What If Success Became the Product?

Something has changed in how young Nigerians are sold success. The people who now fill the space we used to give to businessmen are not always the ones building the biggest companies or shipping the most useful products. They’re coaches, influencers, speakers, mentors, creators. Their business is explaining how to win.

I’m not against that. Knowledge has value. Influence has value. Some of them have built real businesses too. But something odd happens when the story of success starts to matter more than the thing that made the success. You build something, people hear the story, you gather an audience, and then you find out that teaching people how to do what you did pays better than doing it again.

Now the loop starts. Your success proves you understand success. The money you make from selling that understanding proves your success even more. Eventually, someone who made money once can become famous mainly for teaching other people how to make money, even if nobody knows whether the formula works a second time.

The truth is, we underestimate how much luck and timing sit behind success. Capital. Relationships. Market conditions. Geography. Technology. Being early. Being lucky. Those things don’t make good content. “Wake up at 4 a.m. and follow these seven principles” makes good content. Admitting that several favourable things lined up at once does not.

Social media makes this harder to see. We see the cars, the houses, the holidays, the conferences, the photos with important people. We don’t see the balance sheets. We don’t see the failed businesses. We see the performance of wealth, not the work that produced it. And once enough people believe someone has figured life out, that belief itself becomes an asset. You can monetise it through courses, communities, seminars, mentorship, speaking gigs.

In Africa, this matters even more. We still need a lot of hard, boring, unglamorous work. Factories. Payment systems. Logistics. Technology companies. Export businesses. The people quietly building those things may never become influencers. They may not have time to explain their morning routine or sell a framework. But their work can shape the economy far more than the person who has mastered the art of talking about entrepreneurship.

That doesn’t mean influence is worthless. It doesn’t mean people shouldn’t pay for expertise. It just means we should be careful about what we accept as proof of expertise. Succeeding once is not the same as understanding success. So when someone is presented as exceptionally successful, don’t just ask, “How much have they made?” Ask, “What did they actually build? What was their role? Could they do it again? What did they get wrong?”

In an economy built on attention, looking successful can be a very successful business. The trick is not to confuse that with building something that lasts.