A little background: Growing up my dad was a kia truck driver so that meant he wakes up in the morning and leaves the house with the truck, usually it will be people contracting him to convey their goods or take market women and men to one of the near by markets so essentially wasn't always home. My mum too was a regular(that is an understatement) goes to one of the near by markets, Songo. She used to stay there, that is where my dad saw her and married her from. Her mum's family is from that side. And if she wasn't going there for market, she was going the nearby villages in Songo to buy firewood. Dada was conveying them. And these markets we alternating every 3 days. There a lot of combinations but the ones that I keep in mind because they had a special meaning to me(that is how I kept track of which day we were in and which significance in terms of activities that impacted me).
If today were songo, Mama go to market, Dada might go too, Also it meant the next day was Garu market, if today were Garu market, then the next would be Denugu Market and after Denugu comes Songo and the circle continues.
Around primary school, anytime I came home there would be nobody and no money to buy food so I had to cook. I didn't know how to cook. I didn't think/want to learn how to cook.
Mama would bring in house helps from time to time so when they were around there would be food or I would help her prepare the food. But for the days, there wasn't food I had to cook.
What I remember fondly cooking, was yam.
The Recipe was simple:
1. Set up fire, the bane of my existence. I usually say, if only I had learned how to set fire, then I would have learned how to cook food. But I couldn't bring myself up to set up fire, Why? It was annoying, I lost interest, I hated it. So I never learnt how to.
2. Put a water in a pot and put it on the cool pot with the fire.
3. Cut the yam to sizable chucks and put it into the pot, you don't even peal the bark of the yam tuber. We would only do that when we were cooking proper yam to eat with stew. I never cooked any of those.
4. My favorite part, when the water boils the yam to some point, remove a straw from the mud room roofing and insect into the yam chunks based on how easily it penetrates, you can determine that is it ready for eating. Isn't that beautiful? HAAHAAHA
From time to time, mama would of course instruct me to set up fire. And I would get pissed and start complaining and grumbling and every single time, She would say,
The setting the fire incident is what I remember fondly and clearly but in the family that I grew up in, We were always working close to our parents to get stuff done and every single time, that I was asked to do something and I complained(mostly out of laziness), Mama was always there and she would say "No one was born knowing how to do anything, they learned" and over and over. So I grew up with the understanding that, life is all about learning the things you don't know, to solve the problems that you are presented with. Combine that with my inherent passion for learning and curiosity and get a powerful combination. I couldn't have asked for anything better than such powerful upbringing. And for the past have a decade I have leaned on my curiosity and passion for learning to get paid and make a living out of something which is effortlessly my character. The world tremendously awards people who are problem solver and I am grateful to my parents for bringing me up with such a powerful mindset.
I recently bought The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, I have admired that book for a long while and when I got it I devoured and I realized how much I love Naval. I love Naval because he believes in the things that I believe in. I read Naval and it feels like he is talking about me.
There is this part he talks about been the best at what you do, and I have been obsessed with always been the best at anything that I do. And what I know is that I didn't learn it from anywhere, I just see it as part of my character. That is why I love Ronaldo. That is why I love anyone who is at the top of their field. Because deep inside me I have always wanted to be a top performer or the guy that goes the extra mile. And the world rewards people like that. In monetary value, status, freedom and so many other things.
He also talks about choosing work that looks like play to you and work to others. Me, meee, mee. I have always done that, and I have been advising others to even search for what brings them to life. I learned this from Steve Jobs though. Getting in my computers, I read about Steve Jobs in my school computer library, I have written about this in One does not simply build an OS" look that up. One of the things that i believed to be truth and pursued it is when Steve said,
"The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking, don't settle."
- Steve Jobs
And if you look back, i didn't even have to search, I kinda just identified in out of the blue and I stuck with it. And that is my obssessive pursuit of my passion and curiosities and if you look back I have always done that. Making tin cars and trophies, drawing, reading, opening electronic devices with no idea how to fix them but just thinking yeah, I can try.
Addendum
I wanted to write about how mama instilled problem solving into me but this has blown up and I have to publish it now. I have always had this weird behaviours. Where I imagine myself achieving my goals and been a "big person" and people are interviewing me. My mind will ask the question, and then I answer it in my head. I have never made any conscious effort to do this, it is like my subconscious mind just doing its own thing, Sometimes I just catch it in action doing this all of a sudden. I don't know if you have experienced anything like that, if you have, please share. Note this isn't about your subconscious thinking in the background but a specific scenerio that it plays from time to time, sometimes multiple times a day. Like sometimes I have recurring dreams about a setting/place that doesn't exist in real life. But my mind is somehow able to create(because that setting doesn't exist in real life, where did the mind get it from? it is more like a surreal art, where it takes a real life setting and superimposes imagery objects and creates an entirely new reality. Maybe alternate realities exists after all and leaking into each other.) and keep that memory and goes back to it from time to time in my dreams.
Fcvk this was supposed to be the goddamn addendum. Sorry back to addendum. yeah, I just went back to read the beginning of the addendum before I forget what I wanted to say. Okay, with these interviews my mind plays, I started this week to write the interviews down. And this was supposed to be an answer to the question of problem solving.
4 June 2025 (I add the date to I remember when I wrote what, I can only imagine how long this will get, maybe so day I compile it into "The Almanack of Rasheed Starlet")