a photo I took, in case I had to write something like this one day. I knew the time would come.

“Scale”

Growing up, I was only familiar with a “weight scale, the tiny contraption I stood on to find out how much I weighed.

“80kg”.

The nurse would say, and scribble on my hospital file, I’d look down and I get off of the small machine, while I wait for whatever test comes next, usually that fun thing they wrap around my arm to find out what my blood pressure is (however that science works)

As a 21 year old law student, who also runs a creative enterprise and has spent the past couple of. months interacting with the corporate world, I’ve come to know a new meaning of the word.

According to Investopedia, Scalability is a company’s ability to grow its operations and increase profits without being hampered by changing demands or resource limitations.

In simpler terms: it’s building something that grows beyond your personal effort, something that serves more people than just yourself, without collapsing under the weight of growth.

This concept sounds very fancy on paper, and if you’re a dreamer like me, you can spend lots of time thinking about how your ideas can scale beyond what they currently are, and how big things can become, how much profit you can make..

E go sweet you for body. (For my international audience, this fills you with a sense of ecstasy and excitement)

But what does it really mean to scale?

Over the past two months, I have interned at two law firms on Lagos Island, spending one month at each. The Island, with its high-rise buildings, skyscrapers, and luxurious apartments, provided the backdrop to my experience.

These firms represent multi-billion-dollar clients and transactions, and during my time there I encountered figures and deals of a scale I had never interacted with before.

I start to wonder to myself, “how did they do this? What did it take to build something THIS BIG?”

What I’ve come to find, is that scale cannot exist without the smallest version of that thing running smoothly for a while, long enough till you know it’s time to spread your tentacles and grow.

I realized that I’ve become obsessed with the idea of “making it big” (shoutout Femi Otedola, lol) that I forget that I have something “small” to keep working on.

I forget that for anything at all to scale, the person doing the scaling must have scaled as well.

Your mindset must have scaled. You must have gotten to the point where you realize that the current version of yourself and your idea cannot possibly take you ahead on your journey, and then get to fixing your capability.

For me, that’s been Konnova — my media company. I’ve spent the past three months laying its foundation, and the journey has been anything but straightforward. I’ve moved from grand plans to smaller, practical ones. From dreaming of big leaps to taking careful, deliberate steps.

I found that Big cannot exist without small, and scale cannot exist without structure.

So I myself must scale beyond this dreamer, and find the room to balance dreaming with structure, and place each part of the machine in place, screw by screw.

a mirror selfie, to end this beautiful piece of writing. enjoy.

stained glass. refined and made into something beautiful. Day 5 of my exams. I’m done!

My glass, your glass.

Shall I have this glass?

We’re all stabbed in the skin at birth. It’s why we cry in the first few seconds of getting here.

Life hurts, and I just arrived.

I have my shards of glass. You have yours. The mission is simple: leave with as little broken glass as you came with.

So life becomes a process of refining and softening. Unearthing wounds. Dealing with our glass.

As we move through the world, we meet people, each carrying their own shards.

There’s friction.

You love and get heartbroken.

You were the lover who broke a heart.

You got betrayed by a friend.

You were the friend who did the betraying.

You loved your parents, and you lost them.

They loved you — and they lost you too.

Your best friend has another best friend?

Deeper.

You caught a parent in an affair?

Deeper.

Got scammed by someone on the internet?

Deeper.

The friction between us is unavoidable. Some learn to hold their glass carefully, while others swing ever so recklessly.

Some of us take our fragments and turn them into something else — stained glass, pieced together by pain, but beautiful nonetheless.

And we all long for that person.

The one who sees you, shards and all.

Who looks you in the eye, despite their own broken pieces, and asks —

“Shall I have this glass?”

Let’s make it ours.

day 4 of exams. Almost done😭

“Hard guy” will kill you.

Do you realize that one day, you’ll be the bedrock of a family?

That one day, a child with loving, beady eyes will tug at your shirt, look up, and call you “Daddy”?

That one day, a woman will decide to trust you with her entire life, become your wife, and call you “Husband”?

Zoom out.

Look at your hands. Turn them, left and right.

One day, they’ll hold a child.

One day, they’ll handle the love of a family.

One day, they’ll instruct young ones in the way they should go.

Zoom out again.

Look at your hands. They’re not involved in anything productive.

You’re wasting time with foolish boys, yet you call yourself a man.

You have no idea what it means to be a man.

Sorry, Chief.

It’s not the deep voice — 15-year-olds would be men if that were the case.

It’s not how proficient you think you are on a king-size mattress.

It’s not about out-hustling your father either.

It’s not even in the pursuit of money.

It’s quite… intangible.

There’s this thing called loving sacrifice.

Kinda reminds me of the greatest man that ever lived.

He died in place of people who didn’t love Him.

He came from a rich home but lived poor.

He could have snapped His fingers and turned everyone who spat on Him to dust — He didn’t.

Instead, He loved. And then, He gave His life.

He didn’t amass — He gave.

He walked with a company of men. He wasn’t solitary.

He shared His pain.

“My soul is sorrowful, even unto death.”

And He cried with them.

He wasn’t a hard guy.

Even though He was the hardest guy.

“Hard guy” is costing you.

“Hard guy” will kill you.

You need love. Accept it.

You need to start a new trend with your own family.

To be the dad whose kids know, not just through actions but through words, that he loves them.

“My dad said he loves me” wouldn’t be an anomaly.

Because your Father showed you He loved you.

He gave His life for you.

Na real man be that.

Who ever forgets when they meet you?

Walking alone as a young boy, and you pull up in your nice little car, promising a “quick trip” — but no one has to know.

I’ve never seen this type of car before, so I get in.

The first day, we pass through new cities — places I’ve never seen. The houses are grand, almost majestic. I don’t ever want to leave.

I want to call my friends, let them see what I see. But you tell me I can’t.

This has to be our little secret. My friends can’t know. Neither can my parents.

And at the back of my mind, the thought lingers — “if this place is so cool, why can’t I tell anyone about it?”

But I dismiss it.

Doesn’t matter, really.

We keep exploring this city. Every day, something new. Something I rush away from everyone to see.

Until one day, I take a peek behind one of those really cool buildings. And that’s when I see it.

The cracks. The broken pipes. The shattered windows. The furniture, run-down and ruined.

The city isn’t real. The glamour is a lie.

But that’s the thing — you never needed it to be real. You just needed me to trust you. To fall in love with the illusion.

You never let me see for myself. Until I did.

And by then, I think it was too late.

Because I had fallen in love with the rot, too. Came to terms with it. Started to embrace it, like it was my rot.

Every moment spent with people, I saw them through the rot. I couldn’t think straight. Couldn’t see clearly.

The rot took my relationships. Took my friendships.

And slowly, I became like the city I fell in love with.

All nice on the outside. But rotten within.

The rot.

The damned rot.

I became the rot.

But dear lust,

Thank you for one thing.

You drove me to the end of myself. And then I met the beginning of God.

day 2 of exams. We wrote land law

You’re broken, aren’t you?

I can tell.

You hate to confront what’s wrong with you, so you keep pouring yourself into other things — other people.

You discovered the world of social media, and now you drown yourself in putting out your work.

You see the comments — “You’re going places.” “Go boy.” “Talented guy.”

And you feel satisfied. If you could stay there forever, you would.

But you know that even if the followers increase, and the likes and comments triple, there’s still a void.

A void that all the superficial stuff cannot fill.

Even when you climb the highest mountain, your brokenness is amplified at the top because there’s a void.

No one can see it, but you can.

You’ve been creating from a broken place.

- day 1 of my exams.

I might die by my own hand.

What if I’m building a future I won’t even get to participate in?

Late nights bleed into early mornings. Back-to-back meetings. Endless iterations. The unrelenting search for feedback. Somewhere along the way, I forgot to ask myself: Why?

Why do I do this?

Why do I trade rest for one more call, one more idea, one more rabbit hole to dive into?

Why does my work even matter to me?

Maybe my “drive” isn’t even mine. Maybe I’ve been gripping someone else’s steering wheel, hoping that if I hold on long enough, it’ll somehow become my journey.

Or maybe it’s Instagram — those carefully curated glimpses of other people’s lives. The 0.001% they choose to show me.

“I work 20 hours a day.”

“I sleep 30 minutes a night.”

“I make $100k a week.”

And I press harder on the accelerator.

I want to make money too.

I need 100k followers too.

Why don’t my videos have the same reach?

Then — crash.

“He was a good friend,” they say.

“He had dreams,” they sob.

And finally, I get to sleep.

But what if I don’t have to burn out to prove I was here? What if I slow down, step back, and redefine success for myself? Maybe the real race isn’t about speed — it’s about direction

Not that I can direct myself, I’m not big enough to do that.

I can’t create meaning for a life I was given.

I have to find it.