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Professor P. N. Okeke

Posted by: Benjamin Onuorah


One day in our final year Physics class at UNN, Emeritus Professor P. N. Okeke said something that stayed with me. He told us, “I am not as intelligent as many of you think. I only work harder than most.” Coming from Professor P. N. Okeke, a man widely regarded as the best astrophysicist to come out of Africa, that statement carried weight.

What he was dismantling was the myth of brilliance. We like to believe that exceptional people are operating on some rare mental frequency that the rest of us do not have access to. It is comforting because it excuses our own limits. If success is purely about intelligence, then effort becomes optional and failure becomes inevitable.

In reality, mastery is far less romantic. People who rise to the top of any serious craft usually do so by putting in an amount of work that most people would find uncomfortable, boring, or unnecessary.

They read more. They practice longer. They think about the problem when others have moved on. They stay with ideas long after the excitement has worn off.
Many of them are not dramatically smarter than their peers. What separates them is their willingness to show up consistently, to struggle privately, and to endure long periods where progress is invisible. Where others stop because it feels like too much work, they keep going. Where others rely on talent, they rely on repetition.

Hard work is not glamorous, and it rarely announces itself. But over time, it compounds into something that looks like genius from the outside. And that is the uncomfortable truth Professor Okeke was pointing at. The gap between average and exceptional is often not intelligence. It is effort sustained over years.

By: Nkwocha Tochukwu

Bio of Professor P. N. Okeke


Pius Nwankwo Okeke (born ...[Continue Reading]



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