Black Narratives: 3 Lessons On Finding Your Purpose From This CEO
Ideas That Helped This Black Tech Leader Battle Dyslexia and Build a Digital Marketing Agency
Introduction:
Being labelled anything is a challenge. Though some labels are heavier to bear than others, categorising people based on sweeping generalisations doesn’t bode well. Learning Impairments are no different and present issues that can be managed in our younger years.
In some cases, problems carry over into adulthood that could have been addressed in our infancy. Black Tech Influential Voice and Author Alex Onalaja explained the tensions of being diagnosed with dyslexia in his final year of university and how that fuelled his ambitions to redefine his purpose.
Here’s what I learnt from speaking with Alex.
Identify The Battle:
I’d walk in, sit down and stare blankly at the page as if I’d studied for another paper. I struggled to retain the information that I had read.
The goal is to understand what your up against as clearly as possible. To take issues like dyslexia and turn them into successes, you’ll need a firm grip over the problem’s root cause. Here, emotional intelligence is the difference between seeing the problem as it is versus seeing what you want to see to validate your world view.
In Alex’s case, he had to identify what was making learning so difficult. Approaching his University professor, Alex noticed that his reading and writing were causing him to feel physically and mentally exhausted. They agreed the problem was worth much more digging and discovered that Alex had dyslexia after getting a professional opinion.
Having struggled up the stairwell of formal education, Alex felt deflated at the prospect of graduating into a working environment where his disability overshadowed four years of dedication.
I had mixed feelings. Though I had closure and understood the pain of my current situation, I felt alone because I could only get so much support even with my diagnosis.
This is the most difficult lesson I learnt from Alex — being completely honest about where you are so that you can improve is bittersweet but worth every word. As you understand your problem in greater detail, it’ll become clear what you have at your disposal to fight back.
Invest In Your Strengths:
Before investing in your strengths, you’ll need to take stock of your skills and evaluate them.
Alex took an inventory of himself by asking questions like:
- What personal problems can I solve with my inventory?
- What real-life problems can I solve for others?
- Given what I know about group X, what is the value of those problems to those businesses?
You have valuable skills. Period.
The point here is to help you identify your positive contribution to yourself and society.
Nurturing your strengths helps to build confidence because your actions stem from your natural abilities. You’re also likely to improve faster because you genuinely enjoy what you’re doing.
This is how Alex levelled the playing field.
By observing my thoughts about dyslexia and my learning difficulties, I realised that writing could be a form of self-discovery. The more I wrote down my thoughts, the better I understood myself.
Through writing and reading his thoughts, Alex removed false statements he’d adopted during his time at university whilst increasing his self-confidence. As you ween out the thoughts that deduct from your self-confidence, you can gather the resources worth investing in and figure out the skills you want to double-down on.
In Alex’s case, writing became his biggest strength, and he saw opportunities in content writing and digital marketing. That year he went on to study for an MSc in Digital Marketing. Alex continued writing and published a booked called “Lost, Now Found” and began offering his services to friends and family after graduating.
”Through word-of-mouth, I grew my digital marketing agency, TAD 360, and was invited to sit as Chairman on the Board for KYSO.”
Alex made two slick moves that compounded his strengths.
Making use of friends and family to validate his marketing services as well as collaborating with a local community to multiply his reach means his writing and marketing services can improve quickly.
Give Back to The Community:
Giving back to others that live in similar circumstances to those we struggled with helps us complete our journey. It gives us the chance to appreciate the micro-inputs that resulted in our success and positively impact the lives of those on the same path. Alex uses his writing to curate motivational content to inspire his audience via Linkedin.
His words aim to help people overcome any challenge they face.
Similarly, his marketing and business skills have helped the KYSO Community provide more creative opportunities for young people. The KYSO Mission is to break barriers holding back young people from building their confidence and accessing good career opportunities. I don’t think the KYSO are directly responsible for Alex’s journey with dyslexia.
I felt that he resonated with young people’s struggle on the process of finding themselves and was inspired to lead the board based on his plethora of experience managing TAD 360, his digital marketing agency.
Takeaways:
- Life will show up with problems at times that seem unjust and highly inconvenient.
- Finding the root cause of the problem and taking a personal inventory of what you have to make a stand will set you up for a good fight.
- Invest in your strengths, and when the going gets a little less rough, you can give back to those who about to get going.
