33 years of incredible!

33 Things That Make My Life Incredible

Hey friends,

Today I turn 33. So I’m sending a midweek post to celebrate.

And instead of fixating on what I haven’t done, where I haven’t arrived, or who I haven’t become yet, I want to do something different. I want to look at my life, as it is, right now, today, and call it what it actually is.

Incredible.

Not perfect. Not without its scars and its seasons of confusion. But incredible. And I think that’s the whole point. You don’t need a perfect life to have an incredible one. You just need eyes to see it.

So here are nearly 33 things that make my life extraordinary. Read slowly. And when you’re done, I hope you write your own list. Not when things get better. Not when you reach the goal. Now. Today. As you are.

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1. God’s grace upon my life has been so insane. How and why I am still alive, okay, and thriving makes no sense to me. But His grace and mercy abounds. I don’t have a theological explanation for it. I just have evidence of it, scattered across every close call, every season I thought would finish me, every morning I woke up to try again. I’m here. And that alone is enough to write home about.

2. I like and appreciate myself. I have become kind to myself. My inner voice is supportive and nurturing, not hurling expectations at me, not replaying my failures on loop. It’s peaceful in my mind. Actually peaceful. I have healed from a whole lot. And if you know what I used to carry in here, you’d understand why that is everything.

3. Aba. Nine years. Nine years she has been by my side and I still cannot fully put into words what she means to me. My rock. My joy. My wise counsel. The person who grounds me when I am spinning and believes in me when I have talked myself out of everything. She is the reason our home feels like home. She keeps me humble. She keeps me sane. She is mine and I am so grateful.

4. My children. Noah is three years old, our little diva and big boy, and he has no idea how much personality is too much personality, which is exactly why we love him. Micah is not even four months old, already radiating more energy than makes any sense for someone that size, and is the sole cause of every single thing wrong with my back right now. I look at these two and I genuinely cannot understand how I get to be their father. It is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me.

5. My parents are incredible. Incredible. I’m so grateful they are alive, thriving and well. We pray together every Sunday. They send me cute older people photos that make me cringe every time, and I love them for it. Their resilience. Their story. How steady they have been in their values and foundations for so long. The safety net they have always been. I am blessed. So blessed to have them.

6. My brothers, Lyndon and Aaron. I don’t see you guys as much as I’d like, but I love you both deeply. I am proud to be your brother. You are such high achievers, well-rounded, kind, bold humans. My life is incredible because you’re both in it. And Papa, my brother-in-law who stopped being a brother-in-law a long time ago and is just my little brother now. The way he has shown up for this family, the help he offers without being asked, the companionship, the banter. He is one of us. Fully.

7. My parents-in-law. There is a particular grace in marrying into a family and feeling genuinely received. I don’t take that lightly. The love, the warmth, the welcome, it adds to my life in ways I am still discovering.

8. My friends. My friends. My friends. My friends. Where do I even start? I always say I would be a very content old man at the end of days because of the quality of friendships I have experienced. Even those I no longer spend time with regularly, I love you. Each friendship, in each season, each country, each chapter, my life is fundamentally defined by you. I have deep, extraordinary friendships that I genuinely cannot put into words. My life is incredible because of every single one of you.

9. My teams. I am nothing without you. Truly. The people who show up, who carry the vision alongside me, who do the unglamorous work with grace and excellence. I see you. My life is incredible because you chose to pour yourselves into the same things I care about.

10. My clients. Coaching, branding, consulting, workshops. Why you would agree to pay me any money is genuinely beyond me. But you do, and then you show up, and then you open your lives and your businesses and your dreams to me, and I am undone every single time. Your stories are so incredible. You bring my life so much colour. Thank you for trusting me with what you’re building.

11. My community online. You are stranger than I expected and more real than I could have anticipated. You showed up in my DMs during hard seasons, you cheered from screens I’ll never physically stand in front of, and you reminded me that what I was building actually mattered. Thank you.

12. The dreams younger-me would be so proud to see I actually achieved. And more importantly, the ones I let go of. The dreams that were a noose around my neck. Whose absence, once I released them, finally gave me room to breathe and become who I was actually supposed to be. Letting go was an achievement too.

13. My faith, which is finally mine. There was a specific breaking point. A season that cracked everything open and forced me to decide what I actually believed when there was nothing to perform for and no one watching. What came out the other side was quieter, sturdier, and completely my own. Not inherited. Not anxious. Not performed. Mine. That is not a small thing.

14. The width of my perspective. Kenya. South Africa. Botswana. Nigeria. Rwanda. UAE. Croatia. Germany. Spain. USA. France. UK. Albania. Canada. And more. Each country handed me a different lens. I understand now that my normal is someone else’s miracle, that most things are relative, and that the world is far more textured and beautiful than any single version of it. I carry all of those places inside me. That is a genuinely extraordinary way to move through life.

15. The way I know my own mind. I have always been a ponderer. But there was a season where something was always looming, a fear of something missed or forgotten, a low hum of anxiety beneath the thinking. Now I study my mind. I journal. I sit with my own reflections. I have conversations with myself and I actually enjoy them. I am fascinating to me. That took work to get to, and I am keeping it.

16. The people who have coached and sharpened me. Jean-David gets a special mention. The way he has helped me structure my mind, I am a different thinker because of his investment in me. And then Mrs. Ampah, Samuelson Appau, Edem and Phoebe Gbesemete, my men’s inner circle group. The counsel, the challenge, the wisdom, the accountability. You don’t just stumble into people like this. I am genuinely grateful.

17. How I love. I love loudly and deeply and with my whole chest. The disappointments and the heartbreaks have not made me small or closed or calculated. I still love generously. I think that is one of the best things about me.

18. The chapters that nearly broke me. Because they didn’t. And now I know what I’m made of in a way no comfortable season could have ever shown me.

19. The clarity I have about who I am. I know my values. I know what I won’t compromise. I know what I’m building and why. That kind of clarity is rare and I do not take it for granted.

20. Laughter. Real, deep, stomach-hurting laughter. The kind that happens in the middle of ordinary evenings with people you love. I have so much of it in my life. That is not nothing. That is everything.

21. My music. Coldplay is an entire genre on its own for me. I listen to indie folk and Nigerian worship chants and Black Coffee AfroHouse and ancient Viking soundtracks and random acapella covers of songs I’ve known for years. I follow artists like The Theorist who take familiar mainstream songs and turn them into something completely new. My taste makes no sense on paper and perfect sense to me. Music has been one of the most loyal companions of my life. There is a playlist for every season I have lived through.

22. Rest. I have learnt to rest without guilt. To stop without it feeling like failure. To be still and let that be enough. That is a freedom I once couldn’t imagine and now refuse to live without.

23. The losses. The grief, the endings, the goodbyes I didn’t choose. They have made me more compassionate, more present, more aware of how sacred ordinary days actually are. I would not be this version of myself without them.

24. The freedom to be honest. About who I am. About what I’ve been through. About what I believe and what I’m still figuring out. There is a particular lightness that comes with a life lived without pretence. I cherish it.

25. The way God has always provided. Every single time. When I look back at the moments I was most afraid, provision always came. On His timeline, in His way, but it always came. That track record is too long to ignore.

26. Growth that actually shows. I can see it in how I respond, how I speak, how I carry myself, how I treat people. Earned, visible, tangible growth. The kind that required something of me to get to.

27. Tables I almost didn’t sit at. D&AD. Web Summit. So many rooms like those. Opportunities I almost talked myself out of. Moments I said yes when everything in me wanted to retreat, to stay small, to wait until I felt ready. Those yeses changed the trajectory of everything. I am so glad I walked in.

28. London. Of all the cities I have lived in and moved through, London has reinvented me the most. This city has a particular way of demanding that you figure out who you are. It is not gentle about it. But who I became here, the clarity, the growth, the life I built within these streets, I would not trade it.

29. What I’ve built. Brick by brick, day by day. It doesn’t look like what I imagined at 22. It’s better in some ways, different in others. But I built it. With my hands and my faith and my team and a lot of stubborn belief on days it made no sense to keep going. I am proud of it.

30. The love I have received. Being loved by people who know you, really know you, and love you anyway. I have been loved so well. By God. By family. By friends. By Aba. I am full because of it.

31. This moment. Right now. Today, on my 33rd birthday, sitting with everything I have and everything I am. Alive. Grateful. Whole enough. This moment, unremarkable by most standards, is extraordinary when I actually pay attention to it.

32. The whole thing. All of it. The mess and the miracle of it. The parts that are still under construction. The parts I have finally made peace with. The parts that are genuinely, undeniably beautiful. All 33 years. Every single bit of it.

1. Hope. Because the King of kings came down to earth as a human being, for our sake, so that we could be united with Him forever. Whatever your life looks like. Whatever you have carried. Because of Jesus Christ, eternity is on the table. I will never get over that.

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My life is incredible.

And so is yours, if you’re brave enough to look at it that way.

Go write your list.

Happy birthday to me. Thank you for celebrating it with me.