Life, Work, and Everything Nice
“Ise ya, Ise ya, omo Ogun, Ise ya”, I could hear the sonorous voices of my school mates as I made my way back to my high school’s assembly grounds from the rest room. We were being taught the anthem for Ogun state, a state in South West Nigeria and one of the homelands of the Yoruba ethnic group. Those words are the first lines of the anthem which mean “It is time to work, child of Ogun”. Work majorly meant farming for most of the inhabitants of Ogun state in ancient times, and agriculture still makes up over 70% of revenue for the state today.
When you graduate from the university after passing through the Nigerian education system and you had grown up hearing for many years that education is the key (to success of course), you begin to wonder whether the padlock was later changed without your knowledge. In the Nigerian climes, you wait too long waiting for the kind of job that you dreamt about, hunger would eventually chase the passion out of your system. If it is not hunger, then it would be the pile of bills waiting for you at the beginning of every month, and this definitely includes what we now popularly call Black Tax. For many Nigerians, work now implies a means of survival — we call it ‘hustle’.
The average Nigerian would spend 2 to 6 years at home, waiting to receive an admission offer from their dream school to study their dream program, competing with 2 million applicants for just about 750,000 places. Reality eventually dawns on them and most eventually accept whatever program’s admission they can secure years down the line. I was one of those Nigerians who had a dream course, and a dream job, but a lackadaisical attitude that I had developed concerning my future would save me as I would go on to accept admission into a Physics program in university in the same year of my high school graduation, despite not being so good at it. Please do not ask me how I survived it. It is not that we lack tenacity, it is that you should not be moving in circles for too long.
For those who would be lucky enough to study their dream programs, the job market may be unkind upon graduation. I had always believed you go to school to prepare for what you have desired to become in the future. Growing up, motivational speakers were all over our schools teaching us about passion and how important it was that our childhood passions became our ‘work’ in the future so that work would be an enjoyable endeavour, but the Nigerian system would eventually humble you when you see PhD holders applying for jobs as truck drivers and you begin to wonder about the purpose of their intellectual expeditions throughout their years. Until you discover that many went back to school in the first place because they were still yet to find their ‘dream’ jobs, or rather their dream salaries, I would say.
As a child growing up in my father’s house, work was my house chore. When I watched my father leave home for the office every morning, only to return home at late at night, work was a place. When I sang the Ogun state anthem as a boarding student in high school, and a bonafide indigene of Ogun state, work was my education. As a child, my mother would often quote Ecclesiastes 9:10 from the Bible to my siblings and I:
“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.”
I love the Oxford dictionary’s definition of work as any activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result. Having had the privilege (and I respectfully call it so), to have attended institutions of learning that elevated mental expeditions over the physical, I have found more satisfaction contributing to productivity through my brain. I know so because I have put on a coverall a few times and discovered I found no pleasure in it apart from the opportunity to take a selfie. And so, although I would give my all in the first few years of my 9–5 career, ensuring all my bills were settled and there was food to eat, I felt something just was not right and I was constantly in search of an engagement that would fulfil my yearnings for mental excitement. Perhaps, I was lucky enough to have finally come to the realisation.
I read about the Japanese concept of Ikigai and the obvious need for balance to lead a happy life, and I began the search for my own Ikigai. Timothy Ferris’ ‘4-Hour Work Week’ gave me a new concept of retirement and the concept of Essentialism preached by Greg McKeown became my watch-word. It seemed to me that the world had for so long been modelled after the words of Plato who said that all things are produced more plentifully and easily and of better quality when one man does one thing which is natural to him, at the right time, leaving other things. Thus, although I am in acknowledgement that the model of mass production did so much for the Industrial Age, I have chosen to rather follow after the Renaissance.
In May 2020, I took a leap of faith and resigned from a seemingly promising job, to change my career to one that would take me closer to my Ikigai. I am happy and feel lucky to have ‘escaped’ the initial pressure I felt from the Nigerian system I had experienced. Work today means to me an avenue to apply mental skills and talents to productive pursuits, in any space that is willing to pay me enough for the value I bring. I still engage in the typical 9–5 job, but I now find pleasure because it requires mental application. Maybe the passion preachers were right after all; they just needed to mix their message with a much needed touch of reality —if your country does not value your childhood passion, find ye another; passion or country.
You see, I have realised that many of us wind-up becoming passionate about what we become excellent at doing, or knowing, and we often find the application of our natural inclinations and talents in more than one career. I love technology, I love business, I love arts, I love science too. I have a passion for young people, and I also want to see good education democratised in Africa. Work should bring enough of these elements together for me, and I would employ the rest as a hobby, or leisure activity. Work is what brings me closer to my definition of success.
I look forward to what work would mean to me in 10 years. What does work mean to you now?
