I am the co-founder of a nonprofit, Ingressive for Good, and building it has been one of the proudest moments in my life and career; having gone from zero to 200,000 people in a community in two years, and being a part of it from inception till now.

I grew up wanting to be a medical doctor because I wanted to save lives, and I am doing that now, but not in the hospital.

This is the story of how my desire for saving lives, pursuing excellence, and helping others has prepared me for the journey to the Good.

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First, it begins with my mother;

“You girls may not be men but you are my daughters, you are my own sons, you are everything and more that children should be”. 

She reaffirms to me and my kid sister, on getting back home one day. At that time, I just sort of thought she was encouraging us, but as I got older, I found out that some people had insulted her, and asked her a direct question, “when are you going to give birth to an actual child?”.

She responded, “I don’t understand, I have two children!”, and they said, “No, you don’t have any child until you have a son”.

I was a very fortunate child as my parents never really brought me up to think I had limits; I didn’t grow up thinking there was anything I couldn’t do.

As a kid even though my father did not approve, I played football with boys. I was always coming back home with injuries, and a memorable one I remember was when the captain of the football team had jumped to do a bicycle kick for a ball, and I was also jumping to head the same ball, let’s just say his boot made a ball off my head. My dad had a reason to end my football career.

My dad however encouraged my major interest at the time which was to be a medical doctor; he bought me a lab coat and a stethoscope to sort of reaffirm my would-be career choice but as you can already tell, that didn’t work out.

In primary school, my father would wake me up at 3 am and ask me to read my books. When I was done by say 4 or 5 am, he’d quiz me on what I had read from the books. I still laugh over these memories of my dad with my kid sister.

He was also balanced in that he would tell stories and invent games for us to play, he was very present and hands-on in the early years of my life.

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I was everywhere in secondary school – debate club, math club, science club, wrote essays and won competitions for the school, acted in plays, played chess and draft. I was pretty entrenched in a lot of activities for the school, and a time came at the end of my junior secondary school when I had to choose between being in the science or art class.

For me it was a clear-cut choice, but it caused a lot of arguments between the science and art teachers as to which class I would be in. In the end however, I ended up being the only science student who took art classes and I excelled in all of them.

I had the habit of solving math problems from higher levels, and once I had asked the teacher to solve a question which he couldn’t figure out. My colleagues and I couldn’t figure it out, nobody could.

I remember going home, sleeping and then solving it in my dream. I jumped up from my bed in the middle of the night screaming “I solved it!” (Missed the opportunity to shout eureka!).

The next morning, I went to school and showed everyone how to solve it. It was such a great moment!

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In 2015, I came to Lagos. 

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My coming to Lagos is important to how all that is happening right now in my life came to be.

I had always called my father’s house “my father’s house”, a consciousness that it really was my father’s house and not mine. As African parents who were protective of their child, it was going to be difficult to tell your parents that now that you are done with the university, you want to leave the house.

I needed a strategy on how to leave my father’s house in Abuja; my comfort zone where food and rent was never a concern. My wanting to leave wasn’t just a crave for adulthood, I needed to learn a level of responsibility I knew I wouldn’t get if I had the safety net of my parents. 

I didn’t say a word of this to my parents, only my best friend at the time (who is now my husband) knew about it. I didn’t have a plan but luckily, I got posted to Owerri, Imo State for my youth service and in my one year living in Owerri, I began to experience the independence and responsibility I wanted.

While in Owerri, I was saving up to attend branding school (Orange Academy).

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How exactly did branding come into the picture?

I was done with secondary school and was about getting into the university. My dad felt I was too tiny for him to leave me to go abroad to study medicine (I actually was very tiny).

We then decided that I would do a paramedical course in Nigeria first and after that I would proceed to medical school.

From my first year in biochemistry, I already had doubts that this wasn’t for me, and by my third-year industrial training (IT), I was so sure I wasn’t meant to be here.

The reason I wanted to be a medical doctor was to save lives but then it hit me, “how many lives could I possibly save?”, it would have to happen person by person also.

Something was shifting in my thinking, and by the time I got back to school from my industrial training, I joined a public speaking club. We were soon given a task to write a business plan, I started to research how it was done and I did it.

I got so good at writing these plans, that I started writing for my friends who in return would pay me. My marketing plans were particularly top notch, and in student terms, let’s just say I was making a lot of money.

One day, a friend said to me “Blessing, it’s very uncommon for someone to be very good at business and have a really creative acumen.

“You need to google what branding is, and maybe go to a branding school”.

I knew business because my whole family talked about business a lot. We would read business books and as a family talk about them. Also, I watched my father run a business and learned a lot to not make the idea of business foreign to me.

In my research on branding, I came across the Orange Academy that I ended up going to for one year after school.

I ditched medicine, great break-up story I would say!

Immediately after youth service, I shipped my bags from Owerri to Lagos, and informed my parents that I had relocated.

I did however ensure I got a job first because I knew that was a way to get my father on board with the idea even though I was forfeiting another job in Abuja with higher pay. I had to also figure out what my accommodation would look like and make a part payment for branding school.

I basically tried to cover all the bases, but he was still shocked at how I was deviating from our plan from being a medical doctor into a branding and communications person.

In fact, for two years after this time, he would always ask “So Blessing, what did you say is this branding thing?”, and I would give him an answer every single time.

He finally agreed for me to go to branding school after I signed a contract with him that if it didn’t work out, I would come back home.

I never went back home, at least not to live in my father’s house.

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Lagos is chaotic, as somebody coming from Abuja you would understand when I say this. There is the traffic; the noise hits you, then the smell.

On getting to Lagos, I had to ask myself again, “why am I here?”. At the time, I couldn’t do branding school online so it was important that I was here.

I had an interesting accommodation when I got to Lagos. I would have to walk through my landlord’s living room to get to my apartment, and to go from the bedroom to my living room, I either go out and go through the balcony or through the bathroom then the kitchen before I get to the living room. The architects must be proud!

I couldn’t complain to my parents because that meant going back home but we agreed I wasn’t doing that, right. I had never experienced anything like this so it didn’t completely feel like suffering, it just felt like this was all part of the process.

But now that I think about it, I was suffering sha but also figuring things out and growing.

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I owe a lot of who I am and how I am to my parents.

My dad is a go-getter in the weirdest way; he sees obstacles and chooses that path because it’s the road less traveled, he is a true fan of education; reading, experiences and learning from people.

My mother never felt she was limited because she was a woman, and she put a lot of that in me. She is just really unstoppable and such a smart woman. 

The journey of my career which started from Orange Academy to where I am now at Ingressive for Good has been an interesting one.

I have learned and grown. I was at Orange Academy recently to speak, and on getting there, a lot of the students came to me, hugged me and were telling me “I am here because of you”, “I saw a post about you, I read an article and it’s because of you I came”.

It was very nostalgic for me. My father now knows what branding is, and even tells his friends “Your brand might not be right, you may need to speak to my daughter”. 

I’ve sold a business, and currently I am building Ingressive for Good. 

I was recently reading through a blogpost where the team members at Ingressive for Good shared their different experiences about the most memorable moments they have had working for the company.

A lot of it revolved around how they would go to random places, and people would run to them, and hug them saying “you are part of I4G!!” and that made them feel like celebrities.

As an ed-tech nonprofit, I4G is on a mission to increase the earning power of the African youth by empowering them with tech skills that they need, and connecting them to resources and opportunities.

The feeling the team experienced in the blogpost was because of the jobs, resources, and opportunities we have helped people get access to. We have a company that came from our community that is now valued at $30million and is in Y combinator, we have had people 10x their salaries, and specifically one lady who used to make and sell soaps that has now become a web developer with a ten-fold increase in her earnings.

These are practical life changing moments that you can see, touch, feel; real human beings, real people.

This is what saving lives has become for me.

There is more to saving lives than keeping people alive as a medical doctor. Helping people actualize their dreams, keeping businesses alive so as to put food on the tables of the owners, this is saving lives as well.

I didn’t come to this life to just make money and die, but to contribute. The contributions of people throughout history have brought humanity to its current evolution. We are all supposed to contribute to each other’s lives to make the world a better place, or at least help the world evolve.

To do this is to succeed.