Why I Have Decided to Write

I recently found myself telling my friends how I wish I knew at least a decade ago everything I know today. I conducted an experiment in my office after having a class with our interns, and I asked if all the things they had just learned in that class could have been understood by and valuable to a 13-year-old. The general consensus was yes. So, if a teenager has the capacity to understand these things (which I will be publishing going forward), why don’t we go ahead and teach them? In subsequent essays, I will write on why I think we are doing our youth a disservice by not exposing them to the realities of life much earlier, only for them to get a rude awakening as adults. I have decided to synthesise what I have learned in almost three decades of my existence on the planet and condense them into essays I believe will be beneficial to others.

Second, I am writing to be effective in managing my relationships. Very recently, a friend sent me a text describing me as being “nerdy.” In her words, she was just trying to “have a conversation with a friend, not a strategist.” Now, I don’t hold this against her in any way. On the contrary, I am grateful because she helped unlock a vital lesson for me—certain things are meant to serve broader audiences and not surface so intensely in personal conversations. A doctor friend always scrutinising the medical implications of your actions and giving medical advice in almost every conversation quickly becomes boring and not fun to hang with. But that same doctor could be a great friend when they dish out their medical insights to the world, while simply being a friend to you (of course, their expertise will still be helpful, but ideally managed with good discretion within the friendship). I am grateful for all my friends who have had to bear the burden of listening to my thoughts and ideas, but I think many of those ideas are for a different context and audience, and this space is an avenue to be more effective with that. (P.S: Many of the initial essays you’ll read here will have a conversational tone because they were mostly framed during conversations with friends.)

My third reason for writing is that I acknowledge that I’m ageing. I recognise that the best time to have started was about a decade ago, but the next best time is now. I realise that the more I procrastinate and push things off, the riskier it gets. Youth is a beautiful season of life for multiple reasons—one of which is that it is the stage when individuals are socially allowed to fail. Hence, risks I don’t take now become harder to take the older I get. And given the size of my ambitions, I need to keep developing my risk appetite and detach from social validation quickly. There’s also another angle to this. I take inventory of my life seriously, and I do this beginning with the end in mind. I have an idea of who I want to be on my last day on earth, and that guy doesn’t have many regrets—especially not ones involving things he should have done but didn’t.

I don’t think I have fully arrived at a place where my own voice is completely formed, but I am encouraged by a quote I once heard Rich Wilkerson Jr. say, that “sometimes it is okay to be an echo before you become a voice.” While I don’t think anyone ever fully outgrows echoing the thoughts and voices of others, I have learned a few things about how one’s unique voice is formed, and I am willing to experiment using this medium.