For most of my professional life, I’ve been good at sales. Not in the “run ads and close the funnel” kind of way. I mean real sales—1-to-1 conversations, building trust, closing value.
But there’s a catch. I was trained as a lawyer in Nigeria.
Six years of legal education and fifteen years of practice shape you. And one thing it instills, deeply and repeatedly, is this:
Do not tout.
Do not self-promote.
Do not act in a way that brings disrepute to the profession.
We call it being “fit and proper.”
Rule 39 of the Rules of Professional Conduct makes this very clear. A lawyer may only advertise if it is “fair and proper,” avoids misleading the public, does not brag, does not criticize other professionals, and is not so frequent as to become annoying. In other words: stay low, stay noble, stay silent.
The irony? These very taboos are the pillars of modern marketing.
Brag. Promote. Interrupt. Compare. Repeat.
So for years, I carried a quiet tension. As a product leader and studio head, I needed to market. But my internal compass—trained in restraint, integrity, and humility—kept saying: don’t be a tout.
It wasn’t about technical skill. I know how to market.
It was about identity.
Recently, I’ve begun to reflect on that identity. I asked myself:
What if you let it go? What if you just marketed without guilt?
The answer came quietly:
“You have nothing to lose.”
But then another voice followed:
Sure—except twenty years of self-image.
And that’s when it hit me: we don’t think in inversions.
We assert one side of a thought—but rarely flip it over.
“I have nothing to lose.”
But we don’t complete the mirror: “I have everything to gain.”
Clarity comes from contrast. You can't see the whole shape unless you flip it.
In every field of life, we live in assertions without opposites. We speak in positives and never consciously articulate their inverse truths.
You can’t really know what summer is without knowing winter.
Ask the residents of Dubai. Without contrast, concepts blur.
There is no clarity without inversion.
We admire courage, but forget it means facing fear.
We desire freedom, but rarely think about constraint.
We say “don’t fail”—but rarely ask what would guarantee failure.
And that’s the rewiring I’m doing. Not just learning to market—but learning to think in reverse.
Because inversion isn’t just a mental model. It’s a worldview.
One that lets you see the full shape of truth.
So yes—I have nothing to lose.
But more importantly, I have everything to gain.