Late 2016 was a pretty dark period for me, so in early 2017 when I got my NYSC letter to serve in Sokoto, I figured God was giving me the chance at a new beginning so I grabbed the opportunity and ignored all suggestions to rework my service to places that people around me at the time figured was a โsaferโ environment to serve and grow.ย
My service was one of the best experiences of my life, but I also had dark and low days. While I was building websites for people to get by, I was doing little to grow myself or my skills at that point. I was coasting through the growth period of my life. This was going on for a while until one day I ran into Unicode developer's Twitter account. I really cannot recall what tweet made me encounter the account, but I remember seeing his picture with some folks and feeling positive vibes and energy from it, so I hit the follow button (this was on my old Twitter account).ย
Then I noticed something amazing he was doing, regularly heโd tweet a string of text with either the exact same message or a variation of it.ย
A new day another opportunity to be world-class.
A new week another opportunity to be world-class.
These tweets often had the rocket and globe emojis appended at the end of the string or before it.ย ๐๐๐๐
It is crazy yeah? Just that tweet lit up a small light in my world. It was like I was in a dark room in the career growth phase of my life and someone was sending sparks of tweets to turn on the menorah in my life.ย
What did I do next, I picked up my computer and started enrolling in every tech tutorial I could find, I mean I was not a stranger to the base rules of programming (I studied Information Technology in college), but I had given up all hope that I could ever understand anything that was being said in that world.ย
Omo, I enrolled inย Feecodecamp.org, restarted Codecademy again, finished the basic tutorials in General Assembly and even finally cracked how bootstrap worked (God I recall how excited I was when I figured out rows and cols and how to code diff layouts in bootstrap 4). I was just consuming stuff with anywhere belle face. JavaScript used me to see cruise sha, so I ran away from Freecodecamp and ended up picking up python (Lol, I still came back to that JavaScript for another beating the following year).
Picking up a python course plays a role in how I ended up in Colab the following year by the way. I would write on my Colab story before the year ends, I promise.ย
Today I am a community grown Product Designer who strives to do good work, give back and improve on his craft daily, I thank God for how far I have come and how far he is willing to take me.ย
Surely, I cannot forget the role amazing people have played in my life also, the Colab family and the design family (I promise to write on this too), yet I would not have been here today if someone did not send out regular strings of text telling me I had a daily/weekly opportunity to be world-class.ย
So today I say this prayer for you Mr Prosper Otemuyiwa.ย
The Lord God will prosper you in all you do, may everything you touch receive life and accelerated growth. May good success be a part of every facet of your life.ย
โฆthou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.
-Joshua 1:8
ย You are amazing bro, I love you. โค๏ธโ๐พ
I'm also hugely inspired by Prosper, true OG. Great Piece.
Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Thanks for this beautiful piece and kind words. I really appreciate this and I am grateful to God for how he has brought you thus far. This is amazing!!!