Akin Akingbogun

This is my story, every pulsating detail documented to inspire you to question what you know and leap beyond your limitations.
This story is about the audacity of belief, the power of a well-told lie, and the journey to unlearn the things that poisoned my teenage mind.
I hope you find it worth your time.

There is a peculiar kind of madness that does not arrive with hallucinations or trembling hands. It arrives quietly. At two in the morning. In a small desert town in New Mexico. It sounds like an idling diesel engine somewhere in the distance — except there is no engine. It sounds like a bass note being held by an invisible orchestra — except there is no orchestra.

Let me confess something. Long before LinkedIn articles, podcasts, and leadership keynotes became my world, I was a teenager sneaking to the library

In an era that increasingly demands hyper-specialization, Akin Akingbogun stands out as a refreshing anomaly. He is a man who refuses to be confined to a single box.

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.

Let me tell you something uncomfortable: the most generous person you know — the one who volunteers every weekend, donates quietly, never asks for anything in return — is probably getting something out of it. Not money. Maybe not even recognition. But something.

Adaeze had been awake since 4 a.m.
Not because she was anxious — though she was — but because this trip felt different. After eighteen months of follow-ups, phone calls, and PowerPoint presentations polished to a mirror shine, the deal was finally ready to close. An investor meeting in Abuja. A partnership that would change the trajectory of her small but gutsy consulting firm. She had triple-checked her flight, her documents, her outfit. She had prayed. She was ready.

When he told his father, Dare’s first response was a sigh. Then: “I told you to practice more. I told you months ago. You don’t listen. You never listen.”

There was no “I’m sorry, son.” No pause to let the boy simply feel the loss of the thing he wanted. Just a swift, seamless pivot to what Temi had done wrong — and, by extension, how Temi’s failure was evidence of Temi’s failure to take his father’s wisdom seriously.

I want to tell you something that took me embarrassingly long to learn. Not because the idea is complicated — it is not. But because it cuts against something deeply wired in us, something we are rarely honest enough to admit.

You are somewhere between forty and fifty-five. You looked in the mirror recently and had a thought you immediately dismissed. Maybe you googled something at 2am that you would never say out loud. Maybe you bought something expensive and impractical and told everyone it was an investment. Or maybe you just feel — quietly, persistently — like the life you built was supposed to feel better than this by now.

Anton Chekhov was a Russian physician and playwright — a man trained in the discipline of diagnosis before he became one of the most precise storytellers in the history of world literature. That combination of sensibilities matters, because the principle he articulated in the late nineteenth century was not merely a rule of dramatic craft. It was an observation about the nature of significance itself. About what it means for something to be present. About the relationship between introduction and consequence.

Picture a hand holding sand. The tighter the grip, the faster the grains escape between the fingers. Ease the grip — open the palm, allow the hand to become a vessel rather than a vice — and the sand stays. This is one of the oldest paradoxes of leadership, and one of the least learned: that control, pursued too aggressively, produces the very loss of control it was designed to prevent.

There is a version of ambition that builds. And there is a version of ambition that consumes. From a distance — and especially from inside it — they look almost identical. Both are energetic. Both are forward-moving. Both speak the language of vision and possibility. The difference only becomes visible later, usually at the point of fracture, when what was built begins to come apart under the weight of what was promised.

There is a particular kind of organisational absurdity that most people who have ever worked in a company will recognise immediately. It is the policy that was clearly designed by someone who has never had to implement it. The restructuring that looked elegant on a slide deck and chaotic on the ground. The customer-facing process that was overhauled by a committee that has not spoken to a customer in years. The directive that arrives from above, fully formed and non-negotiable, that causes the people closest to the work to exchange a look — the kind of look that says, without words: they have no idea what we actually do here.

There is a particular kind of failure that never makes the headlines. It does not arrive with a scandal, a public collapse, or a dramatic resignation. It builds slowly, almost imperceptibly, in the space between what a leader sees and what they choose to say. It lives in the meetings that end without the real conversation ever starting. It grows in the silence after a poor decision goes unchallenged, not because nobody noticed, but because everyone agreed — unspokenly — that it was simply easier not to say anything.

When you stay loyal to a version of yourself that no longer exists—the one who was hurt, the one who failed, the one who was overlooked—you are still choosing. You are choosing to let one moment in time define the whole arc of your life. And that choice costs more than it keeps.