“Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.”
~ Jack Welch
I.
In 2016, fresh from the National Youth Service Corps and burning with a particular kind of post-graduation conviction, I assembled a team of approximately thirty young people and began designing a school. Not planning to design a school at some future point when conditions were right. Designing one, actively, with subjects outlined, a curriculum framework sketched, and the shared enthusiasm of a group of people who believed, collectively, that what Nigerian education needed was exactly what we were prepared to offer it. We had ideas. We had energy. We had, in the generous accounting of our own self-assessment, a vision.
What we did not have and what none of us paused long enough in our enthusiasm to notice we lacked, was any serious understanding of the regulatory architecture within which a school must operate. The government education policies that would govern our curriculum. The licensing requirements that would determine whether we could open our doors at all. The institutional relationships, the administrative processes, the financial discipline, the operational frameworks without which a school is not a school but an aspiration with furniture. We had assembled thirty people to build something that required, as a precondition, knowledge that none of us yet possessed.
My parents, when I brought the idea to them, did not discourage me. That detail matters more than it might initially appear. They were not dampening the ambition or questioning the sincerity. They saw both clearly and took them seriously. What they also saw, with the particular clarity that comes from having watched a person develop from the beginning, was a skills gap between what I wanted to build and what I was yet capable of building. Get the work experience first, they said. Not as a consolation. As a direction. They were pointing me towards the longer road because they understood, better than I did at the time, that the shorter road led somewhere I did not want to arrive.
I did not fully understand, in 2016, what they meant. I understand it now. The intervening years have been, in the most precise sense of the term, an apprenticeship. Not in the formal, credentialed sense, but in the older and more exacting sense of learning a craft through sustained proximity to people who had already mastered aspects of it, through the accumulation of failures absorbed and lessons drawn, through the slow replacement of intuition with earned understanding. The school has not been abandoned. It has been deferred until the person building it is equal to what it requires.
II.
There is a distinction that took me longer to understand than I would like to admit, between the desire to be influential and the discipline of becoming useful. They can look identical from the outside, particularly in their early stages. Both involve commitment. Both involve effort. Both involve the sustained application of energy toward a goal. But they are oriented differently, towards different objects, and they produce different kinds of people over time.
The person who wants to be influential is oriented toward recognition. Geared towards the moment when others will acknowledge the quality of what they are doing and grant them the authority that follows from that acknowledgment. There is nothing inherently dishonest about this desire. Influence is a legitimate goal, and the recognition of good work is not vanity but social accountability. The problem arises when the desire for influence outruns the development of the competence that would make influence meaningful. A person who arrives at influence before they have become genuinely useful has acquired a position without the substance to fill it. They will spend their time in that position managing the gap between what they have promised and what they can deliver, which is an exhausting and ultimately corrosive way to work.
The person who orients toward usefulness is asking a different question. Not when will others recognise what I am capable of, but what am I actually capable of, and how do I become more so. It is a quieter question and a less immediately gratifying one. It does not come with the forward momentum of ambition or the social reinforcement of being seen to be rising. What it comes with, over time, is something more durable: a deepening capacity to engage with the problems that actually matter, in a way that produces outcomes rather than appearances.
The shift from one orientation to the other is rarely dramatic. It does not announce itself. For me, it arrived in the form of a document.
III.
Early in my professional years, I was asked to prepare a document that would guide an operational decision of some consequence. I sat down to write it with what I can only describe now as the confidence of the not-yet-tested. I believed I understood the problem. I had thought about it. I had opinions about it. I assumed that the understanding and the opinions, translated into a policy brief and memo, would be sufficient.
They were not. As I wrote, the gap between what I thought I knew and what the document actually required became visible in a way that thinking alone had concealed. Analysis that had felt rigorous in my head became, on the page, a series of assertions without the evidential scaffolding that would allow a reader to test them. Recommendations that had seemed obvious when I was thinking about the problem became, when I tried to write them, obviously dependent on assumptions I had not examined. The document required me to be more precise than I was, and precision, I discovered, is not a rhetorical quality. It is an intellectual one. You cannot write with more precision than you have actually achieved in your thinking.
That discomfort was instructive in a way that success rarely is. It forced a change in how I approached work. I initiated a new discipline of preparation, of reading more deeply before forming conclusions, of structuring arguments carefully enough that each step could be examined independently, of ensuring that any recommendation I made could withstand the scrutiny of a reader who had not already been persuaded by my own enthusiasm for the conclusion. I began paying close attention to how the people around me wrote, negotiated, and framed problems. Not to imitate them, but to understand what competence actually looked like in practice, so that I could develop my own.
IV.
The people I found myself studying most carefully during those years were not famous. They were the people in the rooms I was in, doing the work I was trying to learn.
Samson Yomi Osewa of the Ambassadors Schools taught me, by example rather than instruction, what it meant to build an educational institution that outlasts the energy of its founding moment. Watching someone who had actually constructed the institution I wanted to build, who had navigated the regulatory architecture, managed the staffing, sustained the quality, and held the vision through the ordinary difficulties of operations was a different kind of education than anything I had encountered formally. It was the study of craft. The gap between my 2016 curriculum sketches and what he had built was not a gap of vision. It was a gap of executed competence, accumulated over years.
Lolade Oresanwo and Paul O’Callaghan of WestAfricaENRG showed me what it looks like when operational discipline and institutional navigation exist in the same person simultaneously. When someone can hold the technical requirements of a program, the relational demands of government partnership, and the accountability requirements of development finance in a single coherent practice. I had understood these as separate competencies. Watching them work taught me they were aspects of a single one.
Soji Eniade, as Oyo State’s former Head of Service, offered a window into something I could not have accessed any other way, the internal architecture of the state itself. How decisions accumulate through layers. How authority is actually distributed, as opposed to how organograms suggest it is distributed. How institutional memory is held, and how it is lost. The formal study of public administration is useful preparation for this understanding, but it is not a substitute for proximity to someone who has navigated the actual system over decades.
Bolu Onasanya, Hon. Seyi Adisa, and Major Adebayo Adeleke each offered a different angle on the same essential question. How do people who carry formal authority whether political, administrative, or operational translate that authority into outcomes, under pressure, in environments that resist the outcomes they are trying to produce. I was not studying charisma or positioning. I was studying the cognitive and relational habits of people who had learned to be genuinely effective in difficult institutional environments.
What I was doing, across all of these relationships, was building a composite map of competence. It was not an attempt to find a single model to imitate, but an understanding of how different capabilities fit together in different contexts. Technical rigour. Administrative patience. Political legibility. Operational accountability. Each of these figures had developed one or more of these capacities to a level I had not yet reached. Studying them was not an act of admiration. It was an act of apprenticeship.
V.
Obafemi Awolowo did not arrive at the Western Region premiership unprepared. The years before his political ascendancy were years of sustained, unglamorous formation. Legal training, the founding and management of the Cocoa Marketing Board cooperative structures, the intellectual labour of writing Path to Nigerian Freedom while still a relatively young man working through the relationship between ideas and institutional power. By the time he held authority, he had spent years developing the analytical, administrative, and political competencies that the authority would require. The free primary education programme, the television station, the health infrastructure and his successes were not the products of inspiration. They were the products of a man who had spent years becoming capable of executing them.
Lee Kuan Yew’s trajectory reflects a similar discipline. The legal apprenticeship in Cambridge. The years of trade union work in Singapore, learning from the inside how organisations of ordinary people could be built and sustained. The patient accumulation of political credibility before the moment of consequence arrived. When Singapore’s independence created the conditions for transformative governance, Lee was not beginning his preparation. He had been preparing for years, through forms of work that were not obviously connected to the leadership he would eventually exercise, but that had developed in him precisely the capacities that leadership would demand.
What both men understood, and what their careers demonstrate across very different contexts, is that the right to lead is not conferred by ambition. It is earned by demonstrated competence, built over time, in the specific domains that the leadership will require. A man who arrives at influence before he has built that competence is not a leader. He is a gambler. One who gambles on himself, and on the people whose lives will be shaped by whether the gamble pays off.
VI.
The school is still in my mind. The business plan is being refined. The operational framework is being rethought. What has changed, between the thirty-person curriculum team of 2016 and the quieter, more methodical planning of now, is not the ambition. The ambition, if anything, has grown more specific and therefore more serious. What has changed is everything that surrounds and supports the ambition.
I can now write the policy framework that the 2016 version of me would have needed and did not have. I can navigate the regulatory architecture that we had not paused to consider. I can manage the stakeholder relationships with government, community, funders, and staff that a functioning institution requires. I can build the administrative systems that allow an organisation to hold its quality over time rather than dissipating it in the ordinary friction of operations. I know how decisions move through institutions, because I have watched and participated in that movement across multiple systems. I know how to build the documentation that makes an institution’s commitments legible and therefore accountable.
These are not the competencies that a twenty-year-old with a vision and thirty collaborators possesses. They are the competencies of someone who spent years, sometimes uncomfortably, in rooms where the work required more than they currently had, and chose to close the gap rather than manage around it. The school that I build will not be the school I imagined in 2016. It will be something more durable because the person building it has become, in the intervening years, more equal to what it requires.
VII.
There is a certain kind of impatience that presents itself as ambition but is really something else. It is a desire to skip the formation and arrive directly at the recognition, to hold influence without having done the work of becoming capable of it responsibly. I have felt this impatience. I recognise it in myself from the 2016 curriculum sketches, from the early document that revealed the gap between my intuitions and my actual analytical capacity, from every moment when the work required more than I had and the temptation was to pretend otherwise rather than acknowledge the deficit and address it.
What my parents gave me, in the advice they offered in 2016, was direction. They redirected my energy from the performance of readiness towards the actual work of becoming ready. That redirection cost me, in the sense that it delayed the thing I wanted to build. But it produced something that the direct route would not have given me. The new route gave me a version of myself that is, at thirty, genuinely more capable of building it than the version that stood in front of them nine years ago with a curriculum outline and no regulatory map.
The discipline of being useful is not glamorous. It does not move at the speed that ambition prefers. It requires the willingness to be, for extended periods, the person in the room who is still learning to absorb the discomfort of that position without using it as a reason to claim more than you have yet earned. But it produces something that the shortcut cannot and that is the grounded capacity to do the work that actually needs doing, at the level of quality that the people depending on you deserve.
Influence built on that foundation is worth having. It is worth the wait. The school will be built. And when it is, it will carry within its architecture the knowledge that its builder spent years becoming worthy of it. It is not as a matter of pride, but as the only honest account of what serious work requires.