Episode 2: Medium Dreams
I had big dreams getting into OAU — graduate with a minimum of Second Class Upper honors, be the most humorous guy in my department and get a good job after graduating.
Well, I graduated with a second class honors degree in 2011, won the award for most humorous in my entire set’s faculty of technology, but I did not get a good job. I was hoping I would return to Nestle Nigeria where I did my internship. Why would I not want to return to Nestle when they helped me achieve some of my crazy dreams. I once dreamed of finishing one full packet of Choco milo all by myself, at Nestle, I was taking a minimum of 30 cubes every day. I and two other interns once finished the biggest size of milo in 1 hour. I wonder how Nestle did in the stock market that period. While jobless and waiting for my National Youth Service Corp (NYSC), I dreamed more and dreamed bigger. I dreamed of having a strong presence on Twitter with at least 2k followers. I got to 5k followers in record time with several trending tweets. What a vain dream!
Bigger Stage
I dreamed of performing my spoken word poetry on any stage. I was lucky to get into the biggest spoken word competition in Nigeria. My dream was just to make top ten, at least a few people will remember me. I ended up being the 2nd overall and performing one of the most beautifully written spoken word poems in Nigeria (Title: Amnesia). What was missing was getting a good job. A couple of my classmates had already gotten into P&G and were earning big already. I don’t want to bore you with the details of my job search, read about it here (Son rises from the East).
I dreamed of joining one of the big IHS Towers vendors as a field engineer or lead, instead I ended up as a project coordinator at IHS towers. At last the dream job was here, and I was grateful! Until I discovered I could have negotiated better and gotten a better salary. I knew I could correct my pay gap by getting a couple of promotions, and then my dream was to finally become a manager. I remember when I’ll make jokes with my colleagues that my salary is huge and I have to work hard to justify it. I would mention a ridiculously high amount and everyone would laugh hard about it.
I started dreaming of one day working for a New York Stock Exchange listed company. While people were pushing to get COREN and other local certifications, I targeted the international ones, especially US ones. I already had my PMP so I went on to get certified as a Lean Six Sigma Black belt by American Society for Quality (ASQ), then went on to get another one in supply chain before then becoming a Scrum Master. I just believed that these along with taking on complex and ambiguous projects at work would help me actualize my dream.
Post MBA Dream
In less than 3 years, I became a manager. Yay! Then in another one year, I became a senior manager. You remember that I said I used to joke about a ridiculous amount as my salary? I started getting above 200% of that. Not long after, IHS became a NYSE listed company. “Could this be it? Dream has finished?” Then one day I stumbled on the essays I wrote for my MBA applications. I wanted to go to top US schools so I could get into the big tech companies such as Microsoft, google or Amazon as a program manager, post MBA.
Unfortunately I did not get those schools, so I just decided to do an online MBA instead. My new dream was to finish the MBA and get into a middle tier tech company in Africa, that can now position me to get another tech company outside Africa before finally landing in those top tech MMAANG (Meta Microsoft Apple Amazon Netflix Google) companies. I knew of one person in my close circle that worked for a big 4 consulting firm in Nigeria and got another big 4 in UK, so I felt my dream might be achievable.
I had a feeling I would leave Nigeria soon and wanted to contribute my quota to making the country a better place before leaving. I had and still have a list of ideas I would execute that will solve some of the biggest problems not just in Nigeria, but Africa and the rest of the world. So I picked transportation and decided to brainstorm and start building with one of my colleagues at IHS (alongside other friends). Few weeks after, she was going to join Microsoft Nigeria. This was such a big deal, and practically everyone was tapping into that testimony. I did too, and that reignited my sleeping dream of getting into a global tech company.
I knew I would also get into a big tech company, but did not just know when. So I kept building locally, while thinking globally. This changed the way I approached the startup. Changed the way I interacted with my colleagues at work. All I was doing was filtered through the sieve of; Build local, Dream global!
