What’s tomorrow going to be like

Making plans for the future and taking steps to achieve those goals

I've been telling people and seemingly operating with the goals for this year, 2019, being career and personal development. After a chat over dinner with my friends Bright Williams and Adebowale Oparinu, I was made to realize that the goals I chose to work for were describing a career in transport management or further academic studies.

I would have said exactly so, except that those goals were designed for this year and this year alone. That is, they did not contribute to any future plans. In addition, there seemed to be little to no laid out plan for the future.

A stark truth, I must say. Even though those thoughts and desire for what the future should look like for me has crossed my mind, I had made no commitment to any of those desired future. Instead approaching life with a swinging mindset - crossing whatever bridge comes my way. An alternate mindset will be planning the journey and choosing which bridges to cross, which might also include preparing forehand the requirements to cross those bridges.

The goals I decided to pursue were not the problem. The problem was the reasons I pursued those goals. I'll try to articulate the thoughts that went streaming through my head when I made decisions that would inadvertently define my life and options in the future. Clarity, for conviction's or correction's sake.

Late last year, my friend, Sam and I began the early stages of cofounding a startup - TaxiLTE, a service to provide cabs for hire in Akure. You see that tagline, it describes the fact that we're still in the early stages and haven't figured everything out yet. Nevertheless, we ran pilot operations to a handful of customers in December, which took us out of the books and into the field. This will later prove needful for us in defining parameters our business will run on.

This situation though exposed a gap in my understanding of my readiness for life after graduation. Not to mention that I might as well have studied something other than transport management in school. I was not prepared for the real life dynamics of transport management.

Looking away from the even narrower section of road transport, providing private car hire services, I realized I had grossly insufficient knowledge of transport systems. Logistics, rail transport, transport planning, economics of transport, air travel, marine transport but to mention a few specializations and aspects of transport management. I was in for it.

One more year in school and you'll join the about 150,000 students graduating who have more or less trudged through the last four or five years of their lives as zombies. Graduates with nothing to show for it. The employment situation did not immediately concern me, it was the fact that I would just have spent five years in an institution of learning with little to no knowledge or practical expertise gained. It's easy here to throw shade at the education system and claim foul, but hey, you failed yourself first.

Without playing the back and forth of who's right or wrong, I just didn't want to sing the same song. School-taught or not, at the time I would be graduating, I want to have a wealth of knowledge, expertise and accolades to describe my course of study.

Sometime in my second year, I was introduced to programming. My friend, Oreoluwa Fasina had just told me that the web pages I read, Wikipedia was the site in question, were all written/typed by hand. Not just the text I was seeing but those blue links too. I couldn't believe it. A little bit of front end later I met and fell in love with Python. Save my break still in session, I write code for machine learning now.

I have no doubt of the career opportunities in technology and in fact, I've loosely said that post graduation, I would do tech/programming full time. Another opportunity I've grown into, thanks in part to it's popularity and preference to employment, is entrepreneurship. Bright and Wale are a fine set of entrepreneurs, smart and driven. So are a number of people in my circles. Not to mention cofounding TaxiLTE.

Recognizing these aspects of my life as Transprt, Business and Technology, I pretty much paint a picture of things I have interests in and would enjoy doing. I didn't mention research cause, you know, it's at the foundation of everything else.

So how does a goal of suspending programming to focus on academics, research, and business have anything to do with my life and any future plans I might have. Nothing. At least not much.

I wanted to improve my skill and expertise in the field of transport, improve business know-how, and graduate with what I described as a much finer grade than what I have at the moment. That was it. Next thing after that was supposed to be "do what comes to you" best. Whether it was doing business full time or getting a career in tech or transport, what I had in mind for 2020 was "whatever comes." But I had limited time with academics and developing myself for opportunities in the less likely path of transport, I had to seize the moment. You should not get out there and miss an opportunity cause you weren't prepared.

With Mr Wale's notes, it wouldn't be a missed opportunity if it wasn't your business (area of focus). If I had chosen tech to major in, I would not, (not largely anyway), be exposed to opportunities in transport, talk less of missing them. So... what is it you really want to do?

You're right about having one year left in school. It's a fine time to make plans and take steps that would actually contribute to the achievement of those plans. Are you deciding to further your education, then by all means, get a better grade. Is it supposed to be business, your grade won't decide the outcome of business deals or what your customers think of your product. Is it tech? You wouldn't want to take a year's sabbatical when you could drastically improve your skills, barring the results of your test on pipeline transport.

Clarity. Conviction. Correction.
Make plans. Work hard to achieve them. And above all, pray for grace.