I’m not afraid to look stupid

I’ve walked away from things people spend years chasing.

A master’s degree. A stable job. A well-worn path toward becoming a chartered accountant. I let it all go in 2016, not because I had a better plan, but because I couldn’t pretend anymore.

The truth is, I’ve built a life by starting over. And the older I get, the more convinced I am that reinvention isn’t failure, it’s faith.

I remember the exact day I submitted my dissertation at the University of Bradford. I had just finished my Master’s in Finance, Accounting, and Management. While my classmates celebrated big plans in finance, I knew I wouldn’t be joining them. I didn’t even try to find a job in the UK. I wasn’t confused. I was clear. I knew, with startling certainty, that I wasn’t going to use this degree.

I had never liked accounting. It bored and confused me. I spent more time at the student radio station, RamAir, than in tutorials. My saving grace was the ability to cram for exams. I did just enough to pass, partly out of duty, partly because I didn’t want to disappoint my parents, who had sacrificed so much to send me abroad. That sense of responsibility pushed me to perform well enough to earn a scholarship for a Master’s degree. But passion? That was never part of the equation.

After graduating, I returned to Nigeria and did the expected thing. I enrolled in the ACCA (The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants) program and got a job as an accountant at a health insurance company. I lasted three weeks. I’d fall asleep at my desk, unable to feign interest. I was bored out of my mind. My parents weren’t surprised when I quit. They just asked: What are you going to do next?

That question hung over me until I did something I was never taught to do: I asked for help, publicly and shamelessly. I sent out a tweet, on an old Twitter account, saying something like, “I want to be a journalist. I’ve written some articles. I’m a fast learner. Someone help!”

It felt audacious, maybe even desperate. But it worked. Nigerian journalists like Mercy Abang and Eromo Egbejule responded. Mercy gave me my first writing assignments. I devoured online writing courses. I shadowed reporters. I read voraciously. I wrote badly at first. I made clumsy mistakes. But I stayed with it, because I had to. I had something to prove, not to others, but to myself.

Then came December 2017. The first wave of the End SARS protests against police brutality in Nigeria had just begun. I pitched a story comparing the movement to police brutality protests in the U.S. I’d done my research, studied different editors and their styles, and sent tailored pitches. When Al Jazeera said yes, I couldn’t believe it.

I showed the email to my dad. “I’m going to write for Al Jazeera,” I said, smiling wider than I had in months.

That was the first time I thought, Maybe I can really do this.

Publishing that story was one thing. But over a year later, when the editor of CNN Africa reached out after reading my stories at Stears Business, a publication focused on business stories at the time, and asked me to interview for a role, something shifted in me. That was the “this is it” moment. The validation I hadn’t realized I’d been waiting for.

From there, the work kept coming. Stories in the Financial Times, Mail & Guardian, OkayAfrica. But also stories I wish I could erase, poorly researched, hastily written. Stories that taught me the difference between publishing and publishing well.

Over time, I became an editor, then a producer. I learned how to write for video, how to direct, how to produce podcasts, how to build documentaries from scratch. I made mistakes, lots of them. But I also found joy. I found mastery.

And then, I walked away.

In 2024, after seven years in journalism, I pivoted into tech.

I joined a financial technology company, an entirely new world. In my first month, I heard words like “API keys” and “vulnerability management,” and I felt like a tourist in my own job. I’m a seasoned storyteller, but now I had to learn how money moves behind the scenes, how systems talk to each other, how infrastructure holds up under pressure.

I had entered another unfamiliar space. I had stepped, once again, into what my partner calls the zone of incompetence, the frustrating, humbling space where you don’t yet know what you’re doing. Where everyone around you seems fluent in a language you barely understand. Where you feel like an imposter. But where, if you stay long enough, you grow.

We don’t talk enough about the courage it takes to start over. To walk away from competence and choose curiosity. To look foolish again. To trade confidence for potential.

But I’ve learned to trust the process. To make peace with looking stupid. To ask the obvious questions. To raise my hand when I don’t know. Because the fear of being bad at something is smaller than the joy of becoming good at it.

Starting over has become my superpower. Not because it’s painless. But because it’s mine.

Right now, I’m still learning this new world, still in the zone. But I know something now I didn’t know before: the first draft of anything doesn’t have to be good. It just has to exist. Excellence comes later, through edits, through time, through trust in yourself.

And so I stay. I keep learning. I keep beginning again.

Because somewhere on the other side of the zone of incompetence, something beautiful is waiting to take shape.