Do the little things really matter?

How your seemingly small effort might lead to a revolution.

I made this tweet today

for a moment I couldn't accept it myself but I know it’s true and these are the events that lead to this tweet.

Over the weekend—which doubles as Christmas, I traveled to Lagos to see my siblings and spend some time with them. They were staying at my aunt's—my mum’s sister, we decided to go and see one of my aunts—my dad’s sister that stays not too far away. If you know me you’d know that I started making my hair about 2 months ago, what you don’t know is that this combined with my seemingly financially independent life had people including family members presupposing that I’m now a “yahoo boy”. This is the only accusation that I have decided to clear up especially with family members—seeing as a family is the one place you would run to if you are in trouble, how will they defend you if they already think you are guilty?

We took a trip to my aunt’s house, I wore a hoodie from Figma and used a beanie I got from Adobe earlier this year to cover my hair so that I can avoid the awkward hair conversation. Before leaving Ife for Lagos I had promised my cousin—my aunt’s son—who told me to review one of his designs but he couldn’t send his design because he couldn't export it from CorelDRAW that when I visit I’ll review his designs, he also requested my “green drip” shirt and I promised that I’ll bring it along for him when I visited—really loved this shirt from WII Create, but you know how younger ones are, lol.

When we got to my aunt’s, I was carried away with reviewing his design that I hadn’t touched my food. All of a sudden, my aunt removed my beanie, I just continued working 😭, she called her husband to come to see the hair and that’s when we started talking. My cousins supported me that they see my status and they know I’m not a bad person or wayward, that lead to talking about other non-family people that have been gossiping about me being a “yahoo boy”, I simply said those people were lazy all they to do was Google my name “Felix Ayoola” and they would know what I do for money—try it. I proceeded to enlighten them on how there are ways to make a lot of money as a designer, even a shoemaker because one of my cousins does shoemaking—used Hingees as a case study for this. My aunt and her husband said they didn’t know that and by the end of the discussion they had understood not necessarily what I do, but how what I do is important and how it would in turn bring a lot of money.

While I was trying to show them my name on Google, this article that DataCamp wrote about me last year showed up, on the article is says I helped about 1500 people gain data skills, the last time I heard the figure was close to 6000 if not more and you wouldn’t believe me if I told you how it happened because it was such a small decision that would have been considered insignificant but over a year later it has to lead to a revolution. Here is the story, what you are really here for lol.

I used to do Data Science and I was very active in the community. I’m one of the leads of my local data science community, the national body is called Data Science Nigeria, DSN for short. It happened that DataCamp wanted to give free subscriptions to their courses out to people through communities and they created a partnership with DSN since it was a data science community. They gave them about 300 I think back the but in my local chapter alone we had more members than that so I told my local leader, that we should apply as a community so that we can get our subscription directly from DataCamp, I got the form, filled it and did all the right things but they couldn’t give use subscriptions because we didn’t have a website. I was pained, they offered to give the subscription to us through DSN since they had a website and bureaucracy and whatnot took care of that but that’s just by the way.

When I got the link to the form for applying for as a community, I messaged all the community leads I knew—Google DSC, Microsoft’s LSC, SheCode Africa, Local communities too—and explained the offer, sent them the link you’d probably think I was doing a referral contest lol. I even told Tay—who was our GDSC lead back then to send the link to all the DSC leads he knew to let them apply. Earlier before this, Ingressive Capital has created a scholarship program with Coursera and that was how I knew about their community—Ingressive4Good or I4G as they call it. I remembered that I has also met Blessing Abeng who worked at the company at Techpoint SME earlier in the year so I messaged her with the link, she asked me to send it to the community manager’s email—Haneefah, and that was how the whole thing started. I had totally forgotten about it until DataCamp wrote this piece about them and my name was in it. To me this action was inconsequential, we do this every time we see a free Udemy coupon, a tech event, etcetera but somehow with the right combination of conditions, these little things can have a cataclysmic effect (just wanted to use that word lol). So yeah, the little things matter!

You may have been sharing links, creating Instagram reels, designing Instagram carousels and it seems no one is noticing after all there are a lot of these contents out there but I’m saying that you should continue because these things do have impacts and while they may be little to you, they are can lead to something huge for someone else—I believe there is a butterfly wings metaphor here somewhere. Keep your light shining in your corner, it might be what saves someone from falling into a ditch.

Caio!