I was raised across Africa. Tanzania first, then Zambia, then Nigeria and Cameroon — four countries before I was old enough to be aware of what a passport meant. I learned English through borrowed accents. I learned what a home was by watching the kind that traveled with you, in your habits and your kitchen and the way your mother folded a sari before bed.
For a long time I thought this was a complication. The places I came from did not match the place I was supposed to be. I did not know how to answer the question where are you from without telling a story that was longer than the room had time for. So I learned to give the short version. A geography that fit on a name tag.
The longer I have lived, the more I have come to understand that the complication was the gift.
Falmouth, then New York City
I came to the UK for university — Falmouth, on the Cornish coast, where I earned a postgraduate diploma. Then a chapter in London. Then I crossed the Atlantic for graduate school at Syracuse. Cold in a way I had not known cold. Quiet in a way I was not used to quiet. After Syracuse I moved to New York City and stayed for a decade and change. I built a career. I built a life that, for a while, looked like the right one. I spoke at TEDx — twice, the second of which now lives on TED.com. I published a book of poetry called Kairos, on Hay House. I started a podcast called Words and Voices that did better than I expected and ended on my own terms.
And underneath all of that, I was learning the lesson that almost no one writes about. The lives we are most successful at performing are often the lives least suited to the people performing them. I was good at the New York version of myself. The longer I did it, the more clearly I could feel that I was running on borrowed energy. I was working from a script someone else had written, and I had not yet found the courage to admit that the script was not mine.
What I came to believe
Eventually I stopped. Not all at once. Not in a way that would make for a clean essay. In stages, the way most real change happens. I left New York. I moved closer to family. I started writing differently. I started working differently. I started saying no to things I had been saying yes to for a decade. I started saying yes to things I had been afraid of for longer.
What I have come to believe, after enough years of living against the script, is this. Most people are not stuck because they lack ambition. They are stuck because they are still chasing a target that the current version of them does not actually want. The work is rarely about wanting it more. The work is about wanting the right things. And then having the discipline to want them out loud.
This is what I write about. This is what I speak about. This is the work I help leaders, founders, and quiet ambitious people do. Not the polished kind of clarity that fits on a slide. The honest kind, that sometimes costs you the next twelve months and gives you the next twelve years.
What I am working on now
I write a weekly letter called Off Script. I am finishing my first non-fiction book, Meaningful Momentum, due out August 22, 2026. I work with a small number of leaders and founders each year, the kind of work I take a lot of care with. I speak on stages where the audience is ready to think rather than be entertained. And I am building, slowly, a body of work meant to last longer than a season of attention.
If you have read this far, you probably already know whether we have anything to say to each other. I'd love to find out.