It’s called Freelancer lol 😂
- no official letter
- they can see other people
- one day they have woken up and hired someone and locked you out of their system
People love the idea of discipline until it demands boredom, repetition, and isolation. But that’s where all leverage is born, away from noise, ego, and distractions. Mastery looks boring until the results speak for you.
I had the most hilarious conversation with my cousin this week about why he left Nigeria.
He was working with a very big guy in Nigeria, and the guy's son, who was once his younger flatmate in school in England, was looking for work abroad after he graduated from the same school instead of coming back home to work for his Dad.
My cousin asked him why he was not coming home. He replied that he was not going to learn anything worthwhile if he did. My guy took a cue and advised himself to do the same thing. LOL!
This was the exact reason why I didn't go into Nigerian banking. I saw too much at the top to aspire to it as a career path. My people were not doing banking; they were doing wheeling and dealing. Nothing different from Agbero work.
I am happy today to see those who once worked with me in places like Google, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, etc. I had to relearn everything from Hallam and working for MTN. How many bankers who are not from Citibank, Standard Chartered, or Stanbic can boast of doing the same?
I was talking to someone in investment banking at one of these local banks, and he was lamenting that they never get to learn anything and the deals are handed down to them. He, too, wanted to go and learn elsewhere.
When the HSBC Capital team came to do the Econet deal in Lagos, I was in the same office with them for a month and learned more than I did throughout my MBA and the time I spent doing stuff for my uncle in major local bank acquisition deals. I practically imposed myself on them and learned a lot.
This is another reason why people leave Nigeria. You don't really grow in your career. In 2002/2003, I worked with some guys from SA doing information security assessments in Nigeria for Econet and FirstBank. They were supposed to come back in 6 months to repeat the assessment, but never did because of inside politics after the fallout of the first assessment.
In those 6 months, the SA team had done 200 other assessments globally; I had done none. I left Information Security after that and focused on ERP and Applications support. I also needed UK experience, which is why I left for Hallam. It made all the difference. In tech, your competition is global. I had learned the hard way before.
The anti-memorization movement has left millions of students unable to think because every elementary operation consumes working memory.
For instance, solving equations feels smooth when basic arithmetic is automatic. It's like moving puzzle pieces around, and you just need to identify how they fit together.
But without automaticity on basic arithmetic, each puzzle piece is a heavy weight. You struggle to move them at all, much less figure out where they're supposed to go.
It’s the same all the way up the ladder of math: from arithmetic, to algebra, to calculus, to all sorts of university-level math and beyond.
Playfulness is the highest intelligence. Watch a genius work, he's joylaughing. Watch a fool work, he's furious. Seriousness is a mask worn by men who fear being seen playing. God made dolphins, puppies, and orgasms. The evidence is in. He wants us laughing.
I’ve been privileged to work on incredible projects these past few months.
Will be sharing highlights + other side explorations over the next few weeks, stay tuned!
In the meantime, I’m looking for my next challenge. If you’ve got something exciting, let’s talk!
China open-sourced a peanut-sized OCR that parses entire 100-page PDFs in one shot..
It's called Unlimited-OCR. Only 3B params. Runs locally.
Every other OCR tool chops your doc into pages and loses the thread. this one reads the whole thing in a single pass.
→ One-shot "long-horizon" parsing (32K context window)
→ Multilingual, out of the box
→ 93% on the standard parsing benchmark (+6 over baseline)
→ <0.11 error rate past 40 pages
→ Runs 100% locally on your own hardware
→ Works with Transformers, vLLM, SGLang, Docker, Ollama, llama.cpp
Traditional cloud OCR (Textract, Google Vision, Azure Doc Intelligence) costs $1.50–$15 per 1,000 pages.
This runs on your machine. For free. Forever.
Baidu built it explicitly to push DeepSeek-OCR one step further. Already at 1.9M downloads on Hugging Face and most people have no idea it exists yet.
100% open source.
Rumi was right when he said Live like the world is rigged in your favor. The second you move like you own it, reality starts bending to prove you right.
I don’t have the language for this yet, but cerebrally, I know that how much I allow myself show interest in someone romantically depends a great deal on how consistently intense they’ve made it clear that they’re interested in me.
This is free advice from an expensive psychologist.
If you're an anxious person, do everything for fun. Go to a job interview for fun. Submit documents for fun. Start a blog for fun. Anxiety feeds on importance. Don't make everything a matter of life and death.
If you think 9–9–6 is extreme, you probably haven't studied the 1800s.
The industrialists who built railroads, steel, and Standard Oil weren't working 40-hour weeks. Their personal operating system was closer to 6 AM–6 PM, six days a week.
Which, if you're doing the math, is just 9-9-6 applied to different hours.
The rejection of that schedule as "hustle culture" is odd, because it repeats itself over and over again. Rockefeller, James J. Hill, Gould, Ford, to present day Musk, Jobs, Dyson, etc. Great founders have spent far more than 40 hours a week building for generations. They just couldn't expect (esp post labor laws in the 30s) their workforce to do the same.
Today we're fortunate to be ABLE to only work 40 hpw; you don't have to choose this life. If you're enjoying a 9-5 W-2 or a lifestyle business, do you.
But if your goal is to build something exceptional, history keeps pointing to the same input: an extraordinary volume of work.
Greatness is purchased with time.