2023: A Review?
Once More, With Feeling
Hello, Medium. It’s been a while. It’s been long since I’ve written anything at all. This is probably my first post of the year, and I apologise in advance for what you’re about to read: I’m rusty. If I could describe my experience with writing now, I’d say it’s like when a bench player suffers a massive injury and is just getting eased back onto the bench. For non-team sports people: writing was never my strong point. Even when I was writing somewhat consistently, it was mid at best. Then I stopped. You can only imagine how much worse than mid my familiarity with writing is currently. Again, my sincerest apologies.
So, 2023. What about it?
People say I don’t use as many filler words as average. I disagree. Basically, essentially and effectively should count as filler words, and I almost always use “in short” when I’m about to say something that isn’t short in any way, shape or form. However, my main “filler” words are odd and interesting. 2023 has been an odd and interesting year.
This is how it’s going to work: Instead of presenting the review as one long stream of consciousness, I’ve divided it into sections. And instead of structuring the sections around the months of the year, I’ve structured it to revolve around areas of my life. Finito.
(Deji: I’ve toyed with writing this review in different formats, and none of them worked. Even this one I’ve decided to use won’t work, it’ll just fail less than the others.)
Before actually delving into the thing, a short note about expectations. I had a few, mostly focused on career and writing. Looking back, I have only two words to describe my experience hitting my targets: lol. lmao. To illustrate, consider this writing goal: write 30 articles in 2023. Again: lol. lmao. No one asked me to set a number that high, but I didn’t even write a single article. I met a few of my expectations, but I think 2023 has mostly been characterized by inertia in some areas and growth at the speed of light in others. Add that to a few completely unexpected developments and it’s certainly been an odd and interesting 2023.
Career
This is the first time I can truly say I lived up to this mantra: “Aim to have such a higher career growth rate that you cringe looking back at yourself a year ago”. 2022 Me is cringe, and I’m proud of that.
I entered the year weighing up the pros and cons of switching careers before I even graduated with my first degree in psychology (and after making an original switch to data science), and I leave the year with a tunnel vision-like focus on my field of interest ¹.
What changed, for me, was that I got more clarity on what I wanted to do and what kinds of work I liked. I got that clarity through a transformative three-month internship at Stanbic IBTC. I should’ve written a long-form essay about my experience there (but continued procrastinating until it stopped being a sensible idea), but what I can say is that I discovered that I didn’t like being viewed as a psychologist (or as someone with predominantly psychology-related skills). I got assigned to my business unit primarily because of my psychology background, but I figured that out on my first day and weaseled my way into something more in line with my skill set. I ended up being pretty good at it.
It was at Stanbic IBTC that I also identified what I wanted to work on. I didn’t work on those things myself (switching departments was a hassle), but I got a pretty informed idea of what happened there, and in stark contrast with the more psychological areas of my department (where my interest continued to fade as time passed), I grew more fascinated by the work as the internship progressed.
I had amazing bosses and co-workers. I imagine it would’ve been pretty easy for Mama T (my Team Lead) to keep the psychology student in the psychology area, but for whatever reason, she didn’t. It would’ve been easier for Oluchi, Julie and Donatus to just ignore the intern and continue with work as usual, but for whatever reason, they didn’t. I’m eternally grateful to them for taking a chance on the scrawny kid from UNILAG. The AC was insane, though. 4 layers of clothing and I still felt like I was freezing my butt off.
I also joined TIS. More on that in the “school” section, but this directly influenced my career aspirations in the sense that it expanded my understanding of what I thought was possible for me to do. I used to think I was ambitious, but these guys are built different, and they have the doings to prove it. I wasn’t going to reduce my conception of my abilities, so I simply raised my ambitions. First by a little bit, but after being considered for something I never expected to smell in 5 years (served as external validation of the presence of that dawg in me), I raised my expectations by a lot. In 2024, I want to push the limits of my ambition and see where that takes me.
School
After relying on ChatGPT for much of my third year, I’m pleased to finally announce that after 5 (or is it 6?) years in uni, I am now in my final year. To be honest, school was never really important, which is something out of the ordinary. In 2023, the classes and grades aspect declined in importance significantly, compared to previous academic years. Two “wasted” years and extremely subjective marking schemes can go a long way.
Beyond grades, however, school has become much, much more important. It just boils down to The Investment Society (TIS), to be honest ². I’d been contemplating a career in finance ever since 2022, but I spent the last half of 2022 and the first half of 2023 fumbling in the dark. I got to know about TIS through LinkedIn, after they announced that members of the society had won something (I don’t even remember what it was). I got curious and reached out to someone for help, and after a lot of hand-wringing, I joined in August. It’s been exponential growth ever since. To summarize my experience, I’ve managed to raise both my floor³ and ceiling⁴ at everything Finance⁵.
This growth has been facilitated by one thing: moving into school. Throughout secondary school and my previous “three” years in university⁶, I never contemplated the idea of staying in school at all. The costs just outweighed the benefits. Until TIS, at least⁷. Then the benefits only slightly outweighed the costs. Hostels still stink and are cramped as hell (the things my eyes have seen in Saburi Biobaku Hall are not for the week), but I’ve managed to make it work. Small win.
Relationships
Romance⁸
Friendships
2023 in friendships has been characterized by one major self-inflicted L that I’ve only just worked up the courage to fix. In terms of meeting new people (which was not an explicit goal of mine), it was an amazing year, relatively speaking. Much of it was not voluntary: I’m not (nor do I have any desire to be) particularly outgoing, and I was very averse to the entire idea of networking⁹, so meeting new people wasn’t exactly on my bucket list for 2023. A few things changed that. TIS and Stanbic IBTC.
I wasn’t the only intern at Stanbic. I wasn’t even the only intern in my department. As a cohort, we did a fair few things together, so, naturally, friendships (or the seeds of friendship) were bound to develop. The fact that it’s a natural outgrowth of being in one cohort¹⁰ doesn’t dull or cheapen the strength of our relationships. Sharaf, Victoria, Olamide, Chidinma, Daniel, and the entirety of the 2023 Blue Intern cohort made my time there special, and I’m extremely bullish on how far we can go in our careers.
TIS was different. In many ways, it was the first time I didn’t have a say in picking friendships. Some people just barge into your life like that. I’ve had the privilege of meeting ridiculously talented people who have bright futures ahead of them. Every single person I’ve met in TIS has impacted my life positively in some way, but listing the names of every single person is quite frankly a chore, and I still have a lot to write. So I’ll keep it short: Jolaade, Victoria (again!), Zainab, Daniel (different), Francis, Aishat, Gbenga, and Tomisin are all truly brilliant people, and the best way of describing their abilities is this: They’re already at the top of their careers before they formally start.
Books
Most year-in-reviews I’ve written blend some element of going over my best reads with the usual semi-biographical stuff. This one is no different. While I think I’ve certainly read much less than I used to, I’m getting much more bang for my buck. I’ve also dropped the practice of finishing everything I start. I used to think it showed a lack of willingness to push through and do what needs to be done, but I just can’t. Sometimes, the book’s not for me.
In no particular order, here’s a list of the books I enjoyed the most:
Chip War, by Chris Miller
This book is one of those types that completely changes your understanding of what makes the world tick. It’s a fascinating history of the resource that will define the twenty-first century: chips. The chapters about the early days of the industry are probably my favourite, but every chapter is a banger. Favourite snippet:
During most years of the 2000s and 2010s, China spent more money importing semiconductors than oil.
Barbarians at the Gate, by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
I saw this on multiple “best finance books” lists, and it was always #1 or close to it. I decided to give it a shot, and boy did it live up to its billing. It describes the $25bn buyout of RJR Nabisco by KKR, and it has everything. Bidding wars, greedy managers, a detailed yet simple explanation of LBOs, junk bonds, name it, it had it. It is, without a doubt, the best finance book I have ever read.
“When a banker is talking about raising money, he’s your employee,” Sage would say. “When he starts writing the checks, you become his.”
Economic Diversification in Nigeria: The Challenges of Building a Post-Oil Economy, by Zainab Usman
I love a book that goes against the grain. One of the foundational arguments of this book is that Nigeria doesn’t actually suffer from a resource curse, but our failure to diversify is driven by an inability to achieve political equilibrium and a balance of power among individual, group, and institutional actors. By drawing on vast troves of data, she compares two cities that she believes perfectly illustrate Nigeria’s disharmony: Kano and Lagos. In Kano State a lack of a clear well-aligned vision and unified capacity to implement led to failure. But in Lagos State a clear vision and investments in administrative capacity successfully diversified revenue. Well written and surprisingly positive. It’s open access as well. You can find it here.
“Nigeria is not forever beholden to neopatrimonial politics and doomed to perpetual economic stagnation.
Neither is it a developmental state facilitating sustained economic growth and
structural transformation. Rather, Nigeria is an intermediate state capable of episodic reform but, in its present configuration, incapable of driving economic transformation due to the unstable distribution of political power in which ruling elites are constrained to lean towards certain types of policy choices.”
Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, by Zeynep Tufecki
One of the marks of a great book is that the reader is able to find examples of whatever phenomena the author is describing in their personal life. By that criteria, this book is great. When I read it, I kept thinking of EndSars and how Tufecki’s observations map onto the October 2020 protests. It’s up there with Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. Like Economic Diversification, it’s also open access. Find it here.
“For example, the ability to use digital tools to rapidly amass large numbers of protesters with a common goal empowers movements. Once this large group is formed, however, it struggles because it has sidestepped some of the traditional tasks of organizing. Besides taking care of tasks, the drudgery of traditional organizing helps create collective decision-making capabilities, sometimes through formal and informal leadership structures, and builds a collective capacities among movement participants through shared experience and tribulation.”
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin
I first saw this book on Bill Gates’ reading list, and since I enjoyed Vaclav Smil’s How The World Really Works, I thought “Why not give it a shot?”. I wasn’t disappointed. I like to say that I read a lot more nonfiction than fiction, but every single book in my Top 5 is fiction. I’m not a gamer, not anymore, but this book reminds me of when I used to be a deeply passionate gamer, and how much of a communal experience gaming is. It’s also a book about friendship, and what happens when friends come together to create something special. The ups and downs, the good, bad and ugly. Friendship is beautiful, and this book is beautiful.
“Friendship is friendship, and charity is charity,” Freda said. “You know very well that I was in Germany as a child, and you have heard the stories, so I won’t tell them to you again. But I can tell you that the people who give you charity are never your friends. It is not possible to receive charity from a friend.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Sadie said.
Freda stroked Sadie’s hand. “Mine Sadie. This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.”
Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric, by Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann
Another Bill Gates recommendation, this book is about complexity. It’s also a book about company culture, the desire to live up to expectations, “packaging”, and talent. But it’s also a book about collapse, and how companies make mistakes that consign them to failure. It’s also about the limits of being a generalist. It’s a lot, but it’s an amazing read.
“The board had largely followed the chairman’s lead. One newcomer to the board under Welch was surprised by the CEO’s command of the boardroom and the sparse debate among the group. Confused by how the meeting transpired, the new director asked a more senior colleague afterward, “What is the role of a GE board member?”
“Applause,” the older director answered.”
All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
War is bad. This book is fucking brilliant. Enough said.
The brain is locked in total darkness of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?
So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, by Cal Newport
This book is better than Deep Work. I never liked Deep Work anyway. I’ve never been a fan of the idea that a good career involves following one’s passions. My passions were never stable, so I was doomed to a life of switching if I followed the advice. So I ignored it. I also had many things I was good at. I couldn’t make a definitive choice, and I was often moving between skillsets because much of the technical knowledge needed came easily to me. This book has two main arguments. One, that passion is pointless as a predictor of career success and satisfaction. Two, the great work and great careers are formed in the intersection of skill and relevance. The second point was more pertinent to me, and I’ve followed its advice ever since. Shout out to Oluwatobi Kolawole for bringing this gem back to my attention.
“When I told Mark about Jordan, he agreed that an obsessive focus on the quality of what you produce is the rule in professional music. “It trumps your appearance, your equipment, your personality, and your connections,” he explained. “Studio musicians have this adage: ‘The tape doesn’t lie.’ Immediately after the recording comes the playback; your ability has no hiding place.”
Honorable Mentions: Titan, by Ron Chernow; Dead in the War, by Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel, More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite, by Sebastian Mallaby; Escape into Meaning, by Evan Puschak, The Complete Essay, by Montaigne, Number Go Up, by Zeke Fauk; This Present Darkness, by Stephen Ellis.
Books I Wish I Had Read/Finished Reading: The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path To Power, by Robert Caro; The Power Broker, also by Robert Caro; Swing Time, by Zadie Smith; Clear Thinking, by Shane Parrish; Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson.
Articles
This year, I read a lot more articles than in previous years. Part of it was due to an active desire to consume more information (still not sure about the correctness of that decision), and the rest was because I struggled with reading books for chunks of the year, and articles were the next best thing. This list of highlights is not necessarily definitive, but this is some of the best stuff I’ve read all year.
How To Do Great Work, by Paul Graham
This is the best article I’ve ever read. In short, the article posits that doing great work boils down to four key attributes: deciding what to work on, learning enough to get to the frontiers of knowledge, noticing the gaps at the forefront of the field, and exploring promising gaps. It’s an excellent follow-up to Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and I’d 100% recommend.
How To Work Hard, by Paul Graham
The reason Paul Graham is so prominent in my “best articles” list is that I had a lot of free time while at Stanbic IBTC. I couldn’t laze around, so I spent time reading articles and completing courses. I got hooked on Great Work, so from July to October, everything I read was Paul Graham. This article resonated more with me than Great Work, since I had to learn how to work hard. Early on in the article, he says this about schoolwork:
Schoolwork varied in difficulty; one didn’t always have to work super hard to do well.
That made sense to me. Many things came easy to me, so I never saw the virtue of hard work. I learned it the hard way, but I rebounded quickly, so I never really learned much. This piece clarified a lot for me, and I can see the effects in my life.
How To Be Successful (At Your Career, Twitter Edition), by Sam Altman
This isn’t an article. This is a Twitter thread, and it’s the best one relating to careers I’ve read. So good I saved it as an article. It has so, so many gems, gems like:
If there is a single key to success, it is the trait of being able to make things happen in the world — willfulness, determination, execution focus, not giving up when you hit a roadblock, the ability to solve any problem that comes your way, and self-belief.
Gold. A useful companion to this is Sam’s recent blog post, What I Wish Someone Had Told Me.
How To Know What To Do, by Imade Iyamu
Imade Iyamu and Destiny Ogedegbe are the peak of what I want to achieve career-wise. This is a masterpiece in writing clarity, and it contains insight you can’t find anywhere else. Applying the advice Imade outlines is like standing on the soldiers of giants.
Why You Should Aim For 100 Rejections A Year, by Kim Liao
I’m still struggling with putting the ideas in this article into practice. I’m just like anyone: rejections hurt, especially when you’ve been exposed to hot breakfast from openings you put a significant amount of time and effort into. But the logic is impeccable, and it’s true.
My ego resists mustering up the courage to submit writing to literary magazines, pitch articles, and apply for grants, residencies, and fellowships. Yet these painful processes are necessary evils if we are ever to climb out of our safe but hermetic cocoons of isolation and share our writing with the world. Perhaps aiming for rejection, a far more attainable goal, would take some of the sting out of this ego-bruising exercise — which so often feels like an exercise in futility.
Career Moats 101, by Cedric Chin
Yet another companion article to So Good They Can’t Ignore You. It expands on a crucial point in the book, which is that the most successful careers are founded on a combination of rare and valuable skills. This point is what drives the concept of Career Moats, which Chin defines as:
an individual’s ability to maintain competitive advantages over your competition (say, in the job market) in order to protect your long term prospects, your employability, and your ability to generate sufficient financial returns to support the life you want to live.
The entire blog is special, but this post stands out.
Commit To Competence This Coming Year, by David Hansson
I really delved deep into personal development this year, omo. I’m just realizing it. This is a fairly recent piece, written on the 22nd of December, but it’s really good.
If there’s anything I see juniors often miss, it’s this. Careful, repeated, hell, even obsessive, study of their own work.
Honorable Mentions:
Ask vs Guess Culture, by Jean Hsu; Notes in the Margin and Minor Key, by Rémy Ngamije; Learn In Public, Shawn Wang; Pace Layers, by Lee Byron; $ASML, by MT Capital Research.
Movies and Series
I’ve not been a big film guy, but that changed last year when I had a lot of free time. This year, with my laptop gone for 8/12 months, I also had a lot of free time. I watched a record number of movies this year, but 2022 was probably the best year for watching series.
Let me start with what I did not like: the final season of Sex Education. I’ve watched these characters since 2019, and I’ve come to see their journey as mine. To end it like this was a massive disservice to the growth of the characters (it felt like Otis was worse than he’d ever been, and Maeve just kept going through shit for no particular reason), the ending felt like crap, and it just felt forced. I’ll miss the characters, I’ll miss their stories, and I’ll just form my ending in my head. Whatever a good ending is, this wasn’t it.
Here’s the good stuff:
Daniel Craig’s James Bond
The mark of an excellent action movie, in my opinion, is that the viewer, no matter how old they are, can imagine themselves in the shoes of the characters. This five-movie series did just that. Skyfall is the best spy movie I’ve ever watched (and Raoul Silva is an amazing villain), Spectre has the best soundtrack, and Eva Green is perfection in Casino Royale. Quantum of Solace was subpar, and No Time To Die was unnecessary.
James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, vol. 3
Heart. Fitting ending.
A Silent Voice
Got a lot more into anime this year, and this was the one movie that was there when I felt like shit. At the time, I didn’t see myself in Shoya’s journey, but at the end of the year, I can definitely see it. Need to rewatch.
Anohana
Fuck, I’m never watching anything like that ever again. It’s probably the rawest I’ve felt this year. It took all my toxic masculinity to not cry like a fool after the finale, and I immediately regretted not doing so. I can’t watch it again, I no get the mind, but I’d recommend it.
JJK, Season 2
I started reading the manga this year, but the anime is just built different. I’ll never forgive Akutami for Chapter 236.
Across The Spider-Verse
Honorable Mentions: Nimona, The Worst Person In The World, Margin Call, The Social Network, Barbie.
Music
Seyi Vibes, Hans Zimmer, and Asake (to a relatively lesser extent than the aforementioned two) got me through this year. A few songs I enjoyed listening to, in no particular order:
- Basquiat, by Asake. I played this song too many times. It doesn’t get old.
- Still Don’t Know My Name, by Labyrinth. This is one of those songs where the music video adds much more depth to the song than pure audio.
- Start Again, by Falana.
- Obapluto, by Shallipopi. Heard about him for the first time in September and he somehow was #2 on my Spotify Wrapped at the end of the year.
- Giza, by Burna Boy and Seyi Vibes.
- Bank of America, by Seyi Vibes.
- Writing’s On The Wall, by Sam Smith (carried the entire Spectre soundtrack).
- Something In The Way, by Nirvana. Batman.
- Why Do We Fall, by Hans Zimmer. Carried the entire “The Dark Knight Rises” soundtrack.
- Cornfield Chase, by Hans Zimmer.
- Time, by Hans Zimmer. You may be seeing a pattern here. Hans + Nolan = 🔥🔥🔥
- New Religion, by Olamide and Asake. Better than Amapiano, in my books.
- Lincoln Tunnel, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Heard it while I watched Watchmen (the series) and got hooked.
- I Ain’t Worried, by One Republic. Top Gun: Maverick was so, so good.
- What’s Up Danger, by Blackway and Black Caviar.
2024: Stepping Into The Unknown
2023 was odd and interesting. I don’t know what 2024 will be like (if you do, pls DM me with stock market tips. Transcorp gained 10x this year and I want a piece of that), but I learned a lot about myself in ’23. I learned that I had a much higher ceiling than I had come to believe in recent years, and I established some consistency (even in something as small as Wordle, where I have a 74-day streak). I learned that willpower is absolutely fucking underrated, and being a pest can sometimes be useful. I always knew conceptually that rejections don’t equate to failure, but I fully internalized it this year.
Next year? I want to make money. I always want to make money. But I also want to write more, work more, read more, and continue to build that weird collection of skillsets people say I have.
Onwards and upwards, I guess.
¹ IYKYK.
² I struggled with picking a segment for TIS. It’s just one of those areas that combine school, career and relationships. But I’ve gone with putting it in the school section. No TIS without UNILAG.
³ Minimum performance level. Think of it like replacing a 4/10 player with a 6/10 player.
⁴ Maximum performance level.
⁵ Except Fixed Income. I don’t know what those people are on, but I want no part of it.
⁶ Except for that two-week stint in FGC Ijanikin in JSS1. That doesn’t count.
⁷ Research meetings. I’m a midnight person, so it’s not a big deal, but I’m the “sit in a spot and work” type of night person, not the “move around from Point A to Point B type of person.
⁸ Why is it empty? Because nothing happened, just as intended. All targets were met. We go again in 2024.
⁹ I remain unconvinced by the concept and the practice of networking, but it’s a necessary evil.
¹⁰ Suffering builds character, they say.
