Day 171. I keep coming back to one thing my first interview showed me, the one I still haven’t heard back on.
I can find the truth in marketing data. I can architect it, trace it, defend it with numbers. What I’m not as sharp at is handing that truth to another person in a way they can actually receive.
As a marketing data analyst, that’s supposed to be the whole job. Bridging marketing and sales means nothing if I can’t communicate what I found.
For a second, that gap tried to become bigger than it was. It tried to whisper that maybe this means go back to my previous roles, take whatever’s easier, stop insisting on this lane—but I know that voice by now.
The Psychological Trap
That voice always shows up right after something goes wrong, trying to get me to sign a permanent decision in the middle of a temporary situation. Behavioral economists call it the Hot-Cold Empathy Gap: in the heat of a bad moment, we can’t accurately imagine how we’ll see things once we’ve cooled down, causing us to make decisions the calmer version of us would never agree to.
I’ve grown past it. Just because a role is hard to land doesn’t mean I abandon it for something I’ll regret in the long run. I’d rather take the long, hard road than the short, easy one that leads nowhere I actually want to be.
If the door won’t open the way I’m knocking, I break the skill down and sell it in pieces. That’s what an analyst does, title or no title.
Owning the data pipeline from the ground up to ensure absolute measurement accuracy.
Driving strategy based on what a user actually does on a page—before, during, and after.
Finding and defending the real numbers when metrics across different platforms refuse to agree.
Tracing visibility down to where the money is actually going and identifying what drives it.
This is a diagnostic. Not a dead end. I need to build a system to fix it, and I will. Every system I build has to run on its own, no third party required to measure whether it’s actually working.
Intentional living, when I sit with what that word is actually asking of me, means living every day aware of the decision I’m making, the feelings underneath it, the systems I’ve put in place, and why I act the way I act.
It keeps my progress from being the kind that gets erased when a week goes badly. Even when things don’t go as planned, I still have a choice, and a trail I’ve already left behind.
Building that system is where this week actually got humbling.
Day 175. I didn’t finish what I set out to do, and I know exactly why. I never wrote the todolist. Didn’t set the tasks in motion.
This is known as the Intention-Behavior Gap. I had the intention, but I didn’t build the trigger. The funny thing is, the tasks already wired into my routine still got done that day. Only the ones that lived as a thought in my head fell apart.
The Gollwitzer Framework
Day 173 wasn’t so different. I noticed I’d stopped tracking my skill hours. Stopped practicing SQL. Stopped applying for jobs, all while stacking a new evening bible study onto a morning routine that was already full.
That’s adding without redesigning, and I know it.
My current phone’s alarm system can’t hold this many fixed-time tasks anymore. By the time I reach the next one, I’ve forgotten it or I’m mid-way through something else. I’ve asked my Abba for a phone that can actually hold my day. Still waiting on that one, still trusting.
Before, I had no one to talk to, nothing pulling at my time, so I could pack the day tight and get away with it. That’s not true anymore. Pretending it still is isn’t discipline. It’s just an old system running on assumptions that expired.
Everything is data and pattern to me now. No more guessing. No more just living through it. Always use a checklist. Never forget the open-closed loop. Journaling is what gives me the clarity to even see any of this.
Some of that pattern-reading pointed at something less flattering.
For over a week, a slow network disrupted my work. I couldn’t farm dopamine from building, so I sought it elsewhere:
Instead of sitting with friction, I filled the gap with downloaded movies. Research matches this feeling exactly: passive leisure quietly replaces the satisfaction of finishing something with my own hands.
- Consuming something someone else already finished (watching, scrolling).
- Requires zero effort to start, making it the default response to friction.
- Outsources dopamine, consistently linked to lower moods over time.
- Using your own brain and hands to complete a challenging task.
- Requires higher effort and sitting with initial friction to start.
- Yields an internal dopamine hit that cannot be outsourced.
This has been causing me to feel randy, and it wasn’t a coincidence that it was heavy on consuming and light on building. I’m allowed to feel that without spiraling over it though. I’m only human. But now I know the actual lever.
On Wednesday, I’d gone to the market early, on a tight budget, for wears, just in case I had somewhere to go. Fortunately, an hour after I got home, another interview invite came in, a company I had sent job application to request for a physical interview on Friday.
God has a miraculous way of working, arranging what you need before you know you’ll need it.
I hadn’t applied for a job since August 21st, yet the sequence of how this unfolded proves that, God knows everything, and no effort is wasted:
The last time I officially submitted a job application.
In the middle of my first interview, a message came in from another company. They’d moved on for the AEO/GEO role I applied for, but wanted to offer me a Paid Media role.
Physical interview at their office in Ikeja. I navigated the tension by writing out my nerves on my journal before walking in. The interview went well.
The offer letter arrived.
The role I was offered was not the technical side of marketing data analytics, and I noticed myself checking that against everything I’d promised myself on Day 171. But it feeds forward into that future, it isn’t the surrender I said I wouldn’t make, it’s the long road wearing a different shoe for a season.
I’d prayed something specific a few weeks back.
God, connect me with men who need what I have, and who have what I need.
Sitting with it now, I don’t think that prayer was only about money changing hands. Some connections aren’t there to pay you. They’re there to trust you, hand you access before anything else, because their integrity matters more to them than the transaction.
Sometimes what looks like free work is really exposure to someone who’ll trust you with something bigger later.
I got a job offer the same day I picked up a pro bono growth analyst role with an NGO. Which means, my practice seasons are now over. Everything is about to get real now.
Even though I don’t know exactly where this month’s transport and feeding money is coming from yet before receiving my salary. But I know who I’m trusting for it anyway.
Worrying about money is unreasonable, unnatural, unnecessary. Not because money doesn’t matter. Because worry is me trying to carry a weight that was never mine to carry alone.
If it occurs to me that I’ll be happy after I acquire a thing, I’m already missing the joy available right now.
This is called the arrival fallacy.
The belief that happiness is waiting at the destination instead of already available in the walk there.
I’ve watched people arrive at the very thing they were chasing and feel the joy fade in days. I don’t want to keep postponing mine for a milestone that can’t actually hold it.
My real sources of joy were never tied to a bank account anyway. They are tied to
- Knowing God.
- A quiet conscience.
- The people I love.
- Watching myself build capacity I didn’t have a year ago.
- Helping someone fight an addiction they didn’t choose.
- Living on purpose instead of drifting.
God knows what’s in my life and in my wallet before I even ask him about either one.
Cheers to week 25, storm and fire and water and all, still going.
If you’re building from zero too, this is what it actually looks like some weeks. Not a straight line. I’m not writing this because I’ve arrived anywhere. I’m writing it because I’m a living proof that you can keep building without having arrived, one day at a time, the same way I’ve done the last 175 days.
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