The bold will always boss the smart around

Recently, I was enduring a never-ending stream of ranting from one of my mentees (why don’t I ever get paid for this?) about how he gives solid business propositions, but the founder and chief executive of his company doesn’t take his advice. But then when the so call CEO made a mess, my mentee had to do the cleanup.

Of course, my mentee is super smart. First class engineering from a top Nigerian school with IQ as many as floors in the Shanghai Tower. But then, here is a broken man who obviously deserves more and yet isn’t fulfilled. He works in a company that isn’t doing too well because it’s probably poorly managed by the CEO who tells him that if he was that good, he should have started something better.

Does this scene resonate with you? Probably yes.

His story forced me to look around, assess my own life and that of many friends, families, mentees, and random agberos around me. Why do apparently smart people get stalled in poor careers and [some] dumb people become successful? Was it luck? Or business smarts?

Of course, luck plays a role, but statistically, luck should smile on as many smart people as average jones. But empirically, I see most intelligent people working for those less smart. Meanwhile, you would expect the most successful people to be smart since they can use their intelligence to exploit opportunities more but alas, probably around me, this ain’t the case.

Sometimes we talk about hard work. Yes, working hard pays and working smarter pays better. But of what benefit is that if you are working smartly for your dumb bosses and you don’t get any of the upsides and only all the downsides? Most of the hardest working smart people I know work for less-smart bosses, and they rant about it so much my ears bleed. I need to see an ENT.

One thing that seems to be consistent with many founders is that they are bold. Successful founders come in all intellectual shapes and sizes and in various forms of dedication to the hours. But what you won’t take from them is their ability to charge headlong into whatever they believe. They are bold enough to make the leap, not sometimes of faith but many times out of the sheer ballsiness of it. The bold veer towards the edge of insanity to the right, conmanship to the left, inability to access limits to the top, and sheer audacity to the bottom.

I have seen guys walk up and promise delivery of certain products and services without a shred of where and how they would do it, sign the contract and then scamper around to deliver. Sometimes they fail, but when they succeed, maga pays!

And what do the bold do? They employ the smart “you” and “me” to make their dreams come through.

We ain’t all born bold – either because we lost our balls somewhere or we never even came with them. Therefore, we compensate by reading, become thought leaders (whatever that means), get multiple degrees and useless certifications. And when things get really awry, we skip town like Andrew to the US as illegal aliens or to Canada to freeze dry our brains in the name of greener (and extremely cold) pastures.

By the way, it’s not a crime not to be bold; if you don’t have it, you can’t do anything about it. Or maybe you can. I once heard that pretending to be brave and being bold are the same.

But to my many friends and mentees, if you think you are smarter than your boss, just suck it up and spare me the rant. Either you grow your cojones or zip your lips.