The world is an interesting place. That was what I told my friend Tunde during one of our nerdy conversations. I also told my girlfriend that Tunde is a gift to me from heaven because without him, who would I nerd around with? Anyway, I’ve been meaning to write this essay for months. I haven’t written an essay for sometime now because I fell to the whims of capitalism and I, once again, started to write for money, neglecting things that matter to me like writing this essay. Although this time, I set the terms so I wasn’t completely miserable writing for some money. After all, we live in a capitalist world.
At first, the inspiration for this essay was basically my predilection for truth-seeking. All my life, I’ve always somehow prodded things. But I never had the opportunity to explore my curiosities, to arrive at the root of the many things that hold my interest. I’ve come to learn that every child is armed with a curious mind from birth but (Nigerian) parents somehow expunge that part of you as they heap their fears and insecurities on you in your formative years. For many children, they simply follow in the path that their parents lay for them and continue the cycle when they have their own kids. I wasn’t one of those children – I never wanted to be that person. I endeavour(ed) to go after my heart desires, even when they sometimes led to my doom. I believe it’s what makes any of us human – the ability to do whatever you want.
I dropped out of the university in my final year – actually in my extra year, after doing my project defence. It wasn’t an easy decision but it’s a decision I’m proud of. I didn’t have any alternative but I could no longer cope within the four walls of the university so I dropped out. It caused a huge friction in my relationship with my parents who were convinced that my life was going to waste. Sometimes, I held that fear too, that I was going to end up miserable and hopeless. But that didn’t stop me from doing the things I wanted, from exploring my interests and embarking on the endless journey of finding myself.
It’s easy to fall into a routine lifestyle. Especially as you become an adult and lose the burning curiosity inside you, as you begin to take on the identity that the world expects of you and step into the oversized shoes of adulthood. Too many bills and responsibilities leave you chasing your own tail for years. Yes, you hate your job because it’s not what you envisioned yourself doing some years back but quitting becomes more difficult as each day passes by because how you go survive? I’ve seen even the most intelligent people I know fall into this pattern. Before you know, you’re 60 years old looking back on your life with regrets.
Now, not everybody wants to go against convention. For some, working a regular day job is more than enough. My essay is hardly directed towards such people anyway. I think they are the unsung heroes. I tried it once, to work at a 9–5 and even though I was doing something that I loved, it was still hell for me. At some point, I got another job that was far from 9–5 that allowed me to work from the comfort of my home. Yet it proved impossible for me and I eventually lost the job. It was almost as if I was going against my own nature. I think one of the reasons why it felt that way was because of the stifling nature of the job which is basically how it is with most, if not all, 9–5 jobs.
I’ve been jobless for nearly four years. While I wouldn’t necessarily advise anyone to just up and quit their jobs to follow their dreams (LIES, QUIT NOW! THERE’S NEVER A BETTER TIME), I wouldn’t trade my life for anything, which is not to say everything has been rosy. In fact, there has been a lot of downs. I know what I didn’t want – to work a mundane job- but what exactly did I want? That was my first battle. It’s a battle that I had been fighting for years, since I impulsively dropped out of school.
It was evident to me ever since I became aware of my environment since my childhood that there was much more to the world than my environment allowed me to see. My father tried to raise me in the same religion he was raised – Islam. I was forced to memorize the Arabic language and to treat it as sacred, which didn’t make any sense to me because it was just another man’s language. Why do we need to learn a language that’s spoken by another race/tribe? Why should we relegate our own language to speak another’s before God listens to us? There were too many questions that simply didn’t have answers and when I got answers, they were shoddy answers, riddled with loopholes. By the time I was 12, I had ceased believing in what religion preached.
Religion wasn’t the only thing I had a problem with. When I was 10 years old, my parents had enrolled me in a boarding school, Mayflower. There, I tasted true freedom for the first time and I clutched it hard. Finding that freedom made me uninterested in school and it was easy to do that in an environment where teachers never showed up for classes. In my class, we were more than 120 students. Less than a year in Mayflower, my results had tanked and I was giving wayward a new definition. I could be less bothered about my studies and the idea of schooling had begun to repulse me. I hated schooling way before I became an adult. I hated how it restricted you from exploring the depths of the world.
Since I dropped out of uni, I’ve engaged in various things. I started with nightlife, working at various nightclubs over the years, not making much progress with my career as a promoter and generally with life. On most nights in the club, I couldn’t help but ponder if I was living my life how I wanted. Did I drop out of school only to spend the rest of my life working in a club without having any societal impact and at the same time not having anything to show for it? I became increasingly tired of seeing internet fraud boys flaunting their money and cars and buying expensive bottles. There was a point where I was drawn to that lifestyle. That point had passed and when I eventually had an unpleasant encounter with a popular rapper and the son of a powerful politician in the last nightclub I worked, I knew it was my cue to move on with my life.
I have a history of quitting things. And not only quitting, I also have a problem with finishing things. Or maybe, now that I’m thinking about it, maybe it’s commitment issues I have. I have a problem staying committed to things. I can’t pinpoint how I became that way but it’s something that has haunted me for years. Anyway, we are not here to talk about my commitment issues. After quitting my job at the nightclub, I decided to adopt some digital skills. Paired with writing, I started taking social media gigs where I handled various social media pages for different clients. It was also a pretty rough time for me as I had lost my accommodation — one that I wasn’t paying for. So, I moved back to my parents’ and was mostly working from home.
I’m taking you through the timeline of my life because I want you to understand how I got here. Living with my parents years after dropping out of school and not having a tangible source of income pit me against them. I was away from home on most days and even at that, there was serious tension in the house. I moved out a few months after to an apartment where the owner lived like a barbarian. It was around that time I got my first official job as a music writer. Oh, what a dream come true! I excitedly resumed the job and my boss loved my work. Not long after, I started getting a lot of buzz for my work. I did a lot of freelance jobs too and my income quadrupled. In a simpler and more Nigerian term, I had arrived.
I quit that job for a better one that paid me more. I was working remotely and I had moved into a bigger apartment. For a brief moment, life was rosy and I nestled in the warmth and softness of it. But that didn’t last long. A few months into my new job, writing became my personal hell. The quality of my work plummeted and I did everything within my means to jeopardize my job, which I eventually did. I had become very depressed and couldn’t seem to understand why. Was I not making a lot of progress in my career? I had turned my life around in less than a year but no satisfaction came with it. What exactly was I looking for?
It’s been nearly four years and the closest answer I’ve gotten ever since is that I’m on a truth-seeking journey. What does that mean? Just like you, I’m yet to find out. But I believe I’m closer than ever, at least to what my definition of the truth looks like. As someone who prioritizes thinking and thinking well, I’ve come to learn that everything you see today is a result of first principles thinking. I’m not going to delve into the science and technicalities of that but I’m going to tell you what it looks like for me and why I think it’s vital that we adopt that kind of thinking. And I think we should adopt that kind of thinking precisely because with a strong foundation, you can erect any kind of building.
My relationship with the world improved significantly when I began to pay more attention to things I’d often overlooked. It started with history. I read and did a lot of research, learning about different tribes, about wars, about the several empires that ruled the world. My eyes opened to so many things that I wouldn’t ever find out without research. I went down the rabbit hole of Nigerian history, reading about how different tribes flourished before colonisation. The more I read Nigerian history, the clearer it became to me that removing history as a subject from the syllabus of secondary schools was an intentional move by the government. How can you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’re coming from? I strongly believe that the more you know about yourself, about your roots and about the world, the better you are.
The clothes we wear, the phones we use, the food we eat, the cars we drive, the roads that we drive them on, everything that makes our lives better today came from human beings having a better understanding of the world. We are where we are because we have continued to create knowledge as well as suitable applications of the knowledge created. One prime example is fire. We discovered fire and have since found several uses for it including cooking food, converting it into combustion that powers engines of vehicles. Although the world is full of resources, it is because of our unique ability to understand things fundamentally that we have been able to tap into all these resources and use them to our advantage. Without understanding how fire works from a first principles approach, we wouldn’t know how to use it for the numerous things we do today.
Another example is glass. We discovered glass by melting sand at a very high temperature. This is only possible because we studied sand and understood it at a molecular level. We began to make glass with different features because we grasped the chemistry behind it, adding various chemical elements to give glass the properties we want. And glass has gone on to have an enormous influence on our lives. We wouldn’t have access to technology without glass (don’t quote me on that). In art, glass plays a colossal role. Your windows, sunshades, TVs all make use of glass. Our knowledge of the world has vastly increased how well we have adapted and survived as a species.
What am I getting at with this essay? Remember I started the essay by saying the world is an interesting place? Every day that I breathe, that I open my eyes and light enters, that I hear various sounds, is a confirmation of this. More importantly, every day that I learn something new through the lens of first principles thinking, I’m drawn closer to the fact that we live in a world that’s filled with limitless access to resources. Let me briefly take a detour here. Naturally, because of the rate of human consumption, there’s the fear that we would ultimately run out of resources — which is not impossible. But one reason why we have been able to avoid that is because of how well we understand the world. David Deutsch put it perfectly in an episode on Naval’s podcast where he said “Knowledge is the thing that makes the existence of resources infinite. The creation of knowledge is unbounded. We’re going to keep on creating more knowledge and, thereby, learning more and more about different resources.”
But if you don’t channel your mind to this reality, you can easily get stuck on the idea that all we’ve come to do in this world is struggle. Just as it is easy to believe that resources are limited so you unconsciously develop a scarcity mentality where you are convinced that you somehow need to compete for every resource. And guess what? You wouldn’t exactly be wrong. Just like you wouldn’t be right too. The foundational idea of this essay is to help you reframe your thinking as much as it is about what led me to start a company with people who share the same vision and passion as me, one of whom is my friend mentioned earlier.
How do we go about that? That is, to reframe your thinking. Honestly, it’s more of a personal decision and journey, but primarily, some truth-seeking has to be involved, which means you have to question nearly everything. Which is also why I mentioned earlier that the essay is directed at people who want to apply themselves and their brains, people who have an overwhelming desire to create, people who want to impact the world through the creation of knowledge and want to continually discover new ways that we can improve the world through first principles thinking in whatever they find themselves doing.
At Àyàn, we are thinkers. We are artists. We are creators. We are inventors. We are storytellers. But fundamentally, what we aim to do is revolutionise the approach of every thinker, artist and creator; to teach them the power of first principles thinking and how it can be applied in reality – their respective fields.
Àyàn is a breeding ground for new ideas. We want to propagate an avant-garde approach towards building and creating. We want to establish a community of creators and builders who are dedicated to improving the world through a fundamental understanding of ‘truths’ in their respective fields. By prioritising a multidimensional and holistic approach to thinking and problem-solving, Àyàn is on an unending mission to solve real problems with innovation and original ideas.
Ayo: Bro. I think I’m done with the essay. That should capture the essence of what Ayan is trying to do, yes?
Tunde: Yes yes! But I think I have something I’d like to add to give more perspective to what we intend to do.
Here it goes:
Truth-seeking begets knowledge creation. Knowledge creation begets innovation. Innovation begets prosperity. Truth-seeking couldn’t happen without some degree of freedom. In thought and expression. Freedom manifests as a by-product of wealth. Wealth isn’t money, but the state of being well. Wealth is a metric by which we measure individual prosperity.
In a circular loop, all of these things beget each other. Innovation is an egalitarian approach to wealth creation. What Ayan does, is pick the most practical of these phenomenons; Truth-Seeking, and propagate it, so from it, we can arrive at good innovation ergo prosperity/wealth.
Ayo and I are working to figure out how to introduce our products to you, so we leave you with the phrase ‘nullius in verba’. It is the motto of The Royal Society, and it is the Latin equivalent of ’take no one’s word for it’. It is an expression of the determination of fellows of the royal society to “withstand the domination of authority, and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment”.
