Asher's Blog

Life will teach you hard things, and I want to say that not as a warning but as a certainty, because I think we do each other a disservice when we talk about difficulty as though it is something that happens to unlucky people. It is not. It is something that happens to everyone, and the only variable is the timing and the shape it takes when it arrives at your door.

Plans will crumble. A loved one will pass. A friend will betray you in a way you did not see coming and will not fully recover from for a long time. A business you poured yourself into, your best thinking, your savings, your reputation, will hit a wall that you had no map for. And in those moments, the question that separates people is not whether they will be hurt by it. Everyone gets hurt. The question is what they will do with the hurt once it is sitting in front of them.

How do you make sense of what broke you? And more importantly, what does it grow you into?

Growth is not automatically good

Here is the thing I do not think we say enough, and I think the silence around it is actually costing people something real.

Growth is neutral. It is not inherently upward or positive or redemptive. It is what you do with pain that determines which direction the growth actually moves.

Some people go through fire and come out refined, clearer about who they are, more generous, more grounded, more genuinely useful to the people around them. Others go through the exact same fire and come out hardened, bitter, closed off, transactional in the worst sense of the word. They grow too. Just not upward.

We have a name for that kind of growth. We call it becoming a demon.

And before you dismiss that as dramatic language, I want you to sit with it for a moment, because I think you know exactly what I am talking about. Think about the people you have encountered in life and in business who went through genuine pain and made the decision, consciously or not, to weaponise it. The leader who was once overlooked and now overlooks everyone who works beneath them as though it is simply the natural order of things. The entrepreneur who was cheated early and now cheats first, not reluctantly but as a deliberate strategy, almost a point of pride. The person who was betrayed so many times that they arrived at the conclusion that trust is something only naive people extend. They grew. They became formidable, in fact, in ways that are impossible to deny. But somewhere along the way their growth turned inward and sharp and it started cutting the people around them without remorse and sometimes without even awareness.

The question is never simply did I grow. The question is who am I becoming as I grow, and are those the same person I set out to be.

A man who could have gone either way

I want to talk about someone whose story I have been watching closely, because I think it illustrates this tension more clearly than almost anything else I could point to right now.

Aliko Dangote is currently the richest Black man on earth, holding that position for more than fifteen consecutive years, with a fortune exceeding thirty billion dollars built on cement, sugar, and what is now the largest single-train oil refinery in the world. Those are extraordinary facts on their own. But the refinery story is not a clean success story and I think it would be dishonest to present it as one.

It is a war story.

For over a decade, Dangote poured enormous resources into a refinery project that had to fight through bureaucracy, funding crises, and what can only be described as outright sabotage at multiple levels. In September 2025, the refinery dismissed 800 employees it accused of deliberately undermining operations. International oil companies were accused of hiking crude prices above market rate to force the refinery to source feedstock from outside Nigeria, effectively starving a Nigerian refinery of Nigerian crude oil in what should have been an era of energy independence. Unions cut off gas and crude supply to the facility and called it a labour dispute. The refinery called it economic sabotage and the distinction matters. And running underneath all of this was a sustained price war with the state-owned NNPC, a battle not just over petrol prices but over who actually controls Nigeria’s energy future and who gets to determine what that future looks like.

What strikes me most about Dangote’s response through all of it is this. He did not go quiet. He did not retreat. But he also did not become what was being done to him, and I think that second part is the harder and more important achievement. When accusations of monopoly came, he publicly invited NNPC to buy him out and said plainly that he cannot take the refinery or any other asset to his grave and that everything he does is in the interest of his country.

That is not a performance. That is a man who went through sustained and deliberate fire and chose, over and over again, what came out the other side.

So how do you make sure you grow the right way?

I think about this a great deal, for myself and for the people I work with and mentor, and here is what I have come to believe after sitting with it honestly.

You have to decide who you want to be before the pain arrives, because when it arrives you will not have the luxury of time or the clarity of an undisturbed mind. The version of you that shows up in a crisis is almost always the version that was already being built quietly in the seasons before the crisis came. Character is not formed under pressure the way we like to tell ourselves. It is revealed by pressure. The pressure simply shows you what was already there.

You have to process your pain and not just survive it, because those are genuinely different things and the distinction matters more than we admit. Surviving looks like pushing through, moving on, refusing to let it slow you down, which sounds admirable until you realise that the wound you did not stop to look at is now quietly shaping every decision you make. Processing looks like sitting with the experience long enough to understand what it is actually teaching you, being honest enough to ask what this is making you and whether that is who you want to become, and having the courage to answer that question truthfully even when the answer is uncomfortable.

You have to stay connected to your original reason for doing what you are doing, because that original reason is the anchor that keeps you from drifting into becoming the thing you were fighting against. Dangote did not begin building a refinery to win a war against oil cartels. He began because Nigeria needed energy independence, and when the war came to him, that original purpose is what held him. Viktor Frankl wrote that those who have a deep enough “why” can endure almost any how, and I think the reverse is equally true, that a strong enough “why” can keep you from becoming someone you would not recognise if you met them clearly.

You have to choose your community with great care, especially during the hard seasons, because the people around you when things are breaking will shape what you become in ways you may not notice until later. If your inner circle celebrates bitterness and calls it wisdom, if they affirm your worst instincts and frame your hardness as strength, you will drift in that direction almost without realising it. If your inner circle keeps calling you back to integrity and generosity and long-term thinking even when short-term retaliation feels completely justified, you have a real fighting chance of growing in the direction that actually matters.

The choice is always yours

Pain is not a question. It will come, and arguing with that reality is energy you cannot afford to spend. The only real question is what you build with it once it arrives.

Some of the most extraordinary people in history went through extraordinary hardship and chose, in the middle of it and on the other side of it, to grow into something worth becoming. And some people with far lesser hardship let what happened to them curdle slowly into something that eventually poisoned everything they touched and everyone who came close to them.

The difference was never the size of the pain. It was the decision made in response to it, and that decision is always, always yours.

You will be tested. Plans will fall apart. People will disappoint you in ways you did not think you were still capable of being disappointed. And the question sitting quietly on the other side of all of that is simply this: when the fire is done, who will you be?

Choose that person now, while you have the clarity and the time to choose well. Then fight to stay true to them when things get hard and staying true to yourself is the last thing that feels easy.

That is growth.