How to win in your 20s (as an African)

You are 21. You just graduated from the university. In the midst of all of the congratulations, it dawns on you that you are now an unemployed graduate.

The course you studied was for the sake of it. There was no future for you there. You knew it from the start or learned it along the way, yet you still studied it to please your parents.

Now you are out. You do not have a job. If you were lucky, you learnt a skill while in school. But you probably didn’t. You only did what the system wanted: to be a good student. Now you are out hearing words like: you need to learn a skill.

You feel lost. You feel down. You are not sure where to turn.

I was exactly where you are. A year ago I signed out of the University of Lagos. I was in debt, earning one hundred thousand naira per month. Less than a year later, my income is more than 10x that.

I am not more special than you. All I did was develop certain mindsets that left me no choice but to grow.

So if you want to win in your 20s especially as an African, here are 6 mindset shifts you must develop.

1 - You need to be selfish to be selfless.

That is not a normal thing to say in a Nigerian home. The first time I said it out loud, my mum shouted at me. The expectation is set before you even graduate: get a job, then start carrying some expectations in the house. Male children and first-borns know this pressure best. We call it “black tax”.

If you want to make any progress in your 20s, you have to find a way to step out of that.

Here is how I think about it. Picture a container with a hole in its side. Water pours in from the top, but every time the level rises to that hole, it leaks out. You can pour and pour and that container will never be full. That is your 20s if you take on every responsibility that comes your way. You will keep pouring into other people without ever getting full, and the people who needed you will still be standing there waiting.

The moment you are full, there is an overflow, and everyone around you becomes a beneficiary of it. A full container feeds more people than a leaking one ever will. So focus on getting full first. Be selfish now so you can be selfless later.

2- Learn how to figure things out.

The one skill you need above anything else in your 20s is the art of figuring things out. Not knowing. Figuring out.

I have never been the person who sits in a class and learns something properly. I have barely paid for a course in my life. Every skill I have, I picked up by watching. I noticed the gap between what I could do and what the task needed, closed that gap myself, and then started a project around it. YouTube Is my closest friend and more recently AI always asking questions until i understand what to do.

Give me a task, YouTube, and some time, and there is nothing I cannot do. That possibility has exploded since AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT.

This one skill is the single greatest contributor to why I 10x’d my income in under a year. it is not my talent nor a certificate but the willingness to be incompetent in public for a week until I wasn’t.

The world is changing fast. Your biggest advantage is your willingness to learn and reinvent yourself. Your degree won’t protect you. Your willingness to learn will.

3 - Learn to build on the internet.

When I signed out of university, I started something called Project 365: posting every single day for a year. I had no strategy. I was just putting my thoughts, the lessons I was learning, and the things I was still figuring out online.

Somewhere between day 100 and day 150, a man followed me.

Today he is one of my biggest clients.

That never would have happened if I had kept my thoughts in my head. The internet did not reward me for being the smartest person in Lagos. It rewarded me for being consistently visible so that the right person could find me.

The internet is the greatest equalizer this continent has ever seen. You can learn to code in Lagos and work for a company in San Francisco. You can build an audience in Accra and sell to people in London. You can master sales, marketing, design, or development, earn a global salary, and live on local costs.

The default path was to go to school, get a job, retire. That path stopped working a long time ago. Nobody sent you a memo.

The alternative has never been more accessible. That is not a comforting thought. It is a demanding one. There is no longer a shortage of opportunity. There is a shortage of people willing to show up every day for a year before anything happens. I did not know Project 365 would give me a client. I only knew I had to be findable.

4 - Resist the urge to perform for a crowd.

The biggest mistake I see young Africans make is performing for a crowd that is not watching.

You make a little headway and the first instinct is to announce it. Why? You want to collect approval. You want people to see that you are moving. So you post the version of your life that looks like you are making progress.

And now you have to keep it up.

Meanwhile you are just setting a trap for yourself. You set a standard in public that you now have to meet again next week, and the week after, at the expense of what is actually true about your situation. You start dressing for an audience. You start showing a lifestyle you cannot maintain. Your rent is late but your page looks expensive.

You don’t need it. Not one bit of it. The urge will come, and it will feel like ambition. It isn’t. It is fear of being invisible while you are still small.

Keep your head down and do the work you are supposed to be doing. Let the results speak for you.

5 - Question the beliefs you inherited.

The world you choose to see creates the world you see and sadly the world you see has been shaped by world views designed to keep you small. I will explain what i mean.

I grew up believing rich people were evil.

Every nollywood movie back then, the narrative was that to get rich you either need to be evil, corrupt or do some voodoo magic sacrifice. It got amplified in the conversations even in the real world. It always felt like rich people couldn’t be proper Christians. The statement that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God did not help either.

So whenever I met a wealthy man I would smile, shake his hand, and somewhere underneath i had concluded that he was probably corrupt. I did not know I was doing it. That is what makes a limiting belief crazy. It shapes your choices and calls itself your personality.

I felt it the most when i started working for money. I was charging less than I was worth and told myself I was being reasonable. I was not being reasonable. I was being afraid. A part of me genuinely believed that wanting more money was dirty and evil, that asking for it made me the man in the film. I was undercharging for my services. I did not want to become the villain I was raised to fear.

I had to break that belief to make any sort of progress.

You have your own version of this. Some idea about money, or success, or people who have it, that you did not choose and never questioned. Find it. Name it and dismantle it.

Most of what is keeping you small is not a lack of ability. It is a belief you take around without questioning it.

6 - Develop Taste.

Everything above this has been about what you do. This last one is about the standard you hold yourself to while you do it.

Most people never set a standard. They inherit one. They take whatever their environment hands them, whatever the people around them are doing, whatever looks reasonable for someone with their background and their salary, and they call that ambition. It is not ambition. It is the ceiling of the room they grew up in.

You cannot build something excellent if you have never seen what excellence means. You cannot want a life nobody around you has lived. Taste comes before the work, because taste is what tells you whether the work is good.

So go out and develop taste. Attend the conferences. Sit in rooms where you are the least accomplished person there and let it be uncomfortable, because that discomfort is the gap becoming visible. Expose yourself to greatness deliberately, again and again, until you can feel the difference between good and almost good.

Then come home and hold your own life against what you just saw. That is where the work starts. The only way to make progress is to outline the gap between where you are and the standard you now know exists, and bridge it.

You will close it slowly. And every time you close one, the standard moves upwards again. That is the whole process. It does not stop.

So to wrap this up save this in your psyche as mental models to navigate your 20’s and trust me you are definitely will see progress.

I will see you in the next one. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

~ Tolu