The Conversation

Six years ago, during a hot summer afternoon, I played basketball with a long-time friend from my middle school days. We had only been playing for about half an hour, but the heat was unbearable, so we paused to chat.

We sat on our basketballs within the grass at the edge of the court. Amidst the turmoil of ongoing games and visitors at the park, we exchanged updates on our lives. We haven’t seen each other for nearly two years.

My friend, who was studying to take the Medical College Admission Test at the time, informed me that he had…

Part 1: a personal story about enabling change

A few years ago, I took a gap year after college and returned to the Togolese Republic, my home country.

Among the multitude of things I missed, street food ranked high.

The next morning after my arrival in Togo, I walked around the neighborhood and spotted a few street food stalls. I ended up basing my decision on two criteria: the food I missed the most at the time and the distance from my house.

Luckily, there was a woman who sold rice and beans just a minute away from where I lived. When I was in Lomé (the capital)…

If you search the phrase “how to save money” on Google, you will likely get well over 4 billion hits. That’s a lot of data to sift through; a whole lot of advice from everyone and their grandma; and similar tips packed differently and in different flavors.

The truth is, you don’t need to abide by a mountain of personal finance advice to start saving and fast-tracking your retirement or increasing your cash flow. There’s so much information out there that you may drown yourself in a pool of advice.

My first professional internship job offer was in my junior year of college. It happened during a fast-paced campus recruiting season. I wasn’t prepared for it.

It went something like this

I walked into the business school’s main building and plowed my way through a sea of figures in blue and gray attire.

I confidently climbed the stairs leading directly to the waiting area of the interview hall.

“Hello, my name is Jeff and I am here for an interview with XXX.”

The student at the reception desk checked the list of scheduled interviews on that day.

I presented my student ID, filled out a…

I truly believe that regret is such a wasted emotion. For this reason, I have very little of it. The way I see it, once an undesirable event occurs, the only thing I could do is minimize or eliminate — if possible — the chance of that event repeating itself. I dislike feelings of regret and that’s exactly why I do my best to not worry about undesirable outcomes.

It turns out that I’m not the only who views life decisions this way. Jeff Bezos also thinks the same. Well, sort of.

In a 2001 interview, Jeff Bezos explained why…

Two years into moving back to the African continent, some things are becoming clear:

Living in Africa and reading about it can be quite different.

One of the discoveries I’ve made is the complexity of entrepreneurship. Don’t get me wrong: entrepreneurship has never been easy anywhere. In most countries on the continent though, it is a herculean undertaking.

Still, if you’ve been getting fed African entrepreneurship news via media outlets and social media, you’d think everyone and their grandma are making a killing being entrepreneurs in Africa.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It seems some leaders are championing…

I must admit: college was a great experience for me. I acquired broad knowledge and I learned self-discipline. But, some courses were and remain useless to me. I also met really brainy people and some truly strange ones.

Life after college, however, is much more different. University life doesn't quite prepare for some cutthroat realities of the world. After some time roaming the school of hard knocks, these are some of the things I came to grasp with.

Your diploma can only get you so far

No one really cares about your GPA or your alma mater a few years after school.

A few years after college, I…

In a past article, I explained how an ordinary person who has a 9-to-5 job potentially spends about 24% of weekly time at work. While it was good food for thought, we didn’t explore an important element of work: productivity.

Economists rely on productivity indicators to measure GDP growth, living standards, and even economic competitiveness. But here, we’ll focus on workplace productivity which is essentially the amount of output produced per X amount of time. In layman’s term, labor productivity measures the amount of work you get done after, say, one hour. …