Author Archives: Calabarboy

Career Development, Education, issues, Personal Development

Overcoming Digital Overload: Tools vs. Productivity

A few years ago, I was on a working trip in Marrakech with a few friends. I recall Bunmi Ajilore using the term “attaining singularity” as we debated the future of technology and its role in human society. We were discussing the rapid convergence of artificial intelligence toward a superintelligence that would eventually surpass human capability.

At the time, we couldn’t have imagined the reality of the last two years. AI has become the defining concept of our era. Yet, along with the rapid development of these models comes a flood of resultant tools, each arriving with the same promise: increased productivity.

Today, however, the common challenge is sifting through this abundance. We face immense pressure to learn every new platform and sharpen on-demand skills for the marketplace. For a creative like me, someone with diverse interests who dabbles in various ideas, I find myself constantly testing, learning, and discovering new tools daily. Added to that, in my research work for a major tech company, there is a constant demand to not just use, but provide feedback on, these new capabilities.

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Career Development, Education, issues, Personal Development, Spiritual

The Gifts of Stagnation: Lessons in Stillness

Last month, I invested some time in a call to a dear friend who described his life as “running on a treadmill in quicksand.” He had a great job, a stable income, and by external measures, was succeeding. Yet he felt profoundly stuck. The promotion he’d been promised kept getting delayed. The side project he was passionate about had stalled. Even his extracurricular activities felt routine rather than invigorating.

His story echoed dozens of similar conversations I’ve had recently. An entrepreneur friend whose business has plateaued after years of growth. A talented writer who hasn’t published anything for a while. A director-level professional who knows she needs to leave her company but can’t seem to take the first step.

What strikes me about these conversations is how quickly we often leap to solutions. New job. New city. New strategy. New relationship. We treat stagnation like a problem to be solved rather than a message to be heard. We become so focused on movement, any movement at all, that we miss what the stillness is trying to teach us.

Our culture has conditioned us to fear stillness. We equate motion with progress, busyness with importance, and constant growth with success. When we feel stuck, our first instinct is to identify the blockage and remove it.

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Education, Health, issues, Politics, Spiritual

Courage Isn’t Enough

My dad often chastised me with potent words and phrases so weighty that I had to research their meaning. An example is a quote from William Shakespeare’s Henry IV, where the character Falstaff declares, “The better part of valour is discretion.” He would hammer those words into my consciousness whenever I displayed a passionate but narrow focus on accomplishing something, often at the expense of other important matters.

Dad thought of my teenage passions as unguided fervour, lacking the balancing virtue of wisdom. I disagreed most of the time, but now I have come to deeply appreciate what he meant. Looking back, I recognize the many near-tragedies that would have befallen me had it not been for the power of circumspection. Yes, valour (courage and bravery) has opened many doors for me, leading to numerous victories. But the better side of the story is that discretion taught me which battles to fight and how to win them.

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