Author: Favour Eteile

Success has many roads, but the one Tyler Perry travelled stands out as a blueprint for generations to come. In 1992, he staged his first play, I Know I’ve Been Changed, in Atlanta, but only 30 people showed up. The production wiped out his savings, and he ended up living in his car. But instead of seeing that setback as failure, he treated it as information to improve his work. He rewrote the play, staged it again, rewrote it again, and kept refining it. Six years and several seemingly unsuccessful productions later, audiences finally responded. What looked like repeated failure…

Every transformative innovation starts with someone seeing possibility where others don’t. Raheema Auwal-Panti’s work beautifully reflects that truth. At just 15 years old, the young Nigerian from Minna, Niger State, looked beyond the convenience of conventional sanitary pads and saw an environmental problem hiding in plain sight. Instead of accepting it, she imagined a better way. Her innovation, PantiPads, turns agricultural waste like cassava peelings, banana leaves, and corn husks into biodegradable sanitary pads. By doing this, she tackles two major problems at the same time: plastic pollution and period poverty. Unlike many conventional sanitary pads, which contain plastic that…

Consistency is one of the most powerful tools shaping the outcome of every successful person we admire and respect. It is a simple decision that shows up again and again, paying small but meaningful dividends that eventually compound into extraordinary results. But as ordinary as it is, consistency is often mistaken for a rare trait. People look at successful individuals and assume they possess something others don’t. When in reality, everyone is consistent at something, it’s the outcome of repeated choices, not a personality reserved for a select few. Make the same choice often enough, and it stops looking like…

David Beckham hasn’t kicked a professional football in thirteen years. Yet during the 2026 World Cup, he seemed to be everywhere, appearing in commercial after commercial for global brands. That isn’t luck or the result of one brilliant business decision. It’s the payoff of layers of deliberate decisions stacked over decades, one of which was how intentionally he shaped his personal brand and built his reputation. Today, those decisions have become one of his greatest competitive advantages, helping make him someone global companies continue to trust. For more than two decades, Beckham invested not just in trophies or business ventures,…

Without realizing it, many of the habits that make a person an effective leader are also the ones making it harder for them to benefit from the support systems already around them. Research suggests that one of the greatest risks of leadership isn’t always the workload; it’s never truly stepping out of the role. Organizational psychologist Sabine Sonnentag found that when people cannot mentally switch off from work, they recover less effectively, experience greater emotional exhaustion, and are more vulnerable to burnout. So we see that these beneficial traits, incredibly useful during a crisis, helping leaders stay calm, make good…

Imagine two paths. On one, you start the business. Write the book. Launch the idea. On the other, you become the person who helps someone else do those things. The work may be just as hard, but the emotional risk is completely different. Many people choose the second path not because they lack dreams, but because they’re afraid that if their dream fails, it means they have failed. So they throw themselves into helping others succeed, using hard work and loyalty to avoid putting their own dreams to the test. It isn’t laziness. It isn’t a lack of ambition. In…

One of the most persistent forces working against progress is not active wrongdoing. It is passive observation. It is the decision to watch and do nothing. The onlooker who sees and says nothing. The institution that knows and does nothing. The leader who witnesses harm and waits for the issue to die down itself. This is the bystander effect. Think about those awkward workplace moments when a colleague makes a derogatory comment disguised as a joke, or clearly tries to sabotage a coworker and calls it an “oversight.” Everyone in the room sees it. Everyone is watching. But because no…

For years, a myth persisted in the corporate world that ruthless, cold-blooded leadership was the fastest ticket to the top. Flashy quarterly profits were often used to justify the behavior of high-pressure bosses who treated people like machines. But today, research tells a different story. While clear expectations and accountability are important, studies show that people do their best work when they feel respected, heard, and safe to share their ideas. And workplaces built on trust often keep their employees longer, solve problems faster, and perform better over time. Recent leadership research supports this. As businesses adapt to new technology,…

Have you ever reached for the TV remote instead of getting up to press the buttons on the television? Or maybe you’ve started a new job and been automatically enrolled in a retirement savings plan. You could opt out, but most people simply don’t bother. Behavioural economists call this a nudge. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein describe a nudge as designing choices in a way that predictably influences behaviour without taking away people’s freedom. No force. No punishment. No bans. People can always decide differently, but the better option is made easier to follow. In 2019, Chinese food delivery platform…

Artificial Intelligence doesn’t fix human bias; it scales it. As organizations increasingly automate high-stakes decisions, we are learning a harsh truth: algorithms often inherit our worst cognitive shortcuts. When human heuristics, the mental rules of thumb we use to simplify decision-making, are programmed into software, they can become rigid, systemic gatekeepers that shape who gets hired, who receives credit, and who gains access to healthcare. This is the reality of algorithmic bias in AI. Far from being neutral, AI systems learn from historical data, and history often contains the imprint of human prejudice and unequal opportunities. As a result, past…