A Nigerian guy asked me if I could help him get a job or at least point him towards places where he could work. I asked him to meet me at the gym, so I’d get off early, and we could talk afterwards.
When he arrived, I showed him a random pavement where visitors could sit for the time being while I found the owner and asked if he could come in. I could see that his ego was bruised. He murmured something about getting money so that he could be allowed into “anywhere.” But that wasn’t all.
I got off early as promised and we walked around. Along the way, he kept asking how much I earned to be able to afford gyms. He made stupid remarks about how I could be related to Elon Musk for being able to spend money easily. It was as though he had forgotten that I didn’t know him, that he needed a job, and that I had voluntarily offered to help him. Instead, his tone seemed to reveal that given what he perceived as my “flex” I am in a great position to “assist” him—which meant giving him money.
This idiot.
As I showed him around, I noticed how resentful he looked. As though other people were somehow evil for enjoying their lives while he was suffering. At some point, he shared something he had gone through—which, unknown to him, I had experienced myself. I then remarked that carrying one’s pain so visibly on one’s face and shoulders is counterintuitive to getting opportunities and building the relationships that might eventually relieve you of that pain.
That upset him. He redirected his resentment towards me. After all, I’m the soft-spoken, baby-faced guy who can afford to use gyms. What could I possibly know about pain?
I kept quiet and chuckled, mostly to ease the air. Like most entitled fools, he somehow thought it was acceptable to be rude to me while simultaneously demanding that I assist him.
But it got me thinking about two things:
1. How many people hold onto their pain not because they have extracted lessons from it that might shape or develop them, but because the pain has become familiar—and because it gives them a sense of strength or superiority over the average person. Some sort of survivor complex.
2. How many unintelligent decisions are driven less by an actual inability to think and more by low self-esteem and the instinctive need to protect one’s ego.
Fascinating.
And this is where the poisonous money-centric culture among Nigerians becomes particularly troubling. You eventually realise that “show me the way” often means, “I want to have what you have, even if I have no idea what to do with it,” rather than, “I admire the mindset that got you there and want to understand how I can cultivate it myself.”
leaving this country would heal me.
and no, this isn’t one of those tweets where the person already has their visa or bought their flight ticket before posting about it.
i genuinely don’t have the money for it yet.
but it would heal me.
A little over two years ago, I came to the U.S. from Nigeria at 14 with a suitcase and an obsession with ML.
Today, I'm 16 and working on Computer Vision + Robotics at @Apple
Recap:
→ Competed in Math & Physics Olympiads from 11y/o
→ Won Rubik’s Cube competitions at my boarding school, with a personal best of 18 seconds
→ Lost my grandma to an undiagnosed illness: one of the reasons I became very interested in AI
→ Graduated high school and started college at 15
→ Researched diffusion models for crystal generation, inspired by drug discovery
→ Prototyped robotic wheelchairs for people with disabilities
→ Worked on an EdTech startup, OpenClaw for Students
→ Joined @Apple this may on the ESCI org!
→ Went to @ycombinator startup and met of the brightest and most ambitious minds
My dream is to build companies that expand what humanity can do with AI
I'll be sharing my journey here! Physical AI, agentic systems, and everything I'm learning along the way.
Spent my day working on some interview questions and then learning about Views, CTAs, the differences between them and their case uses.
When you're learning SQL, you'll be tempted to skip these parts as they mighnt not seem necessary
Please don't.
Day 99987 of explaining to the lay-man that Data analytics is not only the dashboards you see people posting
If na dashboard we need, everybody will be using figma or corel draw to design it, thank you👍
You don’t use SQL just to “get data.”
You use it to:
→ Extract the right data
→ Join different tables
→ Filter noise
→ Aggregate metrics
→ Find patterns
→ Validate assumptions
→ Prepare data for Excel/Power BI
→ Answer business questions
Omo, this AI era… business users are now chasing developers with demos ooo. 😂
From nowhere, one Procurement Officer is scheduling a meeting to demo an AI tool they built.
Wahala don dey. 😂
The gap between “I have an idea” and “Let me show you what I built” is disappearing very fast.
Business users already have something extremely valuable: domain knowledge.
Now AI is gradually giving them execution capability too.
So if your only advantage as a developer is “I know how to code”, you may need to rethink that advantage.
The game is moving towards understanding the business, architecture, integration, security, scalability, data thinking, and knowing whether what was built can actually survive production.
Because at this rate, somebody from Finance will soon enter the meeting and say:
“Good morning everyone. Let me share my screen.” 😭😂
AI don scatter table.