#Workastories: Fu’ad Lawal
Editor-In-Chief, Zikoko
How would you describe yourself?
A curious person, and a writer.
To be honest, I don’t feel like a model career person because what tends to happen is that I see an opportunity I like, and I have a set of skills that make me take them. And I take them.
In the beginning, it was just writing, but as my role has evolved over the years, it has included working with teams to solve complex problems. If you asked me what I did, I would tell you simply “I make stuff and I hope people like them.”
How would you then define curiosity?
Curiosity is a yearning. It is asking questions that might not always make sense. Sometimes, even subjectively foolish questions — as long as I don’t ask them twice. I think it’s looking for answers to things and updating your own knowledge base.
The interesting thing about asking questions is that it’s not just about finding answers, sometimes it’s the exercise itself equally satisfying. In looking for answers you stumble on random things and learn. The skills you build while at it are at worst like fetching water into a dirty basket; by the time you’re done the basket will still be empty, but it’ll also be clean.
Jollof Rice, for example, is originally from Senegal. Curiosity makes me want to find out more about how it spread across Africa and has become a food that we’re so proud of we fight over it. And so I try to find out.
When did you notice that you were a curious person?
In retrospect. I just knew that my mother used to tell me not to kill her because I asked too many questions.
Curiosity for me was more unproductive than productive. I was curious about non-school stuff. I would keep a special notebook where I would write interests. It was always neater than my school ones.
Let’s talk about your school days and how it led to a “career” path.
I studied Industrial Chemistry. I submitted my final project in 2011, I had problems with school that didn’t make me serve until 2014 and it was in that period that I started writing again. Back then, my internet experience was very different than it is right now. When I was in University, BBM was N5,000 per month, but I couldn’t afford that so I used Express Music accompanied with Waptrick Internet. Basically, I didn’t have the resources to expend my curiosity on.
When I finished University, I lived with someone that had Swift internet and that was the first time in my life I had access to almost unlimited internet. It was like heaven. But I was late to the party. That was 2012. It was then I decided to start writing seriously; every other week.
I started getting feedback from friends in 2013 saying my writing was good. In 2014 I started helping friends who had jobs write some stuff, and they paid me. 2014 — that was the first time I knew you could be paid to write.
At some point in 2015, I opened all the job websites you could find and searched for jobs. I found out that there was so little for me with my degree and saw that people were hiring writers. So I started applying to all kinds of writing jobs. I even applied for a company that was looking for a designer and said: “designers tend to need copywriters”.
In 2015, I got my first job at Pulse. I wrote like hell. I wrote about just about anything. My job at Pulse was for about 9 months.
My second was at Party Jollof. I wrote a lot too and I would say the job there prepared me for my current job. I was there for about 8 months and then I went back to Pulse till 2018.
I left Pulse for Big Cabal in 2018. And that’s where I work right now.
What do you do at Big Cabal?
At Big Cabal, I work with the content teams across the company, and if you asked me what my job description was I would say it is “making content work”. And content works when it finds an audience.
Do you still write?
I write every week.
Would you say you’ve progressed from writing to supervising writing?
Yes. But I feel the need to write more and I’m developing a system that helps me write more.
One thing that changed your perspective about a career
I think careers are something you see when you look back. I see opportunities and I learn what it takes to take them and I take them.
I don’t think I’ve been hired for things I’ve been qualified for; I just figured things out. I just wing it. Growth always happens but you can’t grow by doing the same things every time. Discontent brings growth.
Do you read a lot?
I don’t have a choice. More recently, I listen to a lot of podcasts as well because I don’t have time to read. I also try to use audiobooks. A problem with that though is that it’s when I’m mobile I take inspiration from my environment to help with my creativity, give me ideas and help me learn, but because I’m always wearing headphones I’m missing out on a lot. I have to fix that.
Advice to Young People
I think the two most important things are Curiosity and Discontent.
Try to find out how everything works, and then do not be satisfied with how much you know.
Can you say something about the significance of Jollof Road to Nigerian content creation, and are we ever going to see anything like it from Zikoko again?
Fingers crossed 🤞🏾
By David Odunlami | @odunlami_
