I have always lived with this tension between honesty and performance. To an extent, we all do.

I don't know exactly when it started, but it has always been there subconsciously, colouring my work and my lived experience. I think it comes from my experience growing up in the church environment, as the first born son of pastors.

There was a lot that was great about that and I wouldn't change it for anything. The community, the camaraderie with friends at Youth Group. But there is an insidious side effect that I've had to wrestle for years. That tension between honesty and performance.

But it's not just church, it is everything - society, school, work, culture. There are the unspoken rules, the expectations, the structures. The systems that punish you for stepping out of line, for daring to be different, to be you.

The Nigerian cultural context I grew up in was one that emphasised a deference to authority, a respect for elders, a sometimes hyper-conservatism.

So I learned to perform. I learned to fear being seen.

I learned to act a certain way to get along, get approving smiles and nods. I shared enough to seem open, but not the dangerous truth, the one that could get me in trouble. I desperately tried to be who I thought I should be. Who they want me to be.

I wore masks hoping that one day they would become my face.

…

I started blogging about 16 years ago. Fresh out of college, burnt out from a lifetime of trying to perform and conform to expectations that were literally killing me - I was depressed and suicidal - I was finally learning to radically accept myself, to break the rules. To embrace my sincerity and truth, wherever it might lead me. I had rebelled against this perpetual pressure to perform, and I was drunk on the freedom of saying exactly what I thought.

I wrote about life, and philosophy, and ways of being. It was a raw freeform exploration of ideas, sometimes universal, sometimes personal, sometimes taboo. I wanted to discover and document.

Who I was. What the meaning of life was. How I should live.

I have always loved self-help. There is definitely a through-line from preachers to motivational speakers. So, naturally I gravitated towards writing that sort of content. And I thoroughly enjoyed writing about that. I was learning, applying and sharing.

Even though I started with a raw honest voice, the need for performance crept back in, this time wearing secular clothes.

I wanted to sound credible. I wanted to grow. I hoped to become a name in the space. So I muted my voice, I conformed. I wrote like 2017 Medium (it was 2017 and Medium was all the rage). I wrote in numbered lists, with the motivational closings, in a voice that made it seem like I had it all figured out.

I lost the spark that made me unique.

And soon, I burnt out, running out of things to say, feeling trapped by this narrow niche I had chosen for myself.

In my work, the same tension exists. There is the work I think they would like. The design they have conditioned me to make. The one they usually emphatically accept. And then there's the work I want to do, the things that call to me. The level of design I want to make, the concepts I want to explore. The ones they usually reject, the ones they don't understand.

So over and over, I am pulled between both poles. I create from a place of honesty, then retreat to the safety of conformity.

…

There is something I always say to my friends (more a reminder to myself) - 'be yourself, and your people will find you'. It is always easier said than done.

The core of my writing and thinking is about knowing yourself and being yourself. How to create a life that is true to you, how to live intentionally, how to create a life by design.

How to become fully yourself when the world - family, friends, society, culture, the church, the business world, the creative industry, the social media algorithms - keeps offering you masks that almost fit.

The core of my work is helping clients understand themselves, understand what they are really trying to do with their brands and helping them express that truth - in identity, in web environments, in content.

How to create a brand identity that resonates with themselves as founders and with their customers.

I have always kept these two things separate. Writing on life and the process of becoming, on one platform and branding and design on another. But they are all really about the same thing - discovery of a core truth and the courage to express it.

Understanding yourself, expressing yourself. Understanding your brand, and expressing it. Honestly, boldly. A person is only as authentic and magnetic as the extent to which they live their truth. A brand is only as authentic and compelling as the extent to which it embraces and delivers on its truth.

Whenever we get stuck in performance over creative honesty, we deny our lives and our work the richness of the fullness of our being. This tension, this cycle of creative honesty and retreat, has made me brilliant sometimes and meh other times. It has helped me create many remarkable things that never saw the light of day.

I'm kind of over it.

…

I have a fear of being seen. I think it's because it feels a bit cringe. Also, it does not feel nice to be seen and then misunderstood, or seen and rejected. It is safer to create from truth in private if lucky, but most likely, just in our minds. Our dreams buried in a sea of 'what-ifs'. It is harder to create honestly in public, in the stream of the algorithm.

But I want to create, and I want to succeed doing it, from a place of truth.

To create and share the way I see it, instead of performing towards some external idea of success.

I will allow myself to be seen for better or worse.

I am not hiding anymore.

…

I started this Substack to start afresh on a new platform. To share my writing with an audience, and hopefully as a funnel to my branding studio.

But all I've posted is what I thought I should be posting - things I am learning and working through, but in a voice that is not quite my own. And it has held it back.

So now, I am just going to write… like my life depends on it.

Not how I think I should sound, like a 'professional' studio, or a guru, or an expert. I will write as I think. I'm just a person, living, grinding, creating, trying to figure this thing out.

This is my space to think aloud, about the intersections between life, authenticity, identity, creativity, communication, business, systems, design. It will be a bit messy and chaotic sometimes, highly structured and precise other times. It will be profoundly deep sometimes and profoundly dumb (in the dad joke kinda way). It will be about anything and everything. It will be me.

I'll write about my experiences in business, about my clients and what I am learning from them, about philosophy and concepts I am pondering. I'll write about Jujutsu Kaisen if it's the burning thing on my mind when I sit to write.

Maybe that will make me seem less professional, or all over the place. I doubt that though. We'll see.

It's been 16 years of thinking and creating, designing my life, helping others design theirs. I am not where I want to be yet. I am not an expert, not an authority. I am a very keen student, a practitioner, an operator, a seeker, and I have some things to say.

So, if you are out there, like me - cooking, striving, somewhere between the life you are in and the one you want. If you are on the journey to being and creating something that feels authentic to you, this is a space for you.

Let's walk, think and create together.