked, dismissed, even attacked. But at least they’re seen. Their ideas are on the table. That’s how you know you matter. Disregard is the opposite: it’s erasure, and it’s permanent unless you force a presence.

A beach teaches you patience. Waves don’t obey your timing. You can stand there waiting for the perfect one, only for the ocean to send a weak splash that barely reaches your toes. Or you step closer, thinking you finally understand its rhythm, and a wave comes out of nowhere and drenches you. Life works like that. You try to predict its patterns, but the best you can do is learn to read the signs and stay loose. The moment you believe you’ve mastered the tide is exactly when it humbles you.

There’s also something grounding about sand. It never fully leaves you. You wash your hands, but some grains stay. You shake your shoes, but more hide in the corners. Life leaves traces like that. The experiences you thought you’d forgotten, the conversations you didn’t realise shaped you, the mistakes you tried to leave behind, they cling. Not as punishment, but as reminders. A little grit in the shoe isn’t always bad. Sometimes it’s what keeps you awake to what matters.

And then there’s the horizon. At a beach, you see distance in a way you don’t anywhere else. It’s a silent invitation to imagine. The sea doesn’t show you what’s on the other side, but it hints that something is. Life needs that sort of horizon. A place your eyes can rest while your mind stretches. It’s how you stay hopeful. Even on the days when the sky is grey, the horizon remains, waiting for you to believe in it again.

Life being a beach also means it’s shared. You’re rarely the only one standing there. Some people build castles that look perfect until a wave takes them out. Others dig trenches for no clear reason. Some are just there to sit and breathe. Everyone is dealing with the same tides but in their own way. There’s a quiet comfort in that. You realise you’re not special in your struggles, but you’re also not alone.

What I like most about the beach metaphor is its honesty. A beach is beautiful, but not effortlessly so. It’s shaped by chaos, wind, water, erosion, storms. The same elements that can destroy it also renew it. That’s how life works. You break, you rebuild. You get knocked down by something you didn’t see coming, and you stand again, a little wiser, a little worn, but still part of the shoreline.

If life is a beach, then maybe the goal isn’t to avoid the waves or hunt for the perfect moment. Maybe the goal is to learn how to stand, how to float, how to let the salt sting without letting it defeat you. Maybe it’s to enjoy the warmth when it’s there, to respect the storms when they come, and to keep looking at the horizon even when everything in front of you is loud and messy.

Life is a beach. Unpredictable, beautiful, exhausting, peaceful, and endlessly shifting. And the more you accept that, the easier it becomes to walk barefoot into whatever wave comes next.

When we started Mono, we weren’t the first to imagine open banking in Africa. That honor belongs to Okra. They were the true pioneers, the ones who first convinced the market and investors that such a product could exist here. Fara and her team built the early foundation of what the rest of us are standing on today. They made people believe that open banking wasn’t just a Western concept, but something that could thrive in African markets too.

I remember how, in every meeting, I made it a point to say that Okra did it first. It wasn’t false humility; it was the truth. And more than that, it was respect. Fara was an innovator, bold, early, and brave enough to go where no one had gone.

Unfortunately, many founders today don’t think that way. They see every other founder as a rival to ridicule or erase. They think the only way forward is to discredit others. It’s a culture of hostility disguised as ambition. But that mindset blinds you to something important, your competitors often validate your market, sharpen your thinking, and accelerate your growth. You don’t have to hate them to win.

The first time I met Fara at a TechCabal event, it didn’t feel like meeting a competitor. It felt like meeting someone who understood the same fight. We hugged, talked, and it was natural, like we had known each other for a while. That kind of connection is rare now. Too many new founders are obsessed with posturing instead of building relationships with those who made their path possible.

Recognition isn’t weakness. It’s wisdom. It shows you understand history, and that you’re building with it, not pretending to have invented it. Every ecosystem that thrives does so because its builders celebrate and learn from those who came before them. The pioneers make the soil fertile. The next generation plants new seeds. The smart ones give flowers.

I would like to give mine, to the founders before me who made this ecosystem flourish with investors and belief. GB, who pioneered enterprise payments. Shola, who made payments for developers mainstream. Tosin, who made offline payments cool. Tayo, the true OG of new-age financial services. And many others who carried the torch long before most of us even knew there was a path to walk.

There are certain thoughts we try to walk past quickly, like a dark alley we avoid even when it’s the shortest route home. Death is one of them. We pretend it’s far away, or that thinking about it invites it closer. But the strange thing about avoiding death is that it never really leaves us alone. It sits quietly in the background, shaping how we move, what we chase, and what we fear, even when we refuse to look at it directly.

The first time you allow yourself to think about death without flinching, it doesn’t feel poetic. It feels practical. It feels like suddenly stepping outside yourself to see the outlines of your life from a distance. You notice how much of your time is spent trying to be impressive to people who don’t matter. You notice the grudges you’ve stored with the care of a collector, even though none of them would survive the final audit. You notice the days you threw away because “there’s still time.” Time for what, exactly? Thinking of death makes you confront this silliness with a quiet embarrassment.

But thinking of death isn’t about fear. It is actually a kind of clarity. For some people, it arrives through tragedy. For others, through age. For a few, it comes from nothing dramatic, just a sudden awareness of how fragile everything is, how temporary. You look around and realise that every single person you admire, envy, resent, or try to impress is also heading toward the same end. And somehow, that levels the world in a way nothing else does.

When you think about death long enough, life stops feeling like a race. It becomes more like a project. You begin to ask different questions: What am I building? Who am I becoming? Which parts of my life feel real, and which parts are just performance? And the more honest you become about these questions, the more the noise in your life starts to fall away. People assume the thought of death makes you sad. But more often it makes you intentional.

It also sharpens gratitude. Nothing becomes ordinary anymore. The people you love become a little more precious. The quiet moments that used to pass unnoticed become small reminders that life is happening right now, not later. When you remember that anything could be your last time experiencing something, you pay more attention. You hold things properly. You stop rushing past your own life.

There is something pure about standing at the edge of a new skill. Before you learn anything, there is this wide open space where everything is possible. You are not good or bad yet. You are simply someone about to start. That moment carries a kind of optimism that is hard to find in the parts of life where you already know too much.

Most people pick up hobbies for relaxation. For me it feels more like discovery. A new hobby lets you test who you could become if you were not limited by your old definitions. You get to see yourself without the weight of past expectations. You get to experiment again, the way you did when you were younger and life felt like a series of doors instead of a set of routines.

Right now the guitar is not about making music. It is about curiosity. It is about choosing to explore something without a roadmap or a deadline. There is no pressure to perform. No audience waiting. Just a quiet object that represents another version of myself I have not met yet.

Every major thing I have achieved followed this same pattern. Not a perfect plan. Not confidence. Just a willingness to begin with nothing. So picking up the guitar felt familiar. It felt like the early stage of everything else I have eventually figured out.

Maybe the value of new hobbies is not in mastering them but in what they awaken. The sense that you can still grow, still evolve, still surprise yourself. Today it is the guitar. Tomorrow it might be something completely different. What matters is that I am still willing to begin.

The shift is subtle. When you see a new gambling product, it rarely calls itself gambling. It calls itself entertainment. When you see a prediction app, it calls itself insight or data or community. What none of them say is the real point. They are systems created to extract money from people who think they are playing a game.

The disturbing part is not that these things exist. Humans have always been tempted by luck. What is new is the celebration. We are celebrating businesses with no moral core simply because they grow fast. They raise money, buy ads, announce partnerships, and somehow this convinces people that they are building the future. But if you strip away the noise, they are not building anything at all. They are taking. Quietly. Predictably.

This tells you something uncomfortable about how the world works now. If something grows fast, people assume it is good. Growth has become a replacement for virtue. As long as a company can acquire users and raise money, no one asks what it actually does to the people using it.

You can see the same pattern forming in AI. A lot of the early excitement was about solving real problems. Now the loudest companies are the ones pushing the boundaries of harm. Tools that generate nudity. Tools that can impersonate anyone. Tools that erase the idea of consent. And investors back them because the metrics look promising. It feels like progress on paper, even though it is decay in reality.

What is strange is how easily people accept this decay when it is wrapped in technology. If someone opened a shop that sold fake identities or forged evidence, people would be outraged. But when a startup does it with a neural network, it becomes “innovation.”

The real danger is that once society starts rewarding harmful ideas, the people building useful ideas get drowned out. The winners become the ones who exploit human impulses instead of the ones who solve human problems. And when the winners change, the future changes with them.

I do not think most people see what is happening yet. The consequences appear slowly. A friend who cannot stop betting on micro predictions. A teenager finding an AI generated nude of herself online. A politician framed by a deepfake. These things feel isolated now. They will not feel isolated later.

There is a simple test I wish more founders and investors used. Ask whether the thing you are building makes people stronger or weaker. Not richer or poorer. Stronger or weaker. A world full of tools that make people weaker is not progress. It is just a nicer looking version of decline.

In the last 24 months, I’ve learned more from good mistakes than I did in the entire decade since I started this journey in 2013. I learned from the kind of money mistakes you only make once. From trusting the wrong people. From doing things differently and watching how fast people reveal their real selves. From trying to do right by people who had no interest in doing right at all. None of these lessons were theoretical. They were blunt, sometimes painful reminders that you only understand the world by touching the fire yourself. I wouldn’t have learned any of this without failing, without trying, without stepping into situations I wasn’t fully ready for.

The people who grow the fastest aren’t the ones who avoid mistakes. They’re the ones who make the right kind of mistakes.

Good mistakes vs Bad mistakes. There are two types of mistakes, and they’re not equal. Good mistakes are the ones you make while moving forward. They happen because you were taking initiative, trying something ambitious, stepping into the unknown. These mistakes open your mind. They reveal blind spots you didn’t even know you had. They make you sharper.

Examples of good mistakes:

Shipping something early, getting it wrong, and learning what customers actually want.

Hiring someone who isn’t a fit, and suddenly seeing the patterns you overlooked.

Taking a risk, failing publicly, and discovering a new level of resilience.

Good mistakes make you wiser. They expand your capacity.

Bad mistakes come from carelessness, ego, laziness, or not paying attention. They’re predictable. They don’t teach you anything because you could have avoided them just by being honest with yourself.

Examples of bad mistakes:

Ignoring red flags you already recognized.

Signing something important without reading it.

Repeating the same failed process because reflection feels uncomfortable.

Bad mistakes don’t grow you. They just waste time.

A simple rule:

If the mistake came from pushing forward, it’s probably a good one. If it came from not caring enough, it’s a bad one.

If you look closely at anyone who seems experienced, what you’re really seeing is someone who has accumulated a long trail of errors. Not just dramatic failures, but subtle misjudgments that only reveal their meaning long after the fact. Success teaches almost nothing. It hides the mechanics. Failure is what opens the machine and shows you how the parts fit together. I don’t trust anyone who hasn’t made major mistakes. If someone claims they’ve never messed up badly, it means they’re either not doing anything big, or they’ve never tried anything that stretched them.

A mistake is basically a message from reality. It tells you exactly which part of your thinking is misaligned. Most people treat those messages as personal attacks. Experienced people treat them as data. This is the difference between avoiding mistakes and mining them. Avoiding them keeps you comfortable. Mining them makes you better.

You also notice that the more ambitious someone is, the more interesting their mistakes tend to be. Small ambitions create small errors. Big ambitions create the kind of mistakes that shake you awake. These are the mistakes you remember years later because they changed how you think. Pain isn’t the virtue here. Attention is. Pain just ensures you’re paying it.

Eventually something shifts. You stop seeing mistakes as evidence that you’re incompetent, and you start seeing them as the natural cost of figuring things out. Experience becomes less about knowing everything and more about recognizing the early signs that something is off. It’s pattern recognition, built on top of repeated collisions with the real world.

In the end, experience is just the residue of all the mistakes you didn’t quit after. You earn it by walking into situations you aren’t fully prepared for, letting the consequences reshape your understanding, and then trying again with slightly better instincts. The price is discomfort. The reward is clarity. And if you let your mistakes change you instead of discourage you, you learn faster than you imagined, one quiet failure at a time.

The best talent is rarely the most famous. It lives quietly in people who never step into a spotlight. It is the software engineer who solves problems in ways that feel like wizardry, yet still works at an unnoticed startup. It is the painter whose sketches are better than gallery pieces, but who keeps them in a drawer. It is the athlete running early in the morning when no one is watching. It is the person who has a gift but no desire to turn it into a performance.

Fame measures visibility, not talent. The people who become well known are often the ones who were pushed forward by timing, luck, networks, or a single moment that caught the right attention. They might be good, sometimes even great, but they are only a small slice of all the people who are exceptional at what they do.

Real talent grows in quiet spaces. It grows where people work because they love the craft, not because they are trying to be seen. When you remove the pressure to perform, you get something purer. People experiment more. They take risks that public eyes might discourage. They get lost in the work instead of the reaction to the work. That is where some of the greatest breakthroughs always happen.

Our belief that the world discovers all of its best people is a comforting myth. It keeps us from seeing the quiet genius around us. It also creates a bias toward assuming famous equals best, when the truth is that the world is full of extraordinary ability hidden inside ordinary lives.

The people who become known are still talented, of course. Many deserve the attention they get. But it is important to remember that for every famous expert, there are dozens of others who are as good or better, who simply never stepped into the current that carries people toward fame.

Excellence does not depend on recognition. A person can be world class in complete privacy. And often, that privacy is what keeps their talent honest. It allows them to work without compromise, without shaping their craft around what the crowd expects.

If you want to find the best talent, do not start with the people everyone talks about. Look around you. Pay attention to the person who works quietly but brilliantly. Notice the ones who perform small acts of mastery as if they are nothing. The world’s greatest treasures often sit unnoticed, because they were never built for an audience.

The interesting thing is that waving at planes isn’t really about being seen. It’s about acknowledging movement. It’s about acknowledging possibility. When you wave at a plane, you’re waving at the idea that people can lift themselves off the ground and go somewhere else entirely. It’s a quiet salute to motion, to progress, to the idea that life can shift in an instant.

Kids wave at planes because the world still feels magical. Adults wave at planes because we miss that feeling. For a moment, you let yourself be small in a large world again. The gesture is simple, almost childish, yet it brings a strange sense of peace. You’re greeting strangers you will never meet, wishing them well on a journey you will never know.

There’s another truth hidden in it. Waving at planes is a reminder that most of what we do in life goes unseen. The effort, the kindness, the resilience. You show up, you try, you hope. Most people passing above or around you will never know. But the point isn’t to be noticed. The point is to stay human.

Explaining yourself on Twitter is a waste of time because the medium is designed for speed, not understanding. Thought is slow and layered. Twitter is fast and flat. When you try to move something slow through something fast, it gets crushed. A sentence that would make perfect sense in a conversation becomes an invitation for people to project their own fears, insecurities, or agendas onto it. And once that projection has happened, no explanation will unstick it.

What makes this worse is that people on Twitter are not actually trying to understand you. They are trying to react. Reactions are cheap. Understanding is expensive. Reactions get likes. Understanding gets silence. If someone’s goal is to perform cleverness or outrage for their followers, your explanation is not data to them. It is material. It is something they can bend to extend the performance.

There is also the matter of the crowd. When you explain yourself in a one to one conversation, you are dealing with a single mind that can change. On Twitter, you are dealing with a swarm. And swarms do not change their minds. They disperse when they get bored, and they reform somewhere else. Explaining yourself to a swarm is like arguing with the weather. You can raise your voice, you can produce evidence, you can write long threads, but the weather does not care. It moves on when it wants to.

The deeper problem is that the people who might understand you do not need your explanation in the first place. The people who will never understand you cannot be helped by it. You end up spending your time on the wrong side of the equation. The ones who matter already get it. The ones who do not are not reachable through a thread.

This is one of the hidden costs of being online. You can spend hours defending a sentence that you wrote in thirty seconds. You can lose an entire day trying to correct interpretations that were never made in good faith. And while you are doing that, the real work you could have done sits untouched. The day gets eaten by a battle that did not need to happen.

The smarter approach is silence. Not the silence of fear, but the silence of someone who understands the environment. You do not explain yourself to a storm. You wait for it to pass. And it always passes. People forget. The timeline refreshes. The swarm finds a new target. What felt like a crisis at noon becomes nothing by evening.

If you want to be understood, that happens in slower spaces. Writing essays. Talking to people who actually care about context. Building things that speak for themselves. Twitter is good for many things, but it is not good for explaining yourself. It is a stage, not a classroom. And once you see it that way, you stop trying to persuade it.

You save your energy for the places where explanation is not wasted. Where it is met with curiosity instead of performance. Where thought still has room to breathe.

The strange thing about lying to get ahead is that it does work, but only for people who don’t plan on going very far. A lie is like borrowing from your future reputation. You get a little credit today, but at a cost you haven’t calculated. Most people don’t. They’re focused on the immediate win: impress the investor, bluff the competitor, manipulate perception just enough to survive this moment. But survival isn’t progress. It’s maintaining an illusion of progress.

The people who lie usually underestimate how expensive maintaining the lie becomes. Once you distort reality, you’re forced into a new kind of work: remembering what you said, patching the holes, adjusting new lies to fit the old ones. It’s like running a company with bad unit economics. You can fake growth in the early days, but the debt piles up quietly until it doesn’t. By then the correction feels catastrophic.

What’s worse is that lying changes the liar. When you get ahead by being deceptive, you teach yourself that deception is your tool. You optimize for manipulation instead of competence. You get better at pretending than doing. And the world eventually tests you. Every system does. The test might not come quickly, but it always comes, because reality has a way of asserting itself. No amount of posturing can hide an empty foundation when the load gets heavy.

The irony is that the real path to getting ahead isn’t a shortcut at all. It’s telling the truth early, even when it’s inconvenient or embarrassing. People underestimate how powerful that is. Honesty compounds. Not in some moral sense, but in a very practical one. When people know that your words map to reality, they start trusting your words more than other people’s. Opportunities route toward you. You get invited into rooms without asking, because people prefer low-friction partners. And nothing reduces friction like truth.

What makes honesty powerful is that it buys you time. When you don’t have to remember lies, you can spend your energy building something real. When you don’t have to manage perception, you can focus on fixing what’s broken. When you don’t have to cover your tracks, you can widen your path. Most progress comes from the compounding of small, consistent improvements. Dishonesty breaks the chain. It resets the compounding. It forces you back to zero.

In the end, lying to get ahead isn’t just risky. It’s slow. It drags you down in ways invisible at first but obvious in hindsight. The people who rise furthest aren’t the ones who win every interaction in the short term. They’re the ones who build a reputation strong enough that people bet on them without being asked. That kind of reputation can’t be faked. It has to be earned, brick by brick.

The first step in knowing your enemy is accepting this broader definition. An enemy is anyone whose incentives run opposite yours. Anyone who benefits when you shrink. Anyone who loses nothing by watching you lose something. It might even be someone who has helped you before. A benefactor can become an enemy the moment your growth threatens their comfort.

Once you understand this, your job is not to stare at faces trying to decode intentions. Your job is to create conditions where intentions reveal themselves on their own.

The simplest way to see someone is to give them a chance to show you who they are.

People reveal themselves in response to small signals. You say or do things that lightly touch their interests, their ego, or their expectations, and you watch what happens. Not because you want to manipulate them, but because you want clarity.

Push on their interests. Ask for something simple that slightly inconveniences them. A friend may not enjoy it, but they will show willingness. An enemy will show irritation or avoidance. It is easy for someone to be kind when it costs them nothing. The test is what they do when kindness costs a little.

Say something uncertain. A challenge. A mistake. A doubt. A friend will hold space for it. They’ll try to understand before advising. An enemy will seize the opening. They will magnify your weakness, sometimes politely, sometimes with “concern.” They will use your vulnerability as proof you were never strong in the first place.

Observe what they celebrate. If someone claps when you slow down, they are not neutral. If someone advises caution every time you pursue courage, they are not protecting you. They are protecting the version of you that poses no threat to their worldview.

None of this requires paranoia. It requires attention. A calm, quiet noticing.

Enemies do not need to be fought. In fact, most shouldn’t be. The real value of identifying them is adjusting your expectations and distance. The goal is not revenge. The goal is clarity.

Once you know who wants good for you, who wants little for you, and who wants nothing for you, you will walk differently. You will speak differently. You will make decisions with a sharper edge. And you will stop giving emotional credit to people whose quiet preference is your decline.