There is a particular kind of silence that falls on a man when the phone stops ringing, the proposals go unanswered, and the diary that once groaned under the weight of appointments sits quietly — almost mockingly — open. If you have ever been there, you know it. It is not quite failure. It is more unsettling than that. It is the pause before the music resumes, and you are not sure whether you are in an interval or at the end of the performance.

That was me in the quiet months before what I now consider one of the most meaningful chapters of my adult life. MindVolution — the training outfit I had built from a bold idea and a managing director’s unusual faith in an engineer with no formal HR credentials — had hit a dry patch. The phones had gone quiet. The prospects were either not responding or not ready. And I, buried in other work, had not noticed how long the silence had stretched.

So I did what any sane, restless, slightly unhinged lifelong learner would do.

I decided to go and teach physics at a government secondary school.

Context, Before We Go Any Further

I should explain how I got here — not just to the school, but to this compulsion to teach, this peculiar burden of wanting to pour something into other people even when nobody is paying you to do it.

I returned to Lagos in 2012 after years in the north — Abuja, Kaduna — and settled in Gbagada, a neighbourhood that would become home for over a decade. Long before MindVolution existed as a registered entity, I was already driving two hours to Ikenne, Ogun State, to speak with students at Mayflower School, my alma mater. Those sessions were about everything and nothing — life, readiness, why they needed to show up for themselves before the world would show up for them. It was unpaid work. It never felt that way. The reward was deeply intrinsic, the satisfaction almost embarrassingly private.

Then came MindVolution — born in 2021 out of a simple but audacious idea: that the mind, like a species, can evolve. Not in one dramatic leap but through carefully designed, orchestrated interventions. Modules built not to inform but to transform. The name itself captures the philosophy: Mind. Evolution. A continuum.

The early years were extraordinary. A financial institution’s MD took a chance on an engineer with big ideas and handed me the onboarding of every newly employed staff member. I brought in young training assistants, deployed visual methods, scenario-based activities, interactive self-assessments, breakout sessions. The feedback was electric. The results were astonishing. That three-year stint became the foundation on which reputation was built, competence was validated, and a network of clients was quietly assembled.

But time is the cruelest resource. There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and I had a proper career, a family, and a life that was, mercifully, full. So I restructured. I brought in more hands, showed up for the opening and closing of training weeks, and trusted the process I had designed.

It worked. Until suddenly — it didn’t. Until the calendar cleared in a way that felt less like rest and more like abandonment.

“The greatest gift you can give someone is not your money, but your time and attention — because when you give your time, you are giving a portion of your life that you can never get back.”

— Nicky Gumbel

The Man at the Lounge and the School Around the Corner

I met him at a lounge one evening. We were watching a national football match, strangers sharing the comfortable camaraderie that sport creates. He was a lawyer. He was also, I soon discovered, a man doing something rather beautiful in his spare time.

He taught literature in English at a local public secondary school — voluntarily, consistently, joyfully. He described his sessions with the kind of glow that only genuine passion produces. Interactive. Lively. The kids engaged. He showed up. He was kind about it, not boastful. But it radiated from him, and I felt it land somewhere in my chest like something I had been missing without knowing I had lost it.

I asked to join him that same evening. Just like that.

He introduced me to the principal of Ifajo Secondary School — a government school, about fifteen minutes from where I live — with the warmth of a man opening a door he knows will change your life. The principal and his vice were gracious. They accepted my offer to teach.

I said I would teach Mathematics.

They said: “Please teach Physics. We desperately need a Physics teacher.”

Physics was never my favourite subject. But the desire to teach is a peculiar thing — it does not negotiate much with inconvenience. I had come with a readiness to give, and if Physics was what was needed, then Physics it would be.

Forty Students, a Whiteboard, and YouTube at 5am

The school was exactly what you might expect from a government secondary school in Lagos. Poor infrastructure. Classrooms that had seen better decades. No laboratory equipment worth speaking of. No functioning library. No textbooks to speak of.

But there were students. About forty of them in the SS3 class. And they were hungry.

They were preparing for WAEC and university entrance examinations. They had a backlog of topics. And so on my first day, I did what any reasonable teacher does — I asked them what they needed help with.

They told me.

Electromagnetic fields. Quantum physics. Circuits. Wave optics.

I stood at the board writing the topics, outwardly calm, inwardly having a quiet conversation with my engineering degree about why I had never paid more attention in those classes. I drove home that evening with a list and a mission.

My family became witnesses to something unprecedented: me, on Friday mornings, hunched over a notepad, watching YouTube tutorials, solving physics problems by hand. My children would wake up to find me absorbed in content about wave-particle duality and wonder, quite reasonably, why their father was choosing this when a hot cup of coffee was equally available.

I taught on Friday mornings — 7am to 9am. I “borrowed” an hour from my work schedule and moved meetings religiously to protect that time. I drove my own car. And here is the detail I love most about those mornings:

I parked five minutes away from the school. Every single Friday.

Not because I was ashamed. But because I did not want the car to become the story. I did not want those kids looking at the parking lot instead of the board. I wanted to deflect from myself entirely — to make the lesson about them, not me. The car stays outside. The knowledge comes in.

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

— William Butler Yeats

What Happened in That Classroom

Those students lacked discipline — as many teenagers do — but they were intrigued. They had a teacher who drove a car, worked in a bank, was building an electric vehicle company, and had written books he was now autographing and handing to them as prizes for solving questions. That combination was, apparently, quite compelling.

They learned physics. But they also learned that the person in front of them had not arrived by accident or inheritance. They learned that curiosity is a skill. That preparation is a form of respect — for the opportunity, for the people watching you, for yourself. I introduced them to inspirational figures. I answered the questions they were afraid to ask their regular teachers. I told them the truth about life in ways that textbooks do not.

And they gave back. Every Friday, they were ready. Alert. Asking. Growing.

We spent about two months together. When their WAEC results came in later that year, I was not surprised, but I was deeply moved. A dozen of them had gained university admission — engineering courses, sciences, one into medicine. I do not claim credit for that. I joined the party late, as I often say. But I am proud to have been part of the evening.

The Ending That Became a Beginning

The most remarkable part of this story comes after the exams.

The top student in that class — the sharpest mind in a room full of sharp minds — later became a private tutor to my son for six months. He volunteered for it with the same quiet passion I had brought to his classroom. There was no transaction. There was only a principle, cycling forward.

I stared at that reality for a long time. A boy I taught physics to, who had since earned his place in university, was now investing his time in my son’s learning. Unpaid. Purposeful. Generous.

It was one of the most quietly profound moments of my recent years.

And then — almost on cue — a month after work pressure finally forced me to step away from the school, the training enquiries returned. Not one. Several. Back to back. As if the universe had been watching and decided the intermission was officially over.

I know now what I did not know then: the dry spell was not a punishment. It was a redirection. It sent me to a classroom in Gbagada, where forty teenagers needed someone to show up on Friday mornings, park their car around the corner, and care enough to learn what they needed taught.

“Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.”

— Muhammad Ali

If your pipeline is dry, your calendar is quiet, and the season feels thin — go and give something. Go and teach. Go and mentor. Go and pour into someone who cannot pay you back in kind. Not as a strategy. Not as a hustle in disguise. Go because the giving itself will do something to the giver that no amount of strategic planning ever quite manages.

The music does resume. But what you do in the interval is the part that stays with you.

I am still in touch with many of those students.

That, more than anything else, tells me we did something right.