“What is joy?” one of Nigeria’s most powerful politicians (he would be in the top 10 of any rankings, I suspect) asked my co-founder of 15 years, Adebola Williams about two years ago when he told him what I was up to - starting a new company called Joy, Inc. “What exactly is he doing with that? Is he okay? Is everything alright?”
None of it made sense. To be honest, much of it will still not make sense to those who have only met me in the public sphere. For those who have always known me however – and to me who has always known me - all of it makes sense. All of it is in character.
2015 and 2016 were the years that the business and the brand I had built gathered momentum in every way you could dream of. I had always wanted big stages - and after the magic of the Muhammadu Buhari campaign in Nigeria, closely followed by the victory of Ghana’s Nana Akufo-Addo, both campaigns in which products we had built played a part, I had the big stages that I had dreamed of. And I enjoyed all of it, even the criticism for the most part: it meant that the work that I was doing mattered. To do work that matters and that has real meaning – that has always animated me.
But then in January of 2016, there began a stirring in my heart; none of it was making sense. In form, I wanted this – all of it. In spirit however, I wanted no more of it. I just wanted to rest.
So in February, I informed the board at RED that I was stepping down in two years. I wanted to do something different. Leading a company, participating in nation building through politics and activism, mainstream journalism – I was stepping out from all of it. I just wanted to rest.
It soon moved from desire to need. Because sometime between March and May I broke down in a major depressive episode that lasted anywhere from 3 – 5 months. The Columbia researcher Lisa Miller has called depression a “knock on the door” to “a deeper spiritual experience”. I have never seen anyone describe anything so perfectly.
Depression (and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone) became one of the greatest gifts life has given me.
In those months I confronted everything I believed, everything I thought to be true and had been taught, everything I had based my life on; my greatest fears especially – failure, poverty, loneliness (this continues to confound people who don’t yet know that you can be profoundly busy and yet profoundly alone), ill health.
Fear was at the center of this awakening. And I made a profound discovery about fear: that much of everything I feared was rooted in the strangest of places - my faith.
I discovered that my faith – founded on the one man who spent his days teaching “Do not be afraid” - had made my life a miasma of all kind of fears, reasonable or not, logical or not. Fear was my operating system. Even when I was doing something bold – it came wrapped in fear.
I had spent all of my life up until that point convinced that my life existed at the mercy of cosmic forces and an unreasonable God that could do with me as they wanted; needing to be appeased constantly so that I could ‘fulfill destiny’. I discovered I was deathly afraid of making a mistake, taking a ‘wrong turn’, doing differently from the way I had heard or seen or been taught. Of being criticized, of being disliked, of not achieving my goals, of ‘falling behind’.
Three months of confronting the valley of the shadow of death meant there was no hiding from those fears. And so I spent days – and nights - asking hard questions of my faith, and of the God I was taught to ‘serve’. Everything was on the table. The teachings before that turn had failed me and I was angry, and confused, and bitter. I was not going to negotiate with dogma that couldn’t help me. I was going to get answers or find my own faith for myself. Or no faith.
This is of course a familiar story, as I found out. The New York Times columnist David Brook has written eloquently of this in his book The Second Mountain.
I found out – reading him and others, spending time in meditation and reflection, starkly journaling mistakes and weaknesses, confronting desire and purpose – that I was both statistic and cliché. I was like very many other people. But this time, after all I learnt about the world, now that being ‘special’ was no longer uppermost in my mind, rather than making me panic, this knowledge gave me peace. This, I now knew, was a journey alongside the rest of the world. It was a journey many before me had taken and survived. It was THE Journey that would make the difference between success and significance. It was the moral clarifier.
I began to embrace God. Not the God of vigils to help me secure this achievement or that opportunity. Not God as a tool for me to confirm I was special, or a device to help me ‘make a difference’ in the world. God was me realizing there was nothing to fear in life, and everything to love in it – including, and perhaps especially, adversity. God was me realizing that everything is already perfect, exactly as it is.
To embrace God was to embrace my own spirit (in the Christian tradition, Paul the Apostle calls this ‘Christ in you’) – the fullest expression of the human spirit.
Embracing my fullest expression pulled me up to my full spiritual height. I could look life in the eye, and become part of it. I could stare fear in the face and give it a seat behind me. I had looked into my soul and found light.
“Every so often, you meet people who radiate joy—who seem to know why they were put on this earth, who glow with a kind of inner light. Life, for these people, has often followed what we might think of as a two-mountain shape,” Brooks wrote. “They get out of school, they start a career, and they begin climbing the mountain they thought they were meant to climb. Their goals on this first mountain are the ones our culture endorses: to be a success, to make your mark, to experience personal happiness. But when they get to the top of that mountain, something happens. They look around and find the view . . . unsatisfying. They realize: This wasn’t my mountain after all. There’s another, bigger mountain out there that is actually my mountain.
“And so they embark on a new journey. On the second mountain, life moves from self-centered to other-centered. They want the things that are truly worth wanting, not the things other people tell them to want. They embrace a life of interdependence, not independence. They surrender to a life of commitment.”
I had always lived a life focused on impact, on meaning. But it had been coloured by fear, tainted by the quiet desperation of conditioning.
Depression forced me to burst out of that cage; to confront my own spirit – and to embrace it. That is why I could only smile when that well-meaning, well-intentioned mentor above questioned my life choices, and rather than panic about what he thought of me, I could focus instead of what was ahead of me.
You see, life’s journey is about making mistakes, so it is entirely possible that as I write I am making some now, and will make others later. But mistakes, and the humility of both expecting and embracing them, make us wiser; giving us a ladder to do better.
Because this new journey is not about the what. It’s now about the how. In 2016, I suspect I began the bold, beautiful climb onto my mountain; a journey that is truly, fully mine.
PS: I just realised that what we shared this morning was the wrong draft. I apologise for that error.