Being Broke as a Perquisite to Learning-Motivation

The lack of knowledge can make me a slave to many things and people even in terms of service. This is not to say that I will know everything and forever do everything by myself but I think I would like to know at least a little bit about everything. I don’t have to swim but I’d like to dip my feet into the water and play with it. Initially, I was forced to learn because I was broke and stubbornly independent but most recently, I have just seen all blockages as a realization of lacking some knowledge and opportunity to know something new.

In 2016 when I co-founded Sprinng Literary Movement, I didn’t know jack about web-design or creating flyers. Significantly, I was too broke to pay someone else to design the website for me. I also didn’t want someone else to design the website for me. I didn’t want to become dependent on a web-designer or have to pay a continuous service fee to maintain the website. Lastly, I am the type of person that although I don’t always know what I want, more than half of the time, I know what I don’t want. I knew what I didn’t want the website to be. I didn’t want it to have long pages or be filled with adverts.

In my personal life, I hate congestion. I like things spaced out, clean, clear, and concise and many literary websites I observed weren’t providing such presentations. Although that style of web design may have worked for them, I felt overwhelmed just looking at the first pages of many websites. So I tried my best to create something temporarily, and every now and then, I would return to the site as an editor and play around with the functions. Mind you, I use Weebly for all my website designs because the features are easy to use: drag-and-drop. I watched YouTube videos and read the Weebly help pages in my spare time.

I am still not perfect at it, but I have improved so much compared to where I began. Recently, my team and I have been working on rebranding Sprinng Literary Movement – expanding and elaborating on our resources. We will be changing our name to SprinNG and the new website design is almost complete. I have spent endless hours working on the website. However, one thing I struggled with was how to make the website pages have the same look on a phone as they would on a laptop or computer screen – especially the headers of all the pages except the publications page, which is also the landing page. I finally figured it out this weekend and the joy in my heart couldn’t be measured.

Similarly, I was scrolling through the SLM Instagram page and clearing up the now-irrelevant pictures.  I noticed how my design of flyers for SLM changed over the years and I couldn’t be more proud of myself. The final scenario before diving into my point of this post. Last week, I had to record a video for a program application. My go-to photographer and videographer, unfortunately, wasn’t available to assist with this. You would think – record it on your phone right – but not me. I didn’t like how the phone recording came out. It wasn’t as good enough for me, who wants things well done and perfect. More so – I didn’t know too much about video editing and I kept making many mistakes in between recording that would have needed cropping. My second thought was – quit already, don’t complete the application, you can apply next year or even – maybe this is God telling you this program isn’t for you.

However, there’s a camera that has been lying around the house for a while now. Last-minute, I picked the camera, searched up a couple of You-Tube videos on how to use the video function. I recorded the video and edited it to my satisfaction from 10:30 pm to 3 am on Thursday. I didn’t sleep until I was at least close to getting it right.

I am a curious person and I like to do a lot and play around with things. I also love to learn. I realized that, for the most part, my challenges have been a path to my creativity. So, whenever I am faced with a task that I haven’t done before, while my instinct is saying – quit or let someone else do it for you, so you won’t have to deal with it, there’s that little voice in me resisting. There is that little voice in me saying – Oyin, here is an opportunity to learn something new. Try it, if you don’t get it right, then find someone to teach you – not someone to do it for you every time but to show you how to do it. You know that saying – if you give a man a fish and you’ve fed him for a day but if you teach him how to fish, you have fed him for a lifetime – that’s me.
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I think this experience has been my greatest asset – my desire and curiosity to learn and to know. I have come to conclude that failure may not be the worst thing that will happen to me but the lack of knowledge. The lack of knowledge gives someone else an edge over me. The lack of knowledge can make me a slave to many things and people even in terms of service. This is not to say that I will know everything and forever do everything by myself but I think I would like to know at least a little bit about everything. I don’t have to swim but I’d like to dip my feet into the water and play with it. Initially, I was forced to learn because I was broke and stubbornly independent but most recently, I have just seen all blockages as a realization of lacking some knowledge and opportunity to know something new.