There is a statistic that should discourage any lion from ever hunting again. Three out of every four times a lion charges after prey, it fails.

Twenty five percent success. Seventy five percent waste. If a man ran a business on those numbers, his accountant would resign quietly, his investors would call an emergency meeting, and his mother would move from praying for his success to praying for his sense.

Yet the lion hunts again tomorrow. Not with less hunger, but with the same readiness it had before the first failed chase.

It does not sit in the grass replaying its missed strike, questioning whether it was built for this life, or wondering what the other lions will say.

It simply resets, and waits for the next opportunity to run.

Scientists who have spent their careers observing predators say the explanation is not appetite, though appetite plays its part. 

The deeper explanation is something quieter and far more instructive, something built into the marrow of nature itself.

They call it the Law of Wasted Efforts, and it governs far more of this world than we care to admit.

Read that again slowly. This is not the exception in nature. This is the rule. Waste, by our human definition of the word, is not a flaw in the design of the natural world. It is the design itself. Nature does not budget for efficiency the way we do.

It budgets for abundance, knowing that abundance will absorb the loss and still leave enough behind for life to continue.

I think of this often when I remember the early years of building anything worth building. 

Before Qoray Mobility ever moved a single passenger or charged a single battery, there were pilots that stalled, partnerships that fell apart at the signature stage, and routes we mapped out with great excitement that never carried a single tricycle. 

Each of those was, by every reasonable measure, a wasted effort. Time spent. Money spent. Hope spent.

And yet none of it was actually wasted, because it was the very thing that taught us where the real route was.

We only fail when we stop trying.

This is where the difference between man and the rest of creation becomes painfully clear. Only the human being, of all of God’s creatures, has decided that a failed attempt is proof of unworthiness.

A fish does not conclude, after losing half its offspring, that it should stop laying eggs. A cloud does not refuse to rain over the ocean simply because the ocean will not grow a single tree from it.

Nature keeps moving because nature understands something we spend half our lives forgetting: that the attempt was never the point. Continuation was always the point.

We, on the other hand, keep a ledger. We count our missed calls, our declined proposals, our business ideas that never left the notebook, our relationships that ended before they matured, our prayers that seemed to bounce off the ceiling. 

We add them up and hand ourselves a verdict: failure. 

As though a man’s life can be fairly judged by the attempts that did not work, rather than by whether he kept walking after they didn’t.

I have sat in boardrooms in Lagos where a single difficult quarter was spoken of like a funeral. I have watched brilliant young people abandon good ideas after one rejection, convinced that the market, or God, or life itself, had spoken a final word over them. But the market rarely speaks a final word.

Neither does a closed door, a lost client, or a quiet season. What looks final is often only the first three quarters of a hunt that was never going to succeed on the first attempt anyway.

This is not a call to recklessness, and it is certainly not a call to keep repeating the same failed strategy while calling it faith.

The lion does not charge blindly. It studies the wind, the distance, the weakest member of the herd, and it adjusts its approach with every failed attempt.

Wisdom and persistence are not opposites. They are dance partners. The Law of Wasted Efforts does not ask us to be foolish; it asks us to be undiscouraged.

If there is one word that captures how this world actually works underneath all its noise and metrics and quarterly reports, it is simply this: continue. Continue after the pilot that failed.

Continue after the manuscript that was rejected. Continue after the calling that seems to be taking far longer than you expected. Continue after the year that gave you far less than you prayed for.

The rain that falls into the ocean today does not know it is preparing the atmosphere for the rain that will fall on farmland tomorrow.

It simply falls, faithfully, and lets the larger design handle the accounting.

Never stop at any stage of difficulty. Keep moving. Keep thinking. Keep trying. And above everything else that this fast and unforgiving world will ask of you, keep praying, because there is a kind of endurance that discipline alone cannot manufacture.

Perhaps the real tragedy is not the seventy five percent of attempts that fail. Perhaps the real tragedy is the lion that, after one bad season, convinces itself it was never built to hunt.

How many of your seeds have you already declared lost, when they were only ever meant to feed the ground for the next one?

And what would change in your life today if you finally believed that the attempt was never the failure, only the stopping is?