23/03/2026
To Kill a Monkey & The Efemini in the budding entrepreneur…
To Kill a Monkey gripped me, but Efemini’s story struck a nerve. Forget Oboz the maniac, this is about Efemini, the dreamer who carried ambition on a mediocre salary.
One of the first things that upset me in the movie was the fact that he was married and was expecting a child, I mean, triplet! Why was I upset? Bros, why you even marry with that kain hand-to-mouth salary??? But no, you didn’t stop there, you impregnated somebody’s daughter in that state of abject poverty and brought three more innocent children into that mess!
When one of those children died, I couldn’t help but imagine the child sensing the poverty from the womb and deciding, ‘You know what, let me look for another home.’
In fact, in his heart of hearts, Efemini felt relieved because that loss was one less burden to carry. Of course, I know it was painful still but but…Well, I’m not here to write about the movie, so here’s the main lesson for me.
Efemini wasn’t stupid. He was smart, ambitious, and hardworking. But his downfall was hyper-optimism. Optimism becomes dangerous when you build structures on dreams instead of reality.
Truth is that things wouldn’t have been that frustrating for him if he hadn’t taken on other responsibilities prematurely. In fact, chances are that he would have secured that decent contract he was chasing with hundreds of mails, if he was clear headed and didn’t have family pressures.
For business owners, we are guilty of this at times. You picture your brand to evolve into a Fortune 500 company in the future. Then you start hiring different hands; bearing the weight of the kind of structure your business cannot currently cater to.
My friend, you see that picture of the fortune of the future will puncture your account if reality doesn’t align. At the end of the year, your revenue is N20m but you’re still broke as a company. Why? You’re building on optimism and not reality. You’re like Efemini, who got married and gave birth to children, while hoping he’d make it.
Unfortunately, hope is not a business model.
Dear entrepreneur, keep dreaming big, but build on reality, because when the bills show up, feelings won’t pay them.
Happy New Week!
