2025

It’s been a while since I’ve written an annual review. I wrote my first one in 2016 but stopped after 2021. But as I wrote then, “writing these reviews each year really helps me put the year in perspective. I feel one way about how the year went before I start writing, and differently after.”

Like last time, I am using James Clear’s format for annual reviews and answering three questions:

1. What went well this year?
2. What didn’t go so well this year?
3. What did I learn?

What went well this year?

I graduated from my MBA at INSEAD 🎓 ! This was definitely the biggest achievement of the year. The MBA at INSEAD is intense to say the least but it was undeniably a transformative experience for me as I grew in so many ways.

Academically, I had a goal coming into the program which was to seriously level up my business and financial literacy, and I can confidently say I achieved this. Consequently, I became more confident in myself and my skills. When you’re in a room with a lot of really intelligent people and able to hold your own and bring something to the table, it helps. Finally, I built a new community. As an introverted person, I was worried about if I would be able to make new friends on the program, but I’m happy to say I have made a lot of life-long friends around the world.

Travel ✈️ . This was a bit of a double-edged sword (which I’ll talk more about in the next section), but I did a lot of travel this year. I visited 10 countries in total, a lot of them on multiple visits. According to Flighty, I took 23 flights and travelled 2.6x around the world 😅 . My favourite trips were:

1. My honeymoon in the Maldvies, the most relaxed I have ever been in my life
2. My trip to Singapore, my first time in South Asia
3. The Ghana/Nigeria trip I co-organised for my INSEAD classmates, which I wrote about as it gave me a completely different perspective on my home country

Completed batch 6 of my Udacity Scholarship 🎓. This started last year, where we gave 12 Nigerian women scholarships to complete a Udacity Nanodegree of their choice within 6 months. Of those, 11 women successfully completed their Nanodegrees and have gone on to break into or elevate their careers in tech.

I started writing again ✍🏾 . I wrote just one article last year, which is the least I have done in the past 10 years. So once I completed my MBA, I knew I wanted to get back into writing again. Since re-launching my newsletter, I’ve written 6 articles and I look forward to continuing the momentum next year.

I also started speaking again 🎤. I had to take a break over most of the last year due to the MBA, but managed three events this year - Moonshot in Lagos, a Google Developer Groups Meetup in Lagos, and an INSEAD Africa Initiative event.

Reading 📚. I managed to read a lot of great quality books this year. In case you missed it, I wrote about my top 3 here.

What didn’t go so well this year?

Health 😷. So I mentioned that the travel was a double-edged sword, and it definitely took a toll on me this year. The travel, alongside having an intense year with study and work (at one point I was simultaneaously doing two internships while still at the MBA!), resulted in me having a number of health-related issues this year. I even had surgery for the first time which was wild.

Gratefully, I have recovered, and over the last couple of months I’ve had a new focus on my health and wellbeing. I’m now at the best level of fitness and wellbeing I have been in all year, I even closed the year out with a 10k race.

My progress with Yoruba 🇳🇬. I have a real mental block with learning languages, I feel like I am terrible at them. I have been trying to improve my Yoruba for a while and continued that this year, but I don’t feel like I was able to dedicate as much time to this as I would have liked and so have not made as much progress as I would have liked. Given what I mentioned with feeling stressed and the health issues, I do try to give myself some grace here as I have been able to be relatively consistent with my lessons. But I hope to be in a much better position next year.

What did I learn?

My north star 🌟. In a previous article, I wrote about how the hardest part of my career journey has been figuring out exactly what I want to do. One thing the MBA experience really helped me with was in reflecting on and refining my “north star”. I now have a much clearer view of what I want to dedicate the next few years of my professional life to, and look forward to executing on it.

What burnout feels like for me 😖. This was the first year I experienced real burnout and realised that I can’t actualy operate like a robot. I tend to not know I’m burnt out until my body breaks down because mentally I feel like I can do anything. But this year I learned that I need to be more intentional about rest, at least as much as I am about action.

Next year, I have a yearly theme I call “The Year of Grounding”. This to me means literally being on the ground (so less flights 😅), but also setting roots as I navigate moving to a new country (and continent!). Wish me luck!