The important thing to note here is that it is more about friction and function than expenditure. There is a level of comfort you need to be much more functional, and sometimes (not always) that comfort usually requires spending more or moving to a more expensive place that removes friction.
Yesterday, as I was driving between Ghana and Togo, I realized how important NOT being afraid of the police or criminals appearing suddenly was to my ability to think and be functional. I could also plan my time better with stable infrastructure.
Sometimes you don't need to spend more; you simply have to remove yourself from the source of friction that's preventing the function. That move could even be lateral.
I have told many friends to move away from London to other parts of England after seeing them struggle and achieve limited results. When they did, not only did they save money, but their productivity quadrupled.
In Accra, I moved around a bit. From East Legon, to Ridge, now in the mountains where I found peace and quiet. This place is cheaper than the other places I had lived, but makes me more functional.
I figured the UK and most countries out early enough. When I was in Lagos, I was away from Lagos most weekends and it kept me sane out of the rat race. I saw Late Otunba Balogun doing it every weekend and finally understood why he did and why he lived the way he did for people famously known to be frugal. He was a very functional person.
Many people think hustling and living under hard conditions are virtues in themselves, but they are not. Effort without exponential reward is stupidity. If you pay more and can get more, it is a better way to be on the path to getting even more.
Victor Osimhen: “I left home with a backpack and two pairs of clothes. The one I was wearing, and a green kit in my bag. Lucky green. We drove to Abuja in the oldest car you can imagine, and we arrived at midnight.
The next morning, the sun came up, and I saw 1 million kids with a dream.
Maybe 1 million is an exaggeration, but not by much. There must have been 900 kids waiting outside this stadium. The first day, I didn’t even get on the pitch. The second day, one of the coaches finally pointed at me.
‘Green shirt. Let’s go. You have 15 minutes.’
Just 15 minutes to change my life. I knew that the only way to impress them was to run. So I ran until I was sweating blood.
I ended up scoring 2 goals in 15 minutes.
I thought that maybe I had a chance. But then the coaches got on a microphone, and they addressed the crowd. They called out some names, and I did not hear my name. Everybody started walking to the parking lot.
My dream was dead. I was just about to get in the car when I heard people shouting.
‘Hey! Hey! The guy in green!’
Huh???
I turned around, and some kids were waving to me.
I pointed to my chest, like in the movies.
Me???
I looked behind me.
‘The guy in green!’
Lucky green.
I ran back over to them, and they said, ‘Hey, the coach wants to see you. The team doctor told him you were the guy who scored two goals. Are you the guy?’
I said, ‘I’m the guy!!! I’M THE GUY!!!!’
I went back into the stadium and the doctor was pointing at me and holding up two fingers.
He said, ‘That’s the kid.’
Two fingers saved me.
If the team doctor didn’t do that, I would not be a footballer today. I would probably be at the bottom of a well.”
Truly Inspiring! @victorosimhen9
I have a contrary opinion and you may not like it.
On the surface, this sounds like motivation. In reality, it’s a reckless gamble that often backfires.
When I was starting out, a friend invited me to move into a 3 bed apartment in Banana Island so we could ‘stay motivated’. The rent was over N20million to split, plus N5million service charge. It made no financial sense, so I declined. He moved in with others.
One year later, they couldn’t afford to renew and moved out. That same year, I bought my first house.
Increasing expenses before income is a recipe for poverty. Successful people don’t rent expensive apartments to motivate themselves, they rent them because the money is already there.
This doesn’t mean you can’t change your environment, just not to one that puts pressure on you.
Financial pressure does not motivate you. Infact, it kills your creativity, narrows your thinking, and makes you desperate.
And desperate people make bad decisions.
The correct math is grow your income before you scale your lifestyle.
People debate what “life-changing money” looks like.
₦50M? Obviously life-changing.
₦10M? Still life-changing.
₦5M? Absolutely.
₦500K? For the right person, yes.
Here’s what most won’t admit, any money you don’t currently have can change your life. The number was never the variable. Your situation is.
A man drowning in ₦2M of debt doesn’t need ₦50M to breathe again. He needs ₦2,000,001.
₦500K to someone earning ₦80,000/month is over 6 months salary. That same ₦500K to someone earning ₦5M/month is a rounding error. Same money. Completely different lives.
This is why people get a windfall and go broke within a year. They got the money but never built the mind for it. Life-changing money without life-changing thinking just accelerates the life you already had, good or bad.
What actually makes money life-changing isn’t the amount. It’s whether it removes a constraint you’ve been stuck behind. Whether it buys back time you’ve been selling too cheap. Whether it opens one door that permanently shifts your trajectory.
₦300,000 to the right person at the right time has paid for a skill that tripled their income, covered shop rent while someone built their first business, bought goods that started a distribution chain.
The biggest mistake you would make is waiting for a “big enough” number before they start treating money seriously. “When I get ₦10M I’ll invest.” “When I hit ₦50M I’ll start building.” That’s a poor mindset wearing a future disguise.
The person who knows what to do with ₦500K will know what to do with ₦50M.
The person who wastes ₦500K will waste ₦50M, just louder and faster.
Stop arguing about what amount changes lives. Start asking yourself one honest question:
If the money you needed showed up in your account tomorrow, would you know exactly what to do with it?
If the answer is no, that’s your actual problem. Fix that first. The money will follow.
Scaled from 1,000 to 100,000 users. Here's what broke.
At 5,000 users:
- Single database became the bottleneck
- Added read replicas
At 20,000 users:
- Session storage overwhelmed Redis
- Switched to JWT tokens
At 50,000 users:
- File uploads killed our servers
- Moved to S3 with presigned URLs
At 75,000 users:
- Search became unusable
- Implemented Elasticsearch
At 100,000 users:
- DNS became single point of failure
- Multi-region with Route53 failover
Every stage felt like the final architecture.
None of them were.
Scaling isn't a destination. It's a continuous series of bottleneck discoveries.
2022: No salary increase
2023: No salary increase
2024: No salary increase
2025: No salary increase
2026 :
Employee: Please accept my resignation.
Boss: You’re doing great. Why are you resigning?
Employee: I accepted an offer with a 95% base salary increase and guaranteed yearly salary cycles as long as I meet my performance goals set by my manager.
48 hours later...
Boss: We will match the 95%, please stay, we need your work!
Employee: Unfortunately, it’s too late. Friday is my last day.
Leaders of organizations need to understand their teams’ motivation every month. Every employee is motivated by different things in different periods. Take care of your good employees before it is too late
If you’re not getting promoted every 18-24 months, your company doesn’t rate you.
I say this as someone who spent over a decade working for a company that promotes (if they do) once every 4 years.
The people they want as the CEO or in the executive team are getting promoted on average every two years.
Those are the folks the company truly rate. Everyone else is fodder.
If you’re not ok with this, you can change it. But like everything else, it will come at a cost.
You can job hop. This is the easiest way to do it. Move on if they don’t celebrate you where you’re at. And always ensure you’re taking the next higher step in the new company you’re porting to.
Companies love to shortchange their employees. They bring in a new hire at a higher pay or level who essentially doesn’t know more than the “loyalists.” Be that new hire. Don’t be the loyalist.
You can signify your willingness to relocate. Many careers often go nowhere because people don’t want to go anywhere. You may love Houston but your promotion within the same company may be in Kalamazoo. If you are willing to go to the latter, you can climb the next rung on the ladder.
Don’t accept any excuses they give you for why you’re not getting promoted: “that’s the structure”, “ you’re still learning the job”, “there are others before you on the line” and so on. The moment you concede, you will keep conceding.
Look, people take jobs or remain at jobs for a variety of reasons. The message here is not to leave because of stagnation. The message is to have a clear-eyed assessment of where you stand in your relationship with your company. Don’t let them gaslight you. These days, a patient dog eats no bone at all.
Bad news: AI coding tools don't work for business logic or with existing code, and can't replace domain knowledge or human decision-making. They're just good for boilerplate and simple, repetitive tasks. AGI is not at hand.
https://t.co/GoMnXNVnWJ
Computer science is returning to the hands of physicists, mathematicians, and electrical engineers as LLMs automate much of what is currently defined as software engineering.
The center of gravity is shifting away from manual code writing and toward deeper theoretical, mathematical, and systems-level reasoning.