January Notes: Reading in the Age of AI, Backing Myself Again, and Inputs Thinking

Started the year with a quick hop to Marrakesh for OG’s birthday. It was great fun to be there during AFCON 2025.

While January often feels long after the festivities of December, this one has passed rather quickly for me. It’s not often that I arrive at the end of January with the same energy I started the year with, but that’s the case this year. I’m excited and very grateful to still wake up feeling like every day is a fresh start.

Here are a few things I’ve been thinking about this January.

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First, a quick reflection on reading and writing in the age of AI-written text. As a self-diagnosed addict to endless scrolling formats, I accepted this month that there are no safe levels of Instagram usage for me and finally kicked the app off my phone. It joined Twitter as a social network I can only access from devices I keep at home.

Losing Instagram led me to spend more time this month reading short-form writing, by which I mean blogposts and essays on sites like Medium and Substack. I began noticing an interesting pattern in the essays I read beyond the first few paragraphs: they were increasingly those where the author was discussing experiences that were uniquely theirs. With all the AI slop on the internet these days, I found myself far less interested in generic how-to-do-this or how-to-become-that or “21 things X type of people do” essays. …Again by Tope Owolabi, where she reflects on the long arc of aspiration and the importance of continuing to show up even after years of waiting, and Detty December is A Psyop by Sade Onabowale, which dissects how perceptions of Lagos’s December culture reveal deeper social, economic, and class dynamics around experience and idealisation, were two of my favourites.

The barrier to good writing has disappeared and original content is becoming scarcer. I think this means readers will gravitate towards content that is (or seems to be) more obviously human and authentic.

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This month, I’ve also been seeing the returns from a conscious effort over the past several months to dream big and back myself again.

Fourteen years ago, in my final interview for an internship at Procter & Gamble, I was asked what I knew about Purchasing. I didn’t know much at all. I’d applied to the general internship intake and hadn’t been given a heads-up on which team was interviewing me, so I hadn’t prepared for the question. After a brief pause to collect my thoughts, I told my interviewer what I did know: that purchasing was about buying the goods and services the company needed. Then I went a step further. I told him I was an incredibly quick learner with a huge capacity for learning and doing, and that if I got into the programme, I’d know enough to hit the ground running by my first day.

I wouldn’t have used these words at the time, but I’d just backed myself. The interview was over a few minutes later, and I’d later learn that his decision to hire me had been made in that moment. By backing myself, I’d convinced him to do the same.

Losing loved ones has a way of forcing existential questions, and I was no exception. After losing my dad, I found myself quietly questioning the point of it all. Over time, that questioning began dulling my ambition and my appetite for trying big things. It was only while getting grief therapy, to help navigate the aftermath of a second loss (my brother’s), that I recognised something I hadn’t seen before. This way of thinking had helped me in the early days. It got me through the immediate aftermath of the loss. But I’d stayed there longer than I needed to, coasting in a comfort zone that had stopped being useful. If I wanted to regain the energy and sense of boundless possibility I once felt, I needed to start dreaming again, and backing myself to follow those dreams.

It’s striking how quickly those muscles can atrophy when you stop using them. Returning to dreaming big, occupying space, and betting on myself to do uncomfortable things has been a gradual process, but one that is certainly worth it. I’m glad with the progress I’ve made through January, and I’m looking forward to continuing it.

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Something about this scene made me imagine pulling up to February and opening it, like an Amazon box, to see what’s inside.

The last thing I wanted to share was something on goals and systems. With today being the last day of January, many people have already given up on some of their New Year’s resolutions. The excitement of a new year is fading and daily life is going back on autopilot.

If you’ve already given up on some of your resolutions, I’d suggest trying something different for February. Pick one or two things that really matter to you, but don’t obsess over the outcomes – the amount of money saved, the business launched, or the kilograms lost. Instead, focus on the inputs: the weekly extravagance you’ll cut, the number of potential customers you will speak to and when, or the minutes you’ll spend walking every day just after lunch.

Focus on the inputs and the systems, and let the outputs take care of themselves. Try this one thing in February.

Cheers to the weekend.