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It has been 11 months since I published on this blog. The last post was on 8 January 2019. If you are one of the, like, ten people who subscribe, man, sorry, this wasn’t what it was supposed to be like. It’s not like this was a crazy year of anything like that. Sure, I’ve been busy; but is there any year where that is not the case? I have just been a bit more distracted and a good deal more dispersed in my endeavours. I really haven’t managed my time as well as I would have liked.

This, I guess, is the part where I commit to “do better” next year, isn’t it? But that is a lot of nonsense as you and I know, no one is fooling anyone. So I won’t attempt it. All I will say is: I’ll try.

And, oh, look here, you already have a new 150 word post.

Itis from the Gods

The hot plate fell on the table with a loud clang. It had only been three or so seconds, but that is all the time you need to burn your fingers. Stupid. I licked my tender fingers and studied the white ceramic cereal bowl carefully, worried that it may have cracked when I dropped it. It was fine, and the contents steamed satisfyingly in the dark, airless room. On my way back to the kitchen, I banged shut the microwave and ran my fingertips under cold water to take the sting off. I inspected them. It did not feel too bad. But I knew from long experience that my diagnosis was only valid until I buried my fingers into hot eba; that was the true test of how bad the burn was. I was to find out soon enough.

I grabbed a cup from the cupboard and went back into living room, past the tray of food on the dining table, to the water dispenser in the far corner. I noted that this was my first glass of water for the day.

“At 4 P.M?’ I thought.

But I did not dwell on the matter too long. This is “Christmas Period”, let us enjoy and be merry. I sat before the plate of afang and eba. Before beginning, I turned on the standing fan and made sure the blast was directly on my back. This is a standard precaution. I could already feel the sweat building around me, within me. But what is that to me? Can one truly say he has lived if he did not at least once experience what it is like to sit to a steaming meal in a tropical country, sweating, shirt off, with a blast of air pressing on skin enthusiastically?

It is a treat for the gods.

And so it was that in this condition, having unconsciously taken note of the sensible green-black colour of the soup, I carved my first ball of eba.

It did not burn the fingers. Good.

The first ball is all critical. It heralds the beginning of a stroll in paradise or a descent into a bland, saltless desert. Is it too hot? Then you need to slow down and track your prey more patiently. Too cold? Well, who eats cold food? You moderate and adjust. And when the temperature is just right, you chew carefully, swallow slowly, pause here and there to consider all that you have learned.

A burst of juice from a stray shard of okporoko, with its unmistakeable, pungent taste filled my mouth. I nodded and said a quiet prayer of gratitude to my ancestors who I knew then still smiled warmly on their son. After carefully selecting and setting aside the usual obstructions—cubed beef, dried fish, okporoko, and so on—I was still able to enjoy this piece of fish without reaching into my priceless hoard.

It is the mark of an experienced professional to cook the soup so as to achieve that perfect consistency which allows that each scoop of soup contains within itself some memory of the end, the last act, the conclusion to the whole business. It was clear that the dried fish and okporoko had been introduced at such a time, in such a manner, and in sufficient profusion as to ensure that each quantity of afang one summoned never arrived unaccompanied, never met the palette unescorted.

But I get ahead of myself. At this stage I had just entered a spiritual seance when I noticed a strange phenomenon: There was no periwinkle.

No periwinkle!

What was this provocation? How did this cook, of whom I had thought in such reverential tones only a few moments ago, think it fit to prepare afang without periwinkle? I must admit that I was so gravely offended by this realisation that it threatened to capsize the canoe on which hitherto I had sailed on a river of perfect bliss.

“Nobody does anything properly anymore,” I said aloud.

I put my hand down in despair, careful not to ensure my fingers did not touch table. The dark mood, slowly enveloping me like the shroud of an evil, giant mkpokporo, threatened me with absolute ruin in that hot room. I heard the NEPA horn blare and the fridge and deep freezer compressors kick-in to return the salute. But even this, this smile from the Nigerian Goddess of Electricity (she who is the protector of sleepers, scourge of the generators, ancient of days) failed to lift my spirits. I sat staring with glazed eyes into that cereal bowl.

Then it appeared. I blinked hard to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. But it was plainly there: a green-blue slug glistening under the light of a low voltage energy-saving bulb. I picked it up and placed it in my mouth and chewed gently. Confirmation! I fingered the plate feverishly looking for other signs and there they were all around! It had all been an unfortunate trick of the mind. Where I had been looking for the hardened shells of the periwinkle, I had not allowed the possibility that its less noble de-shelled relatives may be standing in substitute. The gods did indeed smile on me. In a moment, the storm had passed, I was back at the head of the canoe sailing calmly home, sailing towards the sun which sank behind the palm trees.

After the festivities of looking for the elusive periwinkles, I was in no mood to delay the final entree for much longer. I picked one piece of cubed beef, topped it with some of the leftover soup, then delivered it all into my mouth. I chewed for as long as the thing would emit its juices. Next, it was time for the kpomo: one kpomo, two kpomo, three, all boiled to perfection, not too soft, not too hard, not too thick, not too thin. Towel came after, then the dried fish, then the snail, and finally, critically, historically, okporoko, the king of the soup. In this manner, I did as was expected, I preserved the ancient order of precedent set out by my forefathers’ forefathers when they sat in the distant past to decide the order in which the obstructions of a well-appointed plate of soup are to be absorbed.

To complete the ritual, I placed the now cold cereal bowl on top of the flat plate now littered with bones and other detritus. I downed a glass of cold water. I was starting to realise that I was getting cold. Gone was the sweat and humidity, replaced by a hypnotic feeling of satisfaction and contentment. I could feel the approaching state we call Itis. I picked up the tray and left it by the sink, making sure to empty the bones in the bin then soaking the plates in water so that it could be washed easily later. I washed my hands and applied hand cream, which left them supple and smelling faintly of stock fish and lemon.

The room upstairs was ice cold. I had forgotten that I had left the AC on that morning, but it was all as it had been ordained, wasn’t it? I climbed into the bed and laid in it for a minute thinking of nothing in particular. I listened and all I heard was the hum of the AC and the banging from the construction site next door, something which usually annoyed me to no end, but in my present state of intense itis, I found not at all disagreeable. My thoughts drifted to the new year coming. I prayed. I prayed to the Christian God. I prayed to my ancestors. And I asked the Goddess of Electricity to give me smooth tidings even if it was only for the next two hours.

I shut my eyes and slept.

Nana

Today my mother turns sixty.

She was down at my house this past weekend where she, my dad and my siblings recounted old tales of where we have come from and how we got to where we are now. There was a lot of food and nostalgia in the air this weekend, a wonderful time to remind oneself of all the things which ultimately really matter.

It is the way with these things that when the conversation gets going the memory is rejigged and new recollections are brought forth. We were reminded of the time in 1989 when, out of work and down on their luck, she and my father left Calabar for Lagos with three young children in tow, hoping to find something. We roomed with a relative in Ajao Estate in Isolo for the first year. The details of that house are sketchy to me. All I remember was Italia 90 and Roger Milla. We soon found an old house in Surulere which came to serve as our first home in Lagos. My youngest brother came soon after. I can still see him coated in dust from crawling on the stoop of the old house we found just off Adeniran Ogunsanya.

This was the early 90s and Nigeria was anything but a party. This was true even for a family of two professionals who graduated from good federal universities. My mother, a lawyer, could not find work in any law chambers or in any corporate organisation. (Things were not much better for my dad who couldn’t find work as an architect or builder.) Being a person with a basic impulsion to strive and achieve something, she set out to start a business selling fish and roasted plantain. The details are hazy now, but it seems to have transpired something like this: My mother got it in her head that this local delicacy from Calabar could generate some interest among the urban Lagos crowd, so she found a partner who had a shop on Lagos Island. She seeded the business for some amount which nobody can remember now, and agreed that her partner would supply the balance in fish and raw plantain. She was somehow convinced to hand over her capital to this partner, returning home to prepare for what was to be the beginning of a new and fruitful enterprise, she thought. That was not to be, of course. My naive small town mother never saw her business partner again, and ended up out of pocket and with an invaluable welcome-to-Lagos lesson (and a great story).

This early setback didn’t break her. In characteristic fashion, she shook it off and moved on to new things. The sheer range of activities she has gotten herself involved in leaves me exhausted. At various points she has owned and run a salon; she has worked as a barrister; she has studied and trained as a development expert; she has founded and run an NGO for several years; she started a business frying and selling puff puff and buns out of our old blue 305; she has run what might be called a ‘garden’ in Surulere, selling roasted fish, coconut rice, fried turkey, snails, gizzards and booze in front of our house at night (on Fridays and Saturdays we helped to wash plates and serve customers when we got old enough); she has also worked as a diplomat and as a member of parliament. Her sheer willingness to dare to do is a constant inspiration to me and a reminder that I, too, can.

This enterprising spirit is one of her defining qualities. She gets an idea that she needs to do something, and she does it. She does not think too much about it, she does not dwell on the downsides of it. She starts, she bootstraps, she hustles. “You can’t” is a meaningless phrase to her. We hear a lot about what’s wrong with such a crude approach to life. But I’ve seen the other side of this coin, I’ve seen a person who was long on execution and short on strategy, and I think there is a lot to be said for the grafters of this world, those who act quickly and leave the pondering for later.

In writing this piece, I had to think about some memory or defining moment between us. The more I thought about it the more I came to the realisation that that moment did not exist. All of it is a continuum in my mind, a sort of smorgasbord of sights, familiar smells, fierce shouts, hard slaps, awkward smiles, laughs, hugs, hairstyles, boubous, large heavy 80s lens frames, and so on. Here she is one minute working on a report on Adobe Pagemaker late into the night, me dozing off in a corner, standing, because I had failed to obey a simple instruction to go to bed at 9PM. Here she is on sanitation day making akara and ogi for the house, sternly driving all of us to our domestic duties. Here she is at Visiting Day with my favourite meal ukang (an excellent pottage of bushmeat, plantain, palm oil and scent leaf), me embarrassed because the meal was a bit too ‘local’ for my fancy private school where fried rice and jollof was the order of the day. (Turns out fancy private school boys absolutely love ukang, judging by what happened to the cooler I took back to the dorm.) And here she is, slumped on the stoop in the front of the house in Anthony Village where we had moved to. A few metres from where she is seated the neighbour’s massive diesel generator is on, filling the night air with its industrial growl and the smell of Lagos. We did not have a generator then. She had had a long day, it was 10PM. There had been no light all day and we could not pump the water from the borehole into the tank. Me, too busy galavanting, as we say, with friends, had failed to fetch enough water to ensure that there was water upstairs for her return. And so the one thing she had been looking forward to that evening, the one break in her crazy day: a bath, was not possible. She was too tired, too defeated to yell. She would not raise a hand to me either. She just sat there, with her handbag at her feet, and wept. She sat there for a long time.

But she beat that, and she beat everything else life has thrown at her. And she is here now. How do I describe such a leader? How do I tell her how much she means to me?

How does one, say, describe what breathing means to them?

What More Can I Say?

Nigeria will drain every ounce of hope you have, unless, like so much of the country, you exist in an idiot bliss of optimism while the signs all around point to, if not catastrophe, then the familiar slide of flattened aspirations and spreading poverty. The place never collapses, it never implodes, it never boils over. Years collapse into one another, and things just sort of carry on, as they always have and as they always will. But they don’t get better. The worst of it is that we’ve normalised this hypnotic slide, so that spreading poverty is no different from past poverty.

Lately things have taken such a bad turn that I am filled with too much dread to even contemplate where they may end up if we continue on the same trajectory for much longer. It is a repeatedly paralysing exercise to wake up to the day’s news.

And so I have sharply curtailed my commentary. I have stopped to conserve my energy; to try to live, rather than survive (which is what 2014 to date has felt like). I don’t keep abreast of the latest happenings; I don’t try to make sense of corporate fines, masked men shutting down the legislature, or a pronounced anti-business attitude spreading like a virus.

This is necessary also because I have talked myself out espousing positions which are overwhelmingly regarded as ‘negative.’ It hardly helps if clear-eyed realism leads you to the same place as those accused of being pessimists. Whatever your reasons, it is no fun to be the bearer of bad news, idiot bliss is much more agreeable.

But what else can I report? What is the record of our history? Have you not seen this pre-election movie before? Just today Nonso Obiliki reminded us that in 2011 we were seriously debating the need to increase the regulated price of electricity to make the sector more viable. That was almost a decade ago. Today, after all that time, after all that petrol, all that diesel, after all those kerosene lamps, after all that lost productivity and missed opportunity, we are further away than ever from a consensus on how to stop the lights from going off. Ten years. That’s bad, you say. But if you look back long enough, we have been having the power back and forth from as early as the President Obasanjo era, to my memory, and much much longer, I wager, if you dig back far enough.

The pattern repeats itself endlessly: the Biafra agitation, pollution in the Niger Delta, family planning, a national census, public education, and so on. Please take me literally and seriously when I say that on the fundamental issues there are no new problems in Nigeria—because there aren’t. We just don’t seem willing to arrive at any kind of actual solutions or even admit that the band-aid solutions are not working. Perhaps this is the natural messiness of nation-building. Perhaps. In any case, at least for now, I have nothing else to say.

Culture and Grind

Over the past few months, I have been going back and forth with a fairly senior person at one of our big banks. It has been a deeply frustrating process, mainly because of the quality of the person’s work. I was finally prompted to write something down after an interesting conversation on Twitter about, well, the quality of work one has come expect from artisans, specifically, but Nigerians generally.

Every time I think about the quality of output, I am reminded of an episode from years ago. Early into my career, I found myself under a boss who was what could be called a master. He had a remarkable resume and experience at some of the finest firms in the world. One time, I was over at his house for Saturday drinks when he’d organised a barbecue for he and some of his peers (mostly private equity and investment banking types). I was the cub in the den. We got to talking about all sorts of things, and the conversation turned to the young starters in their various firms — people like me. They were all complaining about the quality of work they got. (Some of this I suspect was the usual habit of older people to look back and think everything was better in their day.) I recall someone saying something like:

“Most people think there is some secret to doing great work. Like you must be Einstein or something.

No. That’s wrong.

Sure, it helps to be smart, but assume that most people are at the same level for smarts—which is usually the case for the top firms. The rest is just hard work and keeping at it. Doing great work is a grind.”

I’ve never forgotten that last phrase, “Doing great work is a grind.” Basically, it is drudgery. It is crossing t’s and dotting i’s, checking and rechecking, being obsessed about ridiculously small things. I do not think much about the mythologizing of Steve Jobs, but one thing about his story which has always struck me was his maniacal attention to detail, his obsession with perfection. He cared about the text of his creations, the shade of black on the screen, the feel of the product, even its packaging. It is almost impossible to list out all the specific instances where he was sweating the small stuff.

After that weekend, I started to see my boss’s fussiness in a new light. His painful anality served a purpose. Every letter, every report, every document of his was thought out to extraordinary depths before he even started writing. And then, he would write, and rewrite, and get your opinion, and then rewrite again. Constantly cutting out fluff, correcting errors, distilling the essence of what he was saying. When I sent reports to him, he would go over it with an electronic red pen: correcting grammar, interrogating points, helping me to sharpen my thinking. It was being anal-retentive by design.

And this is just how it goes regardless of who you are or what you do. If you want to do great work, you have to make it a habit and you have to be prepared to work bloody hard. You have got to sweat the tiniest things and sharpen the instinct to spot crap work. You have to hate crap work: I mean like really hate it. Do this long enough, eventually you would have worked yourself to a level where it is simply impossible to do otherwise.

I see the challenge of lower quality work all too clearly. It is a compounding catastrophe. Perhaps the biggest problem is that once you get used to crap work, you accept it; and once you accept it, well, you are done. You will deliver crap work because your norm is now crap. You will lose the ability to distinguish crap from great. Here’s the thing: You cannot on the one hand accept bullshit as OK and think you can deliver caviar. It ain’t gonna happen.

Jeff Bezos had this to say about a culture of performance in his most recent letter to Amazon’s shareholders:

“A culture of high standards is protective of all the ‘invisible’ but crucial work that goes on in every company. I’m talking about the work that no one sees. The work that gets done when no one is watching. In a high standards culture, doing that work well is its own reward—it’s part of what it means to be a professional.”

I love this idea of ‘invisible work.’ (I also love how he defines the idea of a ‘professional.’ When last did you think about what it means to be called a professional-something? What does that mean? How does it separate you from the non-professional?)

Bezos’s allusion to invisible work is an admission that it is impossible to micromanage everyone. The best teams are ones where everyone is prepared to grind and grinding is a culture. For leaders, I think engineering this culture—or, indeed, engineering the destruction of the opposite culture, a culture of low standards and bullshit—may be the single biggest contribution they can make to any team. And I think we are all leaders, if only of our own lives. We can demand a culture of high standards, but it starts with accepting the grind life.

To the Village, Old Man

So here we are, another election season. It feels like only yesterday when President Buhari was being driven through Eagle Square in an open back jeep. There is an element of déjà vu about the whole thing: the non-stop politicking, the heightened level of insane behavior, and the general sense that every available resource has been committed to the goal of winning the election. Our attentions, our budgets, our time, our lives are summoned to these great exertions every four years, and to what end?

Thinking about the last four years, I get an overwhelming feeling of holding on for dear life, trying to survive. I suppose this is what it feels like when a country gets poorer, or, indeed, when a person gets poorer. People who once were rolling in the dough start to count the coins, those who once counted the coins start cutting calories to save money, and those who cut calories before, die. Nothing brought the seriousness of our situation home like the response I got from a family friend’s driver when I asked about what led to the recent death of his father.

Im sick. We send am go village make im die, we no get money to dey keep old man alive.

His father was not much over 60. In Nigeria, that means you had a long life.

My first thought was about how cruel he was. Who says such a thing? Who simply lets, or, indeed, hastens another’s demise, especially one’s father? But consider the position of a driver who is on his ass. He is poor. He has his own children, his own worries, his own expenses. His salary barely covers all the things he needs to do. A dying father is just about the last thing he can afford, and his options are few and unattractive. Palliative care is expensive, interminable, and often futile. Should this man beg? Should he steal? Should he deny his children their school fees or stop paying his rent? These are not academic choices, Dear Reader, this is the reality for far too many people in Nigeria. When people fall seriously ill, they go to the village to die. And usually this happens when people run out of money.

These thoughts were on and off my mind last week when this Brookings Institute story went viral. Apparently, Nigeria has more people (87 million) in extreme poverty than any other country on earth. (They define extreme poverty as people living on less than $1.90 a day, or N20,500 per month.) And that’s only part of the problem. Unlike virtually every other country they follow (at least this is true for those outside Africa) the ranks of people in extreme poverty in this country are growing at a rate of six persons a minute.

Corroborating this view is data provided by Ian Bremmer in this tweet. In the table he shows what has happened to extreme poverty in various countries over the 23 years between 1990 and 2013. Here is another way to look at his data:

Pic

From the above you can see that Nigeria is the only country (in this set of nations) which increased extreme poverty in the period, and it did so by a whopping 70%. (And to repeat: It is still increasing.) If you are not yet worried, consider how young this country is. It is quite likely that close to half of the Nigerians alive today have only lived through a period of deepening poverty. They’ve never seen a great Nigeria. All they have is relative hardship. Save for a few periods of loosening in the economy, their lives have been mired in hardship, lack of opportunity, and lack of options. It is a miracle that we can be such a persistently optimistic nation. In spite of all that we know, we continue to believe. We await the elusive breakthrough.

This situation begs a very simple question: What is the point of leadership in this country?

Minister Okey Enelamah, when asked about the Brookings Institute report, tried his best to deflect from the point. But he sounded embarrassing and shifty, like a little child caught lying about who spilled glue on the bedsheet. It is shocking that we cannot even have an honest conversation about such a serious situation.

There is a hard truth here, a truth which we all feel. We have all felt recently what it is like to have our spirits collapse when our car’s suspension suddenly develops a sharp, abnormal sound (no money). Some know the disappointment of changing a child’s school to a less prestigious one (no money). Others know of delayed or even cancelled medical appointments (no money). And these are middle class concerns. The poor go to the village when they are too sick.

Since 1990, we’ve lived through military and civilian rule, eight heads of state, two oil booms, debt forgiveness, PDP, APC, the four-yearly election cycle, daily bombardment with political pronouncements, commissionings of new roads, FEC meetings, and so on. We were told of a new “diversified” economy, Vision 2020, Africa’s largest economy, and, oh, look at all these wonderful billionaires in Davos with their private jets. All this while extreme poverty went up by 70%. Worst of all we’ve embraced a value system which shames the poor even though ‘poor’ is what the vast majority of us are.

Ah, Dear Reader. These things get me too riled up. It is election season. A time for our traditional display of nepotism, tribalism, and prejudice. Some people think we may have a few years of negative growth ahead. But let’s face it, all that wan na grammer. Wave your brooms, unleash the slogans, shake hands with the traditional rulers, roll-out new jingles and posters, collect rice and oil. Let us begin this festival of folly once again.

I suppose also we all should pray that we do not end up in a hut somewhere dying in our old age. But you don’t care, you are off to Canada. And you, you don’t care either, you are going to be the last vulture feeding off this carcass. And you, well, you are not here, you are extremely poor, so you probably can’t read, or you read but cannot understand.

Good night everybody.

Mountains and Ocean Air

I have been travelling again. This time I visited the, frankly, indescribably beautiful Cape Town. There aren’t many words to explain Cape Town or the surroundings, these are some of the most beautiful lands anywhere on Earth. The food is absolutely glorious, the sea air is clean and wholesome, the mountains tower over the city and demand your attention and awe. Cape Town has few ugly angles, every shot of it is beautiful.

Non-Decisions

Yesterday, a friend of mine forwarded me an email which he had first sent in 2010. He was reminding me of an opportunity from back then, which he had suggested to me. In the original mail he noted that it was ‘the easiest time ever to do this, so please get on it.’ I didn’t. Also copied in that mail were four others who he also encouraged to ‘get on it.’ They didn’t. As I now read how the communication evolved, it is clear that, from the very beginning, there was questionable commitment to the enterprise. Ultimately the endeavour petered out in a sort of muted fashion, under the usual groaning about the administrative hassles (documents, money, time, you know, the usual fare) of simply starting. We moved on with our lives, all was forgotten.

Until yesterday.

Without going into details—mainly because I am still a little too upset by the whole business—I can say that the decision to do nothing was quite possibly one of the worst I have ever made. It may even be more accurate to speak of having made a non-decision. An opportunity was forwarded from someone I knew to be credible, who himself was putting something meaningful at risk to take advantage of this opportunity. (That was how strong his conviction was.) And yet, somehow, I ignored it and moved on, zombie-like, to some new ridiculous distraction which was more immediately gratifying and less difficult.

Now, of course, it is easier to see the future when it becomes the past. I have the benefit of knowing now what the past eight years looked like. Back in 2010, it was all uncertainty. And with uncertainty comes the real burden of trying to make important decisions using what is necessarily incomplete information. That uncertainty often leads to a sort of paralysis. We do nothing, and hope that that difficult situation resolves itself. Sometimes it does, we get lucky. But sometimes we don’t need too much luck. Sometimes we have what gamblers call an edge. At such times we really can say something intelligent about the future. We can influence the outcomes, or tilt the odds to ensure that whichever outcome emerges, we generally end up not too bad. Mohnish Pabrai, who wrote one of the smartest investment texts I’ve read, memorably described such situations as: “Heads I win; tails I don’t lose too much.”

Consider this wonderful post by Scott Alexander, where he discusses a heads-I-win-tails-I-don’t- lose-too-much situation involving Bitcoin. He observes that though his readers were some of the earliest people to hear about and understand the promise of cryptocurrencies—it had been first discussed on the site in early 2011, when coins were trading for $0.91—very few of the site’s regular readers made any meaningful money as crypto-investors. His description of one of the lessons he took out of this is instructive:

When I first saw the posts saying that cryptocurrency investments were a good idea, I agreed with them. I even googled “how to get Bitcoin” and got a bunch of technical stuff that seemed like a lot of work. So I didn’t do it.

Back in 2016, my father asked me what this whole “cryptocurrency” thing was, and I told him he should invest in Ethereum. He did, and centupled his money. I never got around to it, and didn’t.

On the broader scale, I saw what looked like widespread consensus on a lot of the relevant Less Wrong posts that investing in cryptocurrency was a good idea. The problem wasn’t that we failed at the epistemic task of identifying it as an opportunity. The problem was that not too many people converted that into action.

That last line is critical. Like the case with my friend, they recognised the opportunity, they understood it, and they were being instructed by credible people who themselves had something at risk. Beyond that, the potential upside of their investment was so vast that the downside (Min return = -100%) seemed irrelevant. Anyone who had invested $10 in Bitcoins when they first read about it on the site, even after the huge swings in price over the past few months, would be, you know, 50-cent, basically.

And yet, again like me, “not too many people converted that into action.” Fewer than 3% of the site’s readers (including the author) made decent money in cryptocurrencies (as at the end of January 2018).

And this is perhaps not surprising. Most of the time the future is a haze. We cannot do much but our best every day and hope that things don’t get too rough. But on those few occasions when you know something about the future that most people don’t, when you can pick the joker in the pack, when you can get an extremely valuable low-cost option, or when you can setup a heads-I-win-tails-I-don’t-lose-too-much situation, for God’s sake, don’t make a non-decision, jump in with both feet.

I note the irony of referencing this particular investing legend after a discussion on crypto speculation, but I think this quote from Charlie Munger closes things off quite nicely:

The wise ones bet heavily when the world offers them that opportunity. They bet big when they have the odds. And the rest of the time, they don’t.

True in investing. True in life.

How Many Books Did You Read Last Year?

This is a question that gets asked a lot around this time of the year. It is one I struggle with. Of course, I could do a simple tally of all the books I started and finished in the calendar year, but what would be the point? If you learned that I read forty, and some other fellow read twenty, or even ten, what is it to you? What can we reasonably deduce from this information?

I think the problem here stems from how different my goal in reading is from most people’s. A lot of us read primarily because we want advice, hacks, marketable skills, or to learn the facts about a particular area of knowledge. We want something quite concrete out of it. We would like to answer questions like how do I code using javascript, what led to the Nigerian Civil War, what is cryptocurrency.

These are all important questions, which deserve to be studied. But I find that in narrowing ourselves to this approach to reading, we end up with a utilitarian relationship with the written word. Reading becomes a linear activity, and not a very pleasurable one at that. It becomes an exercise in stacking bricks, each new brick making the pile exactly one brick taller. It does not help that we have all consciously or unconsciously imbibed the 10,000 hour rule of practice—an idea that suggests a linear relationship between input and output in most affairs. The whole thing brings to mind the guiding ethos which drives people to try to learn speed reading. Even if you are successful, it is worthless because most of us lack speed comprehension. It is hard to deduce anything if one fellow can read at 200 wpm while the other manages only half of that. It is a pointless metric for most readers.

These practices are in the spirit of our market-driven, efficiency-obsessed smartphone generation. Our habits are gamefied. We need tokens to measure progress. We need scores to know that we are winning. We need to show profits every quarter.

But I think this is a much too narrow relationship with the written word. We need to augment, if not completely abandon, this industrial reading habit. Productivity of reading (which is what the number of books read question enquires about) should be de-emphasised. Books are not metres or kilograms to be measured. There are thousands of books not worth even a perusal, and twitter threads that can change your life.

We should instead try to see reading as fundamentally non-linear. The benefits of reading come unexpectedly, in spurts, and are certainly not always factual or directly tangible. Books do different things to us. Some books help us to make unusual connections or to see reality better. Others help us to become better, wiser human beings. Some books we read for the simple pleasure of it. And then there are books which transcend. How do I quantify Paul Kalanithi’s book When Breath Becomes Air?

These different books are read differently, and at varying speeds. Marcus Aurelius can be slow, ponderous reading. Enid Blyton is a breeze, a rush of fantasy, escapism. A book on programming is probably better consumed in little doses. And we must sing Wesleyan hymns.

When we read in this way, we are not stacking bricks, we are kneading clay, baking bricks, stacking here, discarding there, maybe trying wood or cement in its place. The critical distinction is in our attitude to reading. It is about forging a transcendent relationship with authors who we may never meet, through their words and ideas. This can only happen when we discard the framing of books as textbooks.

Rather than approaching reading as an exercise in what amounts to hitting meaningless targets, I think it is much better to develop a reading habit which allows you to get through books and to have their words pass through you. Sometimes, that involves reading a lot of books fast or is a scattershot fashion, a paragraph here a chapter there. At other times, it is reading only a handful of books slowly and over a long time. And at still others, it is rereading old books, trying to decipher meanings or lessons that had eluded you before, or to once again experience the high (or low) which came from reading it the first time. Jorge Luis Borges said, ‘Besides, rereading, not reading is what counts.’

How many books did I read last year? I don’t know, I just read.

Great Service

Living and doing business in Nigeria carries its special challenges. People constantly complain about the poor quality of service they get from businesses or from the government.  On average, I think the issues people raise are valid, we do have a dearth of great service generally.

But leaving it there is not enough. I think it is even more important to use these experiences as a reference point to measure how we are doing. What sort of service are you providing in your own role? The great thing about being in an environment where we are constantly on the receiving end of bad work is that we know what it feels like and we know when we are the givers of bad service. What I’ve found is that it is as much a behavioural challenge as anything else. In other words, you can’t ‘spot’ deliver service. You don’t choose to do great work today and tomorrow do bad work. It is a binary situation—you are either great or bad. For me this means nitpicking as a way of life. Constantly crossing my t’s and dotting my i’s, because that is the only way I can maintain a habit of excellence. For people building businesses, organisations, I think they are actually involved in social engineering to help people—especially young people—imbibe a standard which they may not know exists because they have lived for so long in an environment where shitty service is the norm. And I think this could be a decisive competitive advantage, especially here, where the bar for great service is so low.

Something to think about.