A Setback That Became a Start

“You can do anything you put your mind to.”

That statement has always been an anchor for taking a step or reaching a milestone. I graduated as the top of my class in secondary school, and it felt like proof. Then I failed Physics in WAEC, a single grade that jeopardised my plan to study Medicine, and with it, the future I had already mapped out in my head.

The exam itself wasn’t the hard part; what came after was. I stopped trusting my own judgment in small and quiet ways, putting off decisions I would normally have made without a second thought. I let other people and circumstances decide things I used to decide myself. I was not confronting the uncertainty; I was waiting for it to pass. Somewhere in that waiting, I lost some faith in my own ability to make things happen.

Looking back on these months at Ikore, I find myself returning to a simple question: what does it actually take to do?

My university years had already given me a partial answer, one I have carried ever since: action begins with thinking, envisaging the task, writing out the steps, and executing. But it was at Ikore that I learned the piece I was missing. Knowing why you are doing something is what turns a goal from a distant outcome into work you can break down, approach intentionally, and complete one step at a time.

The lesson under the lesson: understanding has to come before execution.

During a brainstorming session on one of the projects going on at Ikore, AgDiL, I saw this play out directly. Identifying problems was easy, sitting with one long enough to find a real solution was not. That extra time given to understanding the problem birthed a solution, and that was what eventually reshaped the creditworthiness tool, weighted scores, and simplified questions into something MSMEs could actually use.

Building a beneficiary-allocation framework tested the same instinct in a different register. The first version came together quickly and looked complete. It only became useful once I had spent real time with each indicator, what it measured, why it mattered, and how it held up across four different states.

Proposal writing sharpened the point further, from a third direction. A budget line or a paragraph can look finished and still be wrong because the numbers or the framing have not yet answered the question a reviewer will ask. Getting a proposal ready has meant going back into the work, questioning my own assumptions, and asking reviewers to press on the reasoning before I could trust it.

I have since found this pattern everywhere I look for it: when something does not make sense at first, the answer is rarely to push through anyway. It is to ask, sit with it a little longer, and keep asking until the reasoning is actually clear. I have grown more comfortable asking questions early because not asking them tends to just relocate the work and multiply it later.

My reason for “doing” in university was simple: graduate with good results. At Ikore, the reasons are more varied: credibility and access for MSMEs, a fair and defensible way to select programme beneficiaries, and a proposal that can survive genuine scrutiny. The work looks different. The principle underneath it does not: knowing why changes how you do.

A few months ago, I thought doing was mainly about action. Now I see it as thinking, understanding, asking, acting, and trying again; sometimes quickly, sometimes only after returning to the work more than once.

You can put your mind to something. That’s only the beginning. What comes next is the work.