KWANGA

I AM a CREAT-ive

[nduka omeife @ndukaomeife]

Reading books taught me that before you become rich in your pocket, you must become rich in your mind.

Around 2007, I watched The Secret. It changed something in me. I later bought over 100 copies of the book and CDs and shared them with others.

Then I kept reading, Napoleon Hill, Wallace D. Wattles, The Greatest Salesman in the World, Robert Greene, Bill Bartmann' Billionaires secret to success, Jim Rohn many others.

Yet while reading about success, I was still failing in business. I lost millions. Factories closed. I borrowed money. I started again and again.

But the books were quietly building the person who would eventually build the business.

They changed how I saw money, failure, selling, value creation and opportunity.

Years later, my yoghurt business recorded sales running into billions of naira.

Reading didn't make me rich because books contain magic.

Reading changed my thinking.
My thinking changed my actions.
My actions changed my life.

Read. Think. Act. Fail. Learn. Repeat.

[KWANGA @Denzelkwanga]

@9k_aris @_Nana_Kc 😄😄😄

[Karun Pal @karunpal]

If you want to have original ideas, learn to do nothing. Literally. Sit with boredom. No phone. No music. No podcast. No endless scrolling. Just you and your thoughts. At first, your brain will hate it. It will look for stimulation. Distractions. It will tell you that you’re wasting time. Sit with the discomfort anyway. When you stop consuming other people’s ideas, your mind finally gets the space to create its own. If you never turn off the noise, you'll live and die an echo.

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

Not only were kids reading 700 and 800-page Harry Potter books in a single day, they were writing, without AI, fan-fiction that frequently surpassed the length of those books. The fact that people can no longer believe this happened only shows how steep our decline has been.

[Uchenna. @Favour_Ogazi]

It’s strange and beautiful to realise that you can be simultaneously proud of how far you have come and aware that you have barely scratched the surface of who you could become.

[Okong' Okuna @XivTroy]

I recently did an experiment. I cheated in a monopoly game. I wanted to examine the extent to which undue advantage such as embezzlement/inheritance influenced economic outcomes relative to chance and initiative. I ended up building 2 hotels before the others could build a house (CAPITAL ACCUMULATION).

It got to a place where, I stopped accepting rent from players that landed in the hotels. I instead offered to wipe away their debt in exchange for their land, which was sometimes only a quarter of the debt owed (ASSET-PRICE INFLATION).

The other players could not outbid me for the land as the owner owed me too much (BARGAINING/MARKET POWER).

The more land I got, the more I built. I was barely using the money I had. If I landed in their owned properties, the other players were more willing to overlook what I owed them because after every round I awarded each of them about $50 just to keep them in check (SOCIAL CAPITAL).

And every time I did, I sang about how generous I was (POLITICAL LEGITIMACY).

By the end of it, I owned all land. Had 5 hotels, across 5 prime lands (ASSET CONCENTRATION).

I came to the conclusion that unless by some miracle, you cannot outwit a flawed economic system. Undue advantage has a better compounding influence on positive economic outcomes than initiative and chance (OUTLIERS).

[KWANGA @Denzelkwanga]

@AskAaronLee Aaaall is weeeelll

[Rakgadi Ntebo @Ntebo_Mo]

Related, it sucks how unemployment can literally end friendships. Sometimes it’s not intentional. The unemployed friend hardly shows up coz showing up costs money, while the employed friend naturally spends more time with other employed friends. Eventually, the distance grows.

[_Jemutai Yegoh @Narah_Yegoh]

I have reached my peak application phase cause I just wrote
“I realize I am writing after the stated deadline. I am writing nonetheless because I would rather make a considered case for why I belong at your organization than let a date determine whether I ever make the attempt.”

[smoothie @shedrinkswater]

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they speak of love, especially when they say they do not want it, or that having a partner will become a blockage to the life they are meant to build. More often than not, it is an ideology of love constructed from trauma, disappointment, fear, and the slow humiliation of believing that what they truly desire may never arrive.

Everyone wants love. At the end of the day, when the world has gone quiet and you are lying in your bed with nothing left to perform, to prove, to distract yourself with, the body still seeks warmth, connection, recognition, and the unbearable tenderness of being known by someone who chooses to stay. People deny this and call it freedom because they have started thinking that hopelessness is enlightenment.

Love does not block growth. Love reveals where growth is still required. It will not always arrive as softness, ease, and gilded reassurance. Sometimes it will come as confrontation, rupture, discomfort, patience, repair, and the excruciating demand to remain present with another human being when every wounded part of you wants to run. You have to stay long enough to discover what the love is trying to make of you.

The right love gives you a centre from which you can enter the world with greater courage. You become more free to explore, build, create, risk, and become, because you are no longer moving through life with that quiet, subterranean ache of wondering whether anyone truly loves you, or whether all your striving is only an elaborate attempt to distract yourself from the absence of home.

When you are loved properly, the question of what you are working so hard for begins to answer itself. You are building for a life that can hold love, protect it, honour it, and make it easier for both of you to exist inside the world.

Those who have truly loved know this intimately. Love is one of the most brutal, sacred, and transformative forces through which you truly grow.

[Yehgha @yaygha]

Allow me give a not so brief history lesson so we can all understand what is going on here.

For much of European history, pale skin was a marker of status. An elite woman was supposed to have skin that had barely been under the sun because pale skin signalled she did not work outdoors.

In a world where most people spent their lives labouring under the sun to survive, avoiding the sun was evidence of wealth.

The rich could stay indoors and send the poor outside to work for them. This is why they wore gloves and wide hats when outside. It is also where the term blue blood comes from; rich families who never did physical labour and thus were rarely in the sun had skin so pale the veins underneath would show.

So to be tanned meant to do outdoor labour, and to do outdoor labout meant to be poor.

But as the industrial revolution came around and factories multiplied, the poor who had previously laboured outdoors were pulled indoors to work in factories, workshops and later offices rather than under the sun

And their skin became paler.

Now if the poor could become pale skinned simply by working indoors, then pale skin could no longer communicate wealth, so the elite abandoned the old signal and switched to a new one: tanned skin.

Because now it meant only they had the time and money to lie in the sun while everyone else worked indoors.

Pale meant rich, tanned meant poor. Then pale meant poor so the rich did a 180 and went back to tanned.

That is exactly the same thing that is happening here. Wiresless ear buds generally, and airpods specifically meant rich. Wired earphones meant poor.

Then when everyone could afford wiresless ear buds and their replica knock-offs, wireless meant poor and the 'rich' who differentiated themselves with wiresless in the past, switched back to wired.

It is not because they "got tired of charging their wireless earbuds"

Away from the history lesson, the broader explanation is that humans crave to be seen. We do not want to go through life unnoticed. This is why we do only spend money to enjoy ourselves, we spend money so that others can see us spending money.

And one of the most common, socially acceptable ways of doing so is through the things we wear. For example. We do not spend money on watches that could buy a car so we can check the time. We spend that money so others can see that we spent money.

The point of the spending is the spending witnessed.

And with that, we signal that we are high status and that signal brings us attention .

But this flex has a fundamental flaw in the sense that the moment the status signal works, those below begin to copy it until it loses its utility.

So what happens to a status marker when those below can afford it too?

Simple; those above abandon it.

In conclusion, The things we buy, wear, drive, or use are driven by 1) the desire to belong and 2) the desire to stand out.

You want to look like the people above you to feel among, but you also want to look different from the people below you to stand out.

So the rich adopt a signal
The wannabe middle class copies it
And the majority poor copy the wannabes

And once the signal becomes widespread enough, it stops doing the job it was intended to do. Then the elite abandon it and look for a new one.

Sometimes they move to something more expensive or difficult to acquire. Sometimes they move to something obscure enough that the wannabes and the poor can't even grasp it. And sometimes, as with tanning and wired earphones, they do a 180 and move in the opposite direction.

It happens with clothes, bags, earphones, restaurants, language and so on.

The rich keep moving. The middle class keeps chasing, and the poor keep copying. And the markers of status keep changing. And on and on and on it goes.

[Mr Sergio @samson_samsen]

This is the outcome of modern parents seeing in their children an opportunity to parent their younger selves.

It is the outcome of the “my kids will not have to go through any of what I went through” parenting strategy.

I have said before that one mistake modern parents make is that they are parenting their past, not their child.

They react to what hurt them, to their childhood lack, not what the child needs.

Their decisions are driven by memory, not reality.

Parents should be able to Separate their story from the child’s.

To avoid falling into this psychological blind spot, a parent should do the following:

- Before reacting, ask yourself, “Is this about my child or my childhood?"

- Delay emotional decisions. Respond later, not instantly.

- Write down three things your child actually needs (discipline, patience, effort) and stick to them daily.

Your child is not your younger self.
Parent the child in front of you.

[WARÚHIÚ @kamauwaruhiu]

I avoid advising young people on marriage. I can't tell you how to deal with a wife unless you are going to marry mine.

I am also a first time husband going through marriage blind and feeling my way around. The only person you should seek advice from is her ex-husband. Even her father never got to experience her as a wife.

This doesn't stop many online gurus from publishing books with a manual, like all women are from the same production line. Some things I hear I have never experienced. I am just left to add "wueeeh" and "Sasa utado?".

This same principle applies to parents. I see it a lot online. People even saying the final step to becoming a man is understanding your father.

Some people were brought up by sadists. I have heard cases of fathers defiling their daughters. When you tell a man in order to become a man he has to understand his rapist father, what are you saying?

Not everyone grew up with good parents. We can't put them in the same basket.

But fear not. On this I have a solution that works all the time. The solution is healthy distance.

Unlike marriage where distance means divorce, distance from toxic parents is medicine. You heal and let them marinate in the juices of their own making . This still doesn't stop them from being parents.

We are all going through this life the first time together. Unless you know what you are doing, tupunguze mawaidha potovu.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

A psychologist spent 10 years studying 400 people who called themselves lucky or unlucky. Then he handed each one a newspaper and asked them to count the photographs inside.

Unlucky people took about two minutes. Lucky people took seconds.

Page 2 held a half-page ad in giant type reading "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." A few pages later, another one offered a cash prize to anyone who told the experimenter they'd seen it.

The lucky group spotted both messages. The unlucky group counted straight past them, so locked onto the task that half a page of bold print became invisible. When Richard Wiseman asked afterward if they'd noticed anything unusual, they said no.

His personality data explains why. Unlucky participants scored roughly twice as high on anxiety, and tension narrows attention until the unexpected gets filtered out entirely. Lucky participants also varied their routes to work, talked to more strangers, and broke their routines on purpose, which multiplies how much unexpected material crosses their path to begin with.

Wiseman ran one more test that proves the mechanism. He surveyed 700 lottery players. Self-described lucky people were twice as confident they'd win. Their winnings matched everyone else's exactly. Feeling lucky does nothing in a game of pure chance, because there's nothing to notice.

So he built a "Luck School" that trained unlucky people to behave like lucky ones. Participants reported lasting gains in fortune, confidence, and even health.

The luck was sitting in plain sight on page 2, in type half a page tall. The only variable was who looked up.

[aether @bluewdrift]

What you do in private always shows in public. Reading shows in conversations. Your workouts show in your physique. Your diet shows in your energy. Your discipline shows in your confidence. Your focus shows in your results. You are what you cultivate when no one is watching.

[Max The Airbnb Guy🏡 @Maxtheairbnbguy]

Your partner shows up for you. They communicate. They respect you during conflicts. They get you a gift, even if it is small. They bring you a flower bouquet, even if it is not the massive arrangement you saw on Instagram. They plan dates. They spend money they do not have in this inflation ridden economy just to see you smile. That is not the bare minimum. That is love. Real, tangible, everyday love.

But the Internet and capitalism have made us insatiable. We have been trained to compare. To measure. To always want more. Corporations have profited off our dissatisfaction. They have shown us bigger bouquets, more expensive gifts, picture perfect relationships, and we have internalized the lie that if our love does not look like that, it is not enough. We have forgotten that the highlight reel is not real. We have forgotten that the people posting those perfect moments are not living perfect lives. They are just curating & larping.

And now, we have become so ungrateful that we use the words "bare minimum" to describe acts of genuine love. We have convinced ourselves that appreciation is a sign of settling. That gratitude means we are accepting less. But that is not true. Gratitude is the secret to contentment. Appreciation is the foundation of love. Comparison is the thief of joy. Please, learn to appreciate the person in front of you. See them. See their effort. See their love. That person is giving you their best. And their best deserves to be seen, valued, and cherished.

Do not let social media steal your joy. Do not let comparison make you blind to the love that is already in your life. Open your eyes. Open your heart. And appreciate what is right in front of you. It's worth more than any curated image you will ever see on a screen.

[Chetuya Chinagolum @Chetuyachinago]

This is precisely the tragic reality that W.E.B. Du Bois painfully discovered during the final stages of his intellectual life. The Black individuals who somehow manage to accumulate personal wealth, corporate power, and elite social status do not . . 1/n

[Incentivising @incentivising]

Game theory explains why working harder inside a broken system is the worst response to that system. Because a system is never truly broken. It's just producing exactly the outcomes its own incentive structures were designed to produce, whether intentional or not. Working harder inside this system increases your output in the payoff matrix, but it simply won't change the actual structure of the system's matrix. Thus, the correct response is not more effort. Instead, you must aim to identify whose interests the current structure serves and position yourself in favor of those interests rather than against them. Change the game, or play the game that is actually being played. Either way, you must stop optimizing for the game you wish it to be and start acting realistically.

[Marvel Studios @MarvelStudios]

David Jonsson is your new Black Panther.

Black Panther 3, directed by Ryan Coogler, arrives in theaters December 15, 2028.

[purple🍃✨ @doseofpurple_]

I want you to be delusionally optimistic about your life. Gaslight yourself into thinking you're smart enough to figure something out. You will. Eventually, you'll figure it out.