The Art of Doing Much with a Little

My imaginary girlfriend loves to watch me cook. She thinks it’s funny that I take my time to diligently wash, cut, and arrange all the ingredients and spices and place them in little bowls and trays before I begin the actual cooking process. I am someone who does not know how to stack dirty dishes and colanders when I am cooking. If I am cooking okro soup, as I put my garlic into the pot, the little saucer on which I had put my ground garlic is the only dirty thing on the sink at that time.

My imaginary girlfriend loves that about me. She loves that enough to not bother doing the same when she cooks, and it frustrates me.

I’m a bit of a perfectionist. Perhaps, not as much as I want to think I am, but I very well am one of those who likes to sweat over the small stuff. It took me a long time to acknowledge this… I like to say quirk… and how it has affected me, my interactions with people and also professionally.

In some ways I like that I am so. It has made me cautious. It has not held me from taking risks or dreaming big, but it has made me more analytical and calculating and I tend to always look at things from a wide perspective. It has also imposed on me something that I like to think of as a threshold. Generally, I am generally less-inclined to embark on projects that I think do not meet a minimum requirement which I have set; especially when I have mulled it over in my mind and seen that without that minimum I would be unable to reach a standard which I have set for myself.

And my standards are almost always very high. It is out of that drive that I decided to write for PoiseSocial, actually

On the flip side, my habit has made me lose out on a lot of things that with some patience and a bit of self-abnegation, I would have been able to turn around. And the greatest effect it has had on me is the passage of time. Time has passed and I have nothing to show for a lot of things that I would have been able to show something for.

It’s a lot to process and to admit, and in the last two years, I have been fighting hard to find the right balance; to not second-guess everything so much and to throw myself into the dirt from time to time. I hate to be that person to lower the bar on the threshold I have set, but I have come to accept that the world is not as idyllic as I want it to be.

Tino is the opposite of me, somewhat. Most of you know Tino through the prism of social media, but I know him personally. I’ve known him and his family for many years, although it is when he got back from the states that we really connected. We have long, long conversations all the time which I always berate myself for not recording and putting it on a podcast; especially since a lot of our conversations run deeper than the stuff we write here for you all to read.

Tino is also someone who, like me, sets the bar high. The only difference perhaps with him and me is that he is more of a cut-throat than I am. He is far less compromising, and leaves very little wiggle room on the principles that he knows governs any endeavour he undertakes.

What I am saying is that while Tino, during the Discovery Show, told Montess she was not going to perform because she came late and had not shown up for rehearsals, I would have let Montess perform despite that, only on the assurance that I had seen her perform somewhere else before, and was certain she was not going to mess my show up. But when Tino told me that very day that he had sent Montess back, I understood immediately because I know where he sets the bar.

Tino is also a hands-on person. He is not afraid to throw himself into the quicksand to pull out the diamond. I am more of the person who gets a geologist and drill to get the diamond out.

In effect, what I want to say today is that I am trying, or should I say struggling to be more and more like Tino. And so should we all.

I was made to reflect on this after Tino put a music video, the first he shot, online. He did that music video on a budget of 30,000frs. Is it the best video? No. But is it good? It is more than good. There is a coherence and an artistic vibe and creativity to it, that makes it enjoyable and very pleasing to watch.

I have never had an interest in making a music video, but if I did, I would fret over a lot. Tino just jumped in with the idea he had and went in. And in the time I would get all my ingredients together to finally make my own soup, Tino would have shot 10 videos. He would have ten times the experience for 300,000frs. I would have waited for a million to start. I am that person. And I have been that person for a long time.

A lot of you guys don’t know this but I had been toying with the idea of starting a blog long before i started writing for PoiseSocial. But I never did because I was worried about the quality of writing I had seen on the internet and if and what I could write about. But when Tino started PoiseSocial, I was smart enough to hop in and here we are today.

I have a lot of respect and admiration for Tino. For a lot of people he seems like a lot of trouble. And I know many do not like the fact that he is so brazen. Which is really curious because our collaboration has been sailing smoothly with not even the breeze of a turbulent wind. I guess somewhere we understand ourselves and we are able to accommodate our modus operandi, because at the end we are both searching for the same thing - excellence.

What I have learned from working and collaborating with Tino is that there is no perfect time to start on a project. If you have one leg, grab a cane and start walking. It’s in moving that you will inspire someone who will offer you a crutch. And then further down the way, someone else will offer you a prosthetic leg. And then down the way some more, someone else will give you a bionic leg.

You will hardly have it all to start. Many of us are not Donald Trump. We do not have someone to give us a ‘small loan’ of a million dollars to set us off on the path of life. We grow only by moving, and we move with whatever we have. And that is how we become better. The proof is that I wrote this article in under 30 mins. I would not have been able 3 years ago.

Wandji Wilfred.

P.S* This is the closest thing Tino will ever get to a love letter from me.