#MentalNote · Big Ideas

The Liar’s Dividend: How AI Devalued Truth and What We Pay for It

I lost an argument at Thanksgiving last year. It wasn’t a debate I was unprepared for; I had my facts ready. The topic was a politician’s recent gaffe, and my uncle was insisting it never happened, a fiction invented by the media. I pulled out my phone and played the video from the Associated Press. The footage was clear. The source was impeccable. The words were undeniable. I looked up, expecting, if not an apology, at least a grudging concession.

He shook his head. “You can’t trust that,” he said, his voice layered with a kind of weary wisdom. “That’s probably one of those deepfakes. They can make anyone say anything now.”

In that moment, the argument was over. Not because I had lost, but because the foundation for a shared reality had crumbled beneath us. My evidence, my proof, was irrelevant. The mere possibility of a fake had become more powerful than the authenticated truth in my hands.

This quiet moment of conversational collapse is not unique to my family. It is a scene playing out in miniature across the country, in courtrooms, on campaign trails, and in newsrooms. The technologies of synthetic media have handed a devastatingly effective tool to those who wish to evade accountability, but the true danger is not the technology itself. It is the corrosive public skepticism the technology creates; something scholars have termed the “liar’s dividend.”

This is the profit reaped when truth becomes too difficult to verify and reality itself is cast as a matter of opinion. The proliferation of AI is merely the latest accelerant in a crisis of trust that began long before, with the decentralization of our media and the weaponization of “fake news.” To defend our democracy’s epistemic foundations, we must understand the behavioral mechanics of this dividend and build a robust, multi-layered defense in our companies, in our institutions, and in ourselves.

From Broadcast to Noise

The scene at the Thanksgiving table would have been unthinkable fifty years ago, not because deepfakes didn’t exist, but because the concept of a shared, verifiable reality was largely taken for granted. In 1976, a Gallup poll found that an astonishing 72% of Americans had a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the mass media. In an era dominated by a few television networks and major newspapers, figures like Walter Cronkite of CBS News, often cited as “the most trusted man in America”, served as powerful institutional gatekeepers. They delivered the news, from the Vietnam War to the moon landing, to a mass audience that consumed the same set of core facts. While Americans certainly disagreed on politics and solutions, they were, for the most part, arguing from a common playbook of reality.

The launch of CNN in 1980 and, more pointedly, Fox News in 1996, began the great fragmentation of the American audience. The business model of news shifted. Instead of broadcasting to the widest possible center, cable channels discovered it was more profitable to “narrowcast” to dedicated, partisan niches. The news became a constant, flowing stream, increasingly supplemented with opinion-as-news to keep audiences engaged and loyal. We began sorting ourselves into different information silos, and for the first time, large segments of the population were no longer operating from the same playbook.

The rise of the blogosphere in the early 2000s was a revolution in disintermediation; suddenly, anyone with a keyboard could be a publisher, reaching a potential audience of millions without the filter of an editor or the need for a printing press. This digital democratization of voice challenged institutional authority and broke open vital stories, but it also flooded the ecosystem with conjecture, conspiracy, and unvetted claims. The professional journalist, once a clear gatekeeper, was now just one voice shouting in a crowded digital marketplace. Discerning signal from noise became a full-time job for the average citizen, a job few had the time or training to do.

The final, decisive blow came when social media became the primary arena for our information lives. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter (X I guess) did not just accelerate the spread of information; their core algorithms actively shaped what we saw. These systems are designed for one purpose: engagement. And nothing is more engaging than content that triggers strong emotions: outrage, validation, fear, and tribal identity. In this environment, the term “fake news,” which once described literal hoaxes, was brilliantly and cynically weaponized. Around 2016, it was transformed into a political cudgel, used to dismiss any reporting, no matter how credible, that was critical or inconvenient. It gave millions of people a simple, powerful phrase to delegitimize any fact they didn’t like.

And so the ground was perfectly prepared. By 2024, that 72% trust in the media had collapsed to a historic low of 32%. Decades of fragmentation, decentralization, and deliberate weaponization had cultivated a deep, pervasive skepticism in the public. This is the depleted soil in which the liar’s dividend now grows so easily. The dismissal of a real video as a “deepfake” is not a sudden madness; it is the logical, tragic endpoint of this long decline.

Deconstructing the Devaluation of Truth

The depleted soil of public trust provides the perfect strategic opportunity for what scholars Josh A. Goldstein and Andrew Lohn, in their work for the Brennan Center for Justice, have termed the “liar’s dividend.” The concept is as brilliant as it is corrosive. The dividend is not the benefit a liar gets from a successful deepfake fooling the public; it is the benefit they get from the public’s awareness that deepfakes exist. It is the power to dismiss any real, inconvenient piece of evidence like an audio recording, a video, or a photograph, as a sophisticated fake, and to be believed, or at least to inject enough doubt to muddy the waters into inaction. It transforms the very technology meant to enhance reality capture into a tool for reality denial.

To understand how this dividend is collected, we have to analyze the strategic toolkit it offers to a bad actor. The first variable is the messenger: who delivers the lie? This choice exists on a spectrum of risk and reward. At one end, a political candidate can make a direct, high-impact denial themselves. This garners maximum attention but also carries the maximum risk of backlash if the lie is definitively proven. To mitigate this, the lie can be delegated to an official proxy, like a campaign manager, who offers a degree of separation. For even greater plausible deniability, the claim can be laundered through an unaffiliated proxy; a friendly pundit, a sympathetic media outlet, or an anonymous online account – sacrificing the impact of a personal denial for near-total insulation from accountability.

The second variable is the message itself: how direct is the lie? The most straightforward tactic is a direct claim: “That video of me is a deepfake.” It is a clear, falsifiable assertion. But a far more insidious and often more effective strategy is the indirect claim, which aims not to debunk a specific piece of evidence but to foster a general “informational uncertainty.” This is the world of vague dismissals (“You just can’t trust what you see these days”), oppositional rallying (“The media will do anything to make us look bad”), and whataboutism. This indirect approach poisons the entire well of information. It persuades citizens that discerning truth from fiction is a hopeless task, encouraging them to retreat into the safety of their pre-existing beliefs and partisan loyalties.

This two-axis framework, of messenger and message, provides a flexible and powerful toolkit for any individual or group seeking to escape accountability. They can tailor their strategy based on the severity of the incriminating evidence and their risk appetite. By understanding these mechanics, we can see the liar’s dividend for what it is: not just a simple lie, but a calculated, multifaceted assault on the very concept of verifiable evidence. The question then becomes, why are our own minds so susceptible to this assault?

Why We Are So Susceptible

The power of the liar’s dividend is not rooted in the sophistication of AI. It is rooted in the architecture of the human brain, which is not optimized for discerning objective truth, but for survival, social cohesion, and the conservation of mental energy. These ancient priorities make us profoundly vulnerable to modern informational warfare. The liar’s dividend is effective because it offers us an easy, comfortable, and psychologically satisfying escape from difficult realities.

The primary vulnerability it exploits is our intense aversion to cognitive dissonance, the mental stress we feel when holding two conflicting beliefs simultaneously. Imagine you believe your preferred candidate is a fundamentally decent person. Then, a video emerges showing them saying something cruel. This creates a painful dissonance. To resolve it, you can either engage in the difficult process of updating your entire view of the candidate or you can discard the offending piece of evidence. The liar’s dividend provides a perfect tool for the latter. The “deepfake” explanation allows you to resolve the dissonance instantly, not by changing your mind, but by invalidating the evidence. This isn’t just intellectual dishonesty; it’s a form of psychological self-preservation.

This is amplified by the powerful force of motivated reasoning. We do not process information like impartial judges; we process it like lawyers defending a client we are already committed to. Our client is our own set of pre-existing beliefs and tribal loyalties. When confronted with inconvenient evidence, we don’t ask, “Is this true?” We ask, “Must I believe this?” The deepfake defense allows the answer to be a resounding “no.” It feeds our confirmation bias, our natural tendency to embrace information that supports our team and reject information that challenges it. In an age where our social media feeds are algorithmically tuned to create personalized echo chambers, this effect is supercharged. Inconvenient truths feel like hostile intrusions into a reality that has been custom-built to comfort us.

Finally, the liar’s dividend preys on our brain’s fundamental laziness. Our minds operate on a principle of cognitive ease, constantly seeking the simplest possible path to a conclusion to conserve energy. It is metabolically expensive to question our own beliefs, fact-check a dubious claim, or live with uncertainty. It is cheap and easy to accept a simple, all-purpose dismissal. The claim that “you can’t trust anything” is appealing not just because it’s cynical, but because it’s simple. It relieves us of the burdensome responsibility of critical thought. In an era of crushing information overload, offering people a simple way out is the most powerful persuasion tactic of all.

An Arsenal of Imperfect Weapons

Diagnosing an illness is not the same as curing it. To combat the liar’s dividend requires a conscious and sustained counter-offensive, fought not with a single silver bullet, but with an arsenal of tools, habits, and responsibilities. The work belongs to everyone—the individual citizen, the corporations that shape our digital world, and the public institutions that form the bedrock of society.

What Individuals Must Do: The Practice of Discernment

The first line of defense is the individual mind. This requires moving beyond passive “media literacy” to a more active posture of intellectual self-defense. The most crucial habit is to practice emotional skepticism: when a piece of content makes you feel a strong surge of outrage, validation, or fear, pause. That emotional spike is a biological alarm bell, signaling that you are being targeted for manipulation. Before you share, practice lateral reading: open a new browser tab and spend two minutes searching for the claim or the source. See what other, independent outlets are saying. This simple act of “informational hygiene” is the single most powerful thing a citizen can do to stop the spread of lies. Resisting the urge to instantly share unvetted information is no longer just a matter of personal etiquette; it is a fundamental civic duty.

What Companies Must Do: The Responsibility of the Platform

The corporations that host our digital public square have a profound responsibility to architect for trust. For social media platforms, this means deliberately engineering “friction.” Instead of optimizing for seamless, instantaneous sharing, they should introduce pop-ups that ask, “Are you sure you want to share this article you haven’t opened?” or flag content from unverified sources. They must also move beyond half-measures and universally adopt and enforce clear, consistent labels for synthetic media and known disinformation outlets. For the companies developing AI, the work must begin at creation. They must bake in robust, open-source watermarking and content provenance standards, like the C2PA standard, into their models from the ground up. Making these tools proprietary or paywalled is an abdication of responsibility.

What Institutions Must Do: Rebuilding the Foundation

Our foundational institutions must undertake the slow, generational work of rebuilding our collective defenses. In education, digital citizenship and critical source analysis cannot be a single lesson; they must be a core competency woven into every subject from middle school onward. Our government and civil society leaders must establish and enforce clear, cross-party norms that create real political costs for candidates who knowingly profit from the liar’s dividend. This could take the form of public pledges, withdrawal of funding, or formal censure. Finally, we must reinvest in the institutions designed to create shared knowledge: public media, libraries, and independent, local journalism. These entities provide a crucial, non-partisan baseline of reality that can serve as an anchor in a sea of digital noise. The liar’s dividend thrives in a vacuum of trusted authorities; we must work to refill that vacuum.

Paying the Dividend

We have traveled a long and troubling road: from the high-water mark of shared facts to the fragmented noise of today, from the cynical mechanics of the liar’s dividend to the deep-seated cognitive biases that make us such willing participants. We have seen that this crisis is not the fault of any single technology, but the result of a decades-long erosion of institutional trust, supercharged by platforms that reward emotion over evidence. And while we have laid out an arsenal of potential weapons for this fight, in our habits, our corporate architectures, and our civic institutions, the choice to wield them remains ours.

I think back to that Thanksgiving table. The stalemate was not about a specific fact, but about the very possibility of facts. My uncle’s casual dismissal of a verifiable video was the final payment of the liar’s dividend, the moment where the exhausting work of discernment is abandoned in favor of the simple comfort of disbelief. His argument was the culmination of a system that has taught us that the truth is too difficult to find, that all sources are equally biased, and that trusting our tribe is a safer bet than trusting our eyes.

That quiet, helpless moment is the future on a small scale. It is a world where accountability becomes impossible because evidence has lost its meaning. It is a democracy where deliberation decays into a shouting match between alternate realities, and power flows not to the most competent or principled, but to the most shameless. This is the ultimate price of the liar’s dividend.

Defending our shared reality is now the central, defining challenge of our era. It is exhausting, difficult, and often thankless work. But the alternative, a world where truth is merely a partisan opinion and every citizen is an island of their own belief, is no world at all. We must choose to pay the cost of discernment, because the cost of disbelief is one we can no longer afford.

#MentalNote · #productideas · Big Ideas

Decoding the Chaos: Welcome to Wahala Economics

During my time navigating the vibrant streets of Lagos, I often found myself observing patterns that defied conventional economic wisdom. What initially appeared as disorganization or inefficiency hinted at something more complex, a hidden logic beneath the surface-level ‘wahala.’ It was there, amidst the bustling markets and intricate social dynamics, that the idea of ‘wahala economics’ began to take shape for me – a lens through which to understand the underlying, often unconventional, economic forces at play in such environments. It’s about recognizing that what looks like chaos might actually be a rational, if not always optimal, response to a unique set of constraints and incentives.

Consider the real estate market in Lagos. An outsider might observe seemingly high property prices, perhaps juxtaposed with visible signs of economic hardship. Scratch a little deeper, and you might hear about the lucrative returns some are making through platforms like Airbnb. This visible success, even if enjoyed by a relatively small fraction of property owners, can act as a powerful signal. The perceived profitability of short-term rentals creates an impression of high returns across the board. Consequently, buyers and investors, perhaps lacking granular data on actual Airbnb occupancy rates and profitability across different properties, may bid up prices, not just for Airbnb-suitable apartments, but for real estate more broadly. What appears ‘irrational’ – higher prices even for properties less suited to short-term rentals – becomes a rational response to the distorted incentives created by the highly visible, though potentially unrepresentative, success of some Airbnb ventures.

This phenomenon in the Lagos real estate market isn’t an isolated quirk. Across ‘wahala economies,’ you often find that the incentives themselves are skewed in ways that would seem counterintuitive in more conventional settings. What might appear as irrational behavior – individuals making choices that don’t maximize standard economic utility – often becomes rational when you understand the distorted incentive landscape they navigate. For instance, in environments where trust in formal institutions is low or where scarcity is pervasive, seemingly ‘inefficient’ behaviors like hoarding resources or prioritizing immediate gains over long-term investments can become logical responses to the prevailing conditions. The actors aren’t necessarily irrational; their rationality is simply calibrated to a different, often more challenging, set of incentives.

Beyond the immediate distortions of information asymmetry and skewed incentives, another layer of understanding in ‘wahala economics’ comes from the perspective of ‘infinite games.’ Unlike finite games with clearly defined players, rules, and an end goal, infinite games are about continuing to play. In environments marked by uncertainty and ongoing challenges, actions that appear ‘inefficient’ in the short term might be strategic moves within a much longer, undefined game. Consider a seemingly convoluted or time-consuming negotiation process. From a purely transactional viewpoint, it might look like a waste of resources. However, within the context of an ‘infinite game’ – where building relationships and establishing trust for future interactions is paramount – that extra time and effort might be a crucial investment.

Ultimately, ‘wahala economics’ invites us to look beyond the simplistic metrics of efficiency and immediate transactional gains. The seemingly chaotic dance of these economies often reveals a deeper, adaptive logic rooted in navigating information gaps, responding to skewed incentives, and playing the long game in environments where trust might be localized rather than widespread. The ‘inefficiencies’ we observe on the surface can be understood as the emergent strategies of actors responding rationally (within their context) to the particular ‘wahala’ they face.

What examples of ‘wahala economics’ have you observed in your own experiences or travels? Share your insights!


#MentalNote · Big Ideas

THE HIDDEN TRUTHS MANIFESTO


20 Unspoken Insights Shaping the Next Era of Humanity, Technology, and Consciousness


Introduction: The Power of the In-Between

In a world saturated with information, what’s rare is wisdom from the seams—those truths not yet obvious, not yet profitable, or still inconvenient to say aloud. This manifesto captures 20 emerging insights—drawn not from consensus, but from patterns, contradictions, and quiet signals across culture, technology, psychology, and philosophy. They are not predictions. They are invitations.

We are entering a liminal age. The edges matter now more than ever.


I. The Ontological Shifts

1. Hyperconnectivity is eroding the boundary between signal and simulation. Our nervous systems are recalibrating to synthetic coherence. The real threat is not misinformation—but mis-feeling.

2. Consciousness isn’t a state—it’s a rhythm. Being is not binary. It pulses. The truest intelligence may emerge from resonance, not computation.

3. The soul of a civilization is stored in what it forgets. Our archives are filled with noise. Our ghosts hold the signal. Watch what cultures erase.

4. Laughter is the last truly encrypted signal. Authenticity will be harder to simulate. Laughter, like grief, might remain a final frontier.

5. The planet may already be sentient—just not in a way we know how to listen to. We frame Earth as object, not interlocutor. New science will rediscover old animisms.


II. Technology & Time

6. AI will break the concept of “talent.” When mimicry becomes trivial, differentiation will shift to curation, friction, timing, and soul.

7. Economies will compete on resonance, not just resources. Coherence is currency. Cities and nations with vibrational alignment will outperform those with raw capital but no story.

8. The next colonialism is sensory. Attention was phase one. Emotion, impulse, and identity are next. Sensory sovereignty will emerge as a human right.

9. Most of the world’s best ideas have already been had—but weren’t scalable in their time. The archive is an oracle. Indigenous methods, ancient city-planning, spiritual ecologies—they’re not outdated, just awaiting infrastructure.

10. The most powerful act in the next 50 years might be a radical slowdown. Stillness isn’t escape. It’s rebellion. In an economy of speed, slowness is the ultimate edge.


III. Society & Meaning

11. Childhood is being outsourced to algorithms. Emotional scaffolding is no longer built at home. Identity is now a platform-level construct.

12. The future belongs to those who can sit with paradox. Complexity won’t be solved, only harmonized. Paradox fluency will be the master skill.

13. We’re underestimating the psychic cost of persistent partial presence. Anxiety isn’t pathology—it’s evolutionary resistance to ambient fragmentation.

14. Death may no longer anchor meaning. Lifespan extension, data immortality, and identity diffusion will unravel the narrative spine of civilization.

15. Global South ingenuity is constrained more by narrative friction than capital. The main barrier isn’t money. It’s the inherited epistemologies that limit what people believe they’re allowed to build.


IV. Cultural & Philosophical Reframes

16. The next great export from Africa isn’t oil or music—it’s metaphor. Ancestral logic, oral cosmology, and multi-dimensional storytelling offer new operating systems for post-singularity life.

17. Language is about to fracture in slow motion. Algorithmic dialects, meme languages, and subcultural codes will replace global lingua francas. The internet is not unifying—it’s atomizing semantics.

18. Innovation will look more like excavation than invention. The future is buried. True progress may require humility, not hubris.

19. The most radical tech shift is not generative AI—it’s the return of intentional community. We are rebuilding the village with APIs and group chats. Belonging is the new infrastructure.

20. Taste will matter more than intelligence. In a world where anyone can access brilliance, it’s how you filter, align, and sense-make that sets you apart.


Investment & Tech Hype: A Realignment Ahead

These 20 insights point to an inevitable shift in capital flows and startup psychology. Investment will slowly move from:

  • Efficiency to Coherence
  • Disruption to Resonance
  • Extractive platforms to Restorative ecosystems
  • Utility-first tech to Meaning-infused tech
  • B2B/SaaS monocultures to culture-native, place-rooted infrastructure

We are exiting the API-for-X era and entering the ritual-for-X era—where software must plug into felt realities, not just business logic. Tech hype will pivot from AI acceleration to AI attunement. The winners will not be those who automate everything, but those who re-enchant it.

VCs will need to develop spiritual imagination. Founders will need paradox fluency. And builders? Builders will need to listen as much as they invent.

The question is no longer: What can we build? The question is: What wants to be built through us?


Let this be your prompt. Your prayer. Your playbook. The future is listening.

Africa · Big Ideas · Current Events

Beyond Investment Access: The Deeper Struggles of African Women in Business

This essay could not have been written without honoring the countless women who’ve shared their stories with me. I appreciate and thank you for sharing these stories in the hopes we can all learn from their experiences.

Every International Women’s Day, we see the same headlines: “Invest in women,” “Support women-led businesses,” “Close the gender gap.” And while these messages are important, they barely scratch the surface of what African women entrepreneurs are actually up against.

As a man who has spent years in business across the continent, I want to say something that often goes unsaid on days like this: The biggest obstacle many African women face in business isn’t just a lack of investment — it’s men. Men like me. Men in boardrooms, in funding meetings, on the other side of the negotiation table. Men who hold power and know it — and sometimes abuse it.

If we’re going to be honest this International Women’s Day, we need to talk about how the deeper power dynamics and gender culture in Africa make it almost impossible for women to do business without navigating moral and personal dangers — dangers that go far beyond the usual “empowerment” slogans.

The Reality Beyond the Hashtags

We love to talk about African women as the backbone of our economies — and that’s true. Across agriculture, trade, tech, and creative industries, women are building, innovating, and leading. But what doesn’t get enough attention is what happens when these women enter male-dominated business spaces.

Many women I know — women I’ve worked with, mentored, and watched grow — have had to face a hidden set of rules that men in business don’t talk about but know are there.

They walk into a room prepared to discuss a contract or pitch for funding, only to realize the conversation has terms and conditions that are never spoken out loud — until much later.

“We should talk over dinner.”
“You know, I can make this happen, but…”
“You’re very beautiful. Let’s do business — and more.”

For many women, getting a seat at the table often comes with an unspoken price — a price men never have to pay.

Why “Access to Investment” Isn’t the Full Story

So yes, women need access to funding. But what we don’t talk about is what women have to endure to access that funding in the first place.

  • How many women have walked away from deals because they refused to “play the game”?
  • How many women have compromised themselves because they had no other option?
  • How many brilliant businesses have died before they could grow because a woman chose her dignity over a contract?

These are the questions we aren’t asking on International Women’s Day — but we should be.

It’s not enough to say “invest in women” if we’re not also fixing the corrupt, exploitative systems that make women vulnerable to begin with.

How African Culture Fuels the Problem

This isn’t just about individual bad actors — it’s about a system.

In many African cultures, women are still expected to be “submissive,” to “know their place,” and to defer to men. When a woman is confident, assertive, and driven, she is seen as “too much.” And when she says “no” to inappropriate advances, she is labeled “difficult” or “ungrateful.”

So, even when women get into the room, they are forced to navigate deeply entrenched gender biases that see them as sexual objects before they are seen as entrepreneurs.

And as men, we are often the enforcers of this system, whether we realize it or not.

Why Men Need to Take Responsibility — Especially Now

So on a day like International Women’s Day, it’s not enough for men to post quotes about women’s strength or to say, “we celebrate women today.”

We have to ask ourselves hard questions:

  • How do we treat women when they walk into a business meeting?
  • What do we say when other men make inappropriate comments or demands?
  • Do we make it easier or harder for women to succeed based on merit?
  • Are we offering opportunities with no strings attached — or are we gatekeeping access to power?

If we want to celebrate women’s economic power, we need to confront the ways we, as men, use our power to limit theirs.


What a Real Commitment to Women in Business Looks Like

A real commitment to women entrepreneurs in Africa means:

  1. Creating safe business spaces where women can operate based on merit, not on navigating sexual politics.
  2. Calling out men who abuse their positions — not just privately, but publicly when necessary.
  3. Funding and supporting women-led ventures without attaching expectations beyond professionalism.
  4. Challenging cultural narratives that limit women to secondary roles and demanding that business spaces reflect equality.

Why This Matters for Africa’s Future

If we want to talk about building “Africa’s future” — the one where we are competitive globally, where innovation drives growth, where businesses create real impact — we cannot do that while excluding or exploiting half of our population.

African women are already building the future. The question is whether we, as men, will get out of their way — or continue to be the reason they cannot succeed.

So this International Women’s Day, let’s move beyond empty words.

Let’s ask: What are we doing — as men — to make business safe, fair, and accessible to women?

Because if we can’t answer that question honestly, then all our talk about empowering women is just that — talk.


Big Ideas · History

Drinking My Own Kool-Aid: Embracing the Advice I Give

When I spoke to those bright-eyed LAS graduates at the University of Illinois, my heart was pounding as I talked about being “dangerous dreamers.” I painted this picture of a future full of possibilities, urging them to chase their dreams with courage and unwavering spirit. But as I walked off that stage, with the applause still ringing in my ears, I had a nagging thought – was I actually living by the advice I was giving out? Was I really a dangerous dreamer, or just someone who talked a good game? This essay is about my journey to “drink my own Kool-Aid” – to actually apply the wisdom I’ve shared with countless others, and to close the gap between talk and action.

The Speech and Its Big Message

In my commencement address, I talked about the idea of dreaming dangerously – not as some reckless pursuit of crazy ambition, but as a commitment to transformative action that can change the world. I shared stories of people who dared to dream and turned their visions into reality. I told the graduates to avoid complacency, to step up as leaders, and to create their own destiny. Looking back, I realized that I needed to take a look at my own life and see if my actions matched my words.

The Problem with Giving Advice

It’s a common thing – how easily we give advice, while conveniently forgetting to apply it to our own lives. I’ve seen it time and again, both in others and in myself – the disconnect between what we say and what we actually do. After that speech, the weight of my own hypocrisy became clear. It was a wake-up call, a demand for change.

Drinking My Own Kool-Aid: From Talk to Action

To me, “drinking your own Kool-Aid” goes beyond just believing in your vision; it’s about bringing that vision to life with the same passion and commitment that you encourage in others. Here’s how I started on this journey:

  • Project Initiation: My company, Parallelscore, which operates in the fast-paced tech industry, became the place where I put my own dangerous dreaming into practice. I pushed the limits of innovation, took risks, and embraced the uncertainty that comes with exploring new territory.
  • Community Engagement: I made a promise to mentor young entrepreneurs, not just with words, but with action. I shared my knowledge, my experiences, and my hard-earned wisdom, and I put the idea of collective dreaming into practice.
  • Personal Growth: I made time for my own education, diving into areas where I had been coasting. I challenged my own assumptions, faced my intellectual blind spots, and pushed myself to grow.

These steps weren’t always easy. But each challenge, each setback, served as a reminder of the core message of my speech: dreams require action, resilience, and unwavering belief in the face of adversity.

The Ripple Effect of Practicing What I Preach

The results of this journey have been amazing. Not only have I seen my company grow, but I’ve also noticed a shift in how others see me – as someone who takes action, not just someone who talks. The feedback from my mentees has been overwhelmingly positive, with many admiring my hands-on approach and my willingness to get involved. This journey has taught me a valuable lesson: living your advice not only fuels your personal growth but also makes your message more powerful.

A Call to Action

Now, I challenge you:

  • Reflect: Take a look at your own life. What advice do you give others that you could, and should, apply to yourself?
  • Act: Take that first step, no matter how small. Whether it’s starting a new project, pursuing a personal goal, or getting involved in your community, break free from inaction and embrace the power of action.
  • Connect: Find or create a community of like-minded dreamers who share your passion and your desire for change. Support each other, lift each other up, and dream dangerously together.