Country of Origin: Nigeria
You are not alone, I am just as confused as you are.
My life hasn’t always been the way I wanted it to be. I hated business studies in my junior secondary school, but surprisingly, I had the highest score on the “termly assessment” test. I wanted to be a science student, but I got randomly selected for a commercial class and ended up loving it. As a student of commerce, I graduated as the best in my set.
Discovering what I wanted to do with my life and career was even more challenging.
At 16, I started blogging on blogger.com, and I got so good at it that I began editing the HTML of blogger templates. Later, I got bored, dropped blogging, and moved on to writing poetry and short stories. I had a lot of readers, wow — random people spoke about how they loved my writing — I stopped again. Because I was confused! I really didn’t know what I wanted to do.
I transitioned back to tech and began learning to code and write programs. I started from the basics by mastering HTML and CSS. I stopped again! All this, while I was a student of insurance at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria.
Funny enough, I never wanted to study insurance. I wanted to study accounting, but studying accounting was so competitive, I opted for the more guaranteed employment provider — Insurance. I didn’t want to spend an additional year at home and I knew that becoming an accountant only required that you have the knowledge and pass the professional exams.
My grades were good, so I picked up my finance ambition again and dusted it off. I started my journey into investment banking and landed in some internships. I was doing well, yet my interest drifted to product management. I took a course on digital product management. My interest remained, but that was it. Nothing more. I didn’t feel the need to chase a career in product management. I came back to finance.
While juggling my passion for finance with product management, I launched a podcast series on discovering Africa. Unfortunately, after the first two episodes, I stopped. My problem is that I prefer actions to idle thoughts, and I love learning from my failures. I really can’t remember how many times I have edited my LinkedIn profile to suit my dynamic ideas and ambitions.
I can’t say whether I was really confused or not – I was that confused! All I knew was that I wanted to make a difference. Yes, I am crazy. But trust me, I am not the only crazy dude out there. If being crazy is the only way to break out of my comfort zone, then I want to remain crazy.
Why did I write all this? There are thousands of other crazy intellectuals and creatives out there who have yet to discover their passion. They have been on an never-ending journey of discovering their passion, and finding their niche has become their passion.
If there is one thing I have learned during my journey, it is that no one has it all figured out. It is okay to keep evaluating your potential. It is okay to keep trying new options and exploring new opportunities. The world is limitless to those who know no boundaries.
Thank you to Tripti Mund and Yosef Baskin for their inspired edits on this piece and everyone else on the Work & Life team.
If you are interested in submitting a piece to the DG Sentinel, please visit our submissions page here.
