Ballads of The Advancing Man

Lessons from 2025

This is the third time i am rewriting the beginning of this ballad, I was finding it hard to construct this. I realized that i wasn’t being true to myself, I had a plan for something grand, I have been seeing people draft end of the year reviews and all and I was feeling compelled, the basic human desire to feel among.

What value would my words hold if they did not come from a place of truth, I wanted to make it a write-up of short points, how you should do this and abstain from this but I am not going that route anymore, I am going to share my personal experiences and the lessons would ensue from them.

I find it hard to recall anything from this year because I don’t think I did a lot, at least that is what i believe, I don’t go back to old pictures, hardly read old write-ups and cringe at old podcasts so i really can’t know.

I worked with a client for the first 6 months of the year, sure I learned some technologies and grew a bit but nothing really came out of it, a blip in the radar type of experience.

Very toxic guy, didn’t know what he wanted, tried to exploit and gaslight me at every means and eventually ran with my money, now I really have nothing to show for it apart from the experience.

Sometimes you embark on journeys, days, weeks, months at a time and you arrive back with no material thing to show for such time than your experience of it, and often times, that’s all that matters.

What I learned from the endeavor has shaped me in so many ways, I learned that:

You don’t know what you want until you know what you don’t want.

I am a man of passion, tell me what I have not done, meme creation, rapping, video editing, photography and whatnot. They come and they go. You try to juggle them all, drop one for the other, do both, none at all, give up, come back again to give it another shot and I have really grown from it, before ponder piece I have created three variations of quotes.

Curious me was very sad when I realized that you really cannot do everything, you can only be great in a select few and the others you’ll be average but like I said earlier, you have to try them all out first before you figure out what you stick with.

The biggest lesson this year was from the Zenith Bank Hackathon Ola and I attended, it’s a very sensitive topic for me but i’ll be vulnerable about it.

We commuted to Victoria Island four days in a row, trying to build a product and win the cash prize and get a change to be in an accelerator for the product.

I was fairly confident in our product and our presentation but at the end of the day we did not win.

The day before the demo we went round to connect with every single participant, and I was thinking we would win based on the shitty assessment that I made.

In life there are people that would be way better than you, create better stuff than you, be smarter than you.

I remember after the announcement of the winners and reality had set in, I looked among the crowd and one of our facilitators gave me a silent nod of approval, like the one Alfred gave Bruce in Batman.

And in that moment everything made sense, there was something I understood that I can’t place in words. One of the judges also said this quote, and that was the inspiration for this picture.

That day NF dropped his EP, fear. As Ola and i walked out of the building, overshadowed by the beautiful architecture that inspires, tells you boldly that you were made for more.

Ola made a remark and everywhere was blurry, my eyes were teary and I let it flow, all the dreams on what could be is just gone, just like that. He assured me that it was going to be alright, i’ll never forget.

Cried on the ride home, playing the EP in a loop, got to Berger by 8pm, cried on my walk to my dad’s office. When he saw me he asked how it was, as we were walking to car I was quiet and I started crying again, he comforted me and explained the reality of life.

Failure is just painful knowledge.

In the grand scheme it’s just more of a redirection and redirection is good.

The reason you don’t have something at the moment is because you have not become the person that is capable of having it.

The reason why you don’t have that job is because you have not grown into the person capable of handling it, same reason you don’t have that money or that gadget or whatever you want.

If you grow into the person that is meant to have it, you would get it in the most stress free way, so the lesson in this is to keep growing.

The true measure of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.

Identify the steps that must be taken to achieve what you want and tick it off. Let the work speak for itself, you don’t narrate over a classic painting, it speaks it’s own language.

There is no summary to this, no resolution, no moral compass, no right, no wrong, no five step process to becoming the best person ever.

You must find the meaning of this ballad within you, yourself, The Advancing Man.