Not every good life, successful career, luxuries etc is directly correlated to hard work. And not every miserable life is a result of laziness. Those at the top may have been the beneficiaries of luck while those at the bottom maybe victims of risk. Not that I despise hard work and every bit of quality life that you deserve, but I want to account for the causation of our differences in the quality of our lives and what we have.
After college education, some of you were maybe lucky enough to be employed immediately, not because you were the most qualified. There might have been others who had unrivalled qualifications and experiences, and deserved utmost consideration more than you. But, what made the difference was your network; parents, uncles, friends, cousins, politicians, godfathers etc easily influenced for you. I am not envious of your achievements, but this is the reality of the capitalistic systems.
It is easy to delude ourselves that some of the best moments in our lives have been entirely determined by the quality of the inputs we took (though it might be true). But, this is not always the case. How many times have you had high quality inputs leading to miserable outcomes? How many times have you consciously made bad decisions resulting in the best, unprecedented outcomes? You can count some of them. It is easy to attribute poor incomes to not enough efforts; and our brilliance to the best. However, there might have been other factors outside your control that influenced your successes or failures.
For 4 years, I pitched ideas to different mainstream media but none hardly responded to my emails. Even the few who replied didn't approve my pitches because I wasn't polarising enough to earn a badge of their gutter press. I kept shifting goalposts while looking down upon myself for not working hard enough to reach their 'professional level.' But, I didn't realize that their system was designed against the independent me yearning to write unbossed and unbiased posts. Fast forward, Substack, with its decentralized economic model, offered me luck that I badly needed to write for a cause and jumpstart my passionate work for Africa. Nowadays, I write joyfully without the anxiety of being censured and dismissed unceremoniously.
Tony Elumelu, a Nigerian businessman and a philanthropist best exemplifies the role of luck in his journey to the top. Rose to being branch manager manager at 26 years old and ultimately the CEO of the United Bank of Africa (UBA) at the age of 34 years, he confessed that he wasn't the most intelligent or the most hardworking, but luck played a part in his quick corporate ladder. When he retired in 2010, he dedicated the next phase of his after-corporate life to democratizing luck to reach the excluded. Since then, Tony Elumelu has funded more than 15000 early-stage startups, with an initial seed of nonrefundable capital of $5000 for each entrepreneur. Over 13 years, 1.5 million young Africans in 54 countries have been democratized with luck.
Women too need decentralized structures, devolving knowledge, experiences, capital, network, etc to where they work. This model writes off rigid economic models stiffling women's economic power and replacing it with flexible, easy-to-plug in model at the bottom. Women, in their make-shift structures, do not need to feel inferior to get help. Devolved economic engines let them work hard and meet luck where they are. In Mamas Impact, decentralized systems place women at the core of the policy and capitalize on expanding their self-esteem, leadership, confidence, communication, etc to be lucky through hard work.
You have witnessed that in centralized systems, it is not a war that you can easily win but it is easy enough to fail. The more you work hard, the more they put you in nearly impossible situations, forcing you to subordinate the system, quit, or die trying again and again. Be it conomic, political, social, etc, these systems influence our everyday way of living, whether you work hard or not. As a writer and just like anybody else, I needed a decentralized economic model that prove that the more I work hard, the more I am likely to be lucky. That means the odds of luck in decentralized systems may fall in my favor with ease and with little input.
Going forward, I don't intend to toil in a system modelled to suffocate me and enrich the few at the top. In the decentralized, the power shifts from the center to the individual components of the network. Actors generate value that spill over to reach everyone who works hard. There isn't trust-controlling authority, but interconnected nodes of activities originating from every member and growing the network. This grants me more freedom in my actions and less friction in my path to meet luck. I shift from who I know to what I know to luck myself. And this is how you and I can engineer our own luck from even the least efforts.
Thank you for subscribing to the Startup from Africa. Like, comment, and restack!
Asante @Patrick Muindi for restacking
Great essay, Edwin. You are so right. It does take as much luck to reach your goals as hard work and education. Being born at the tight time in the right place makes a lot of difference. I was fortunate to have been born during the great depression. By the time I was ready to go to college, I was in California, I was luck to get a job teaching in the District where I taught - my whole life has been the fortune of being in the right place at the right time with the right skills. The young people in America today are faced with low wages, no security and a snowballs chance in hell of ever owning their own home. Mostly due to the uncontrolled greed of the top 1% of the wealthy.