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Do You Sleep At All? How I Manage to Be Productive (Part III)

I believe that one way to achieve genuine intergenerational transfer of skills, practices, and ideas is to give people honest and unfiltered access into how I think, how I evolved, and how I mechanize, daily. People will learn more from true confessions than from what they see, hear or think they know about other peoples.

There is nothing I know that I didn’t learn, methodically and intentionally. And there is nothing I know that I cannot teach. The reason is simple. If you cannot teach your skill, you probably don’t know it enough or you think only you deserve to have the skill. Or you are not a good teacher. Skill acquisition without skill transfer is incomplete. In fact, until you successfully transfer your skill, you can’t claim total success of mastering a skill.

I’m an advocate of immersive learning. I hate the idea of skill as a natural gift, not just because it automatically excludes some people from acquiring a skill because they are not gifted, but also because it suggests you didn’t work for it because it’s natural. It’s hard labor that activates and sustains gifts, and it’s possible to master a skill to the degree of natural talent.

True confession---I may have been stuck with the Fuji book project if I wasn’t writing about Fuji on Facebook. You need to write in order to write. Whenever I’m on Facebook, I’m working—in addition to dragging Abeokuta people for preferring their carcass-like taxis, over clean Ubers.

Unlike colonial Nigerian history which has established points of entry into virtually all subjects, Fuji is intersectional cultural studies which is extremely elusive, too expanded, and infinitely flexible. The wider the freedom to engage a subject, the more difficult it is to choose the best point of entry. That’s one reason writing becomes difficult.

By writing about Fuji on Facebook, I put myself into a deliberate distraction mode to turn “ordinary” ideas into intellectual conversation, accessible to the public because I know I have a social media audience willing to read. There is a thin line between “academic” and “popular” or “ordinary” ideas. And there is nothing, no matter how “ordinary” or “simplicist” they sound, that doesn’t have an intellectual dimension. Everything, including why I would rather starve to death than eat amala in Abeokuta, can be intellectualized!

In a nutshell, Facebook, the social media platform, blamed for making people unproductive helped me write the Fuji book, not just because I’m actively mining data from it, but also because I turned the platform into a laboratory to incubate ideas as they germinate.

So, when I write about my process on Facebook, I’m giving back to a space that allowed me to achieve a unique kind of excellence with the Fuji project. I’m returning knowledge, back to one of the places it came from, albeit in a more refined form.

Yours Sincerely in Fuji
Ìsòlá awón bí ogbón
The Okà ò sò'fò of Ibadanland
Prof Saheed Aderinto
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