I get this question a lot from many young people: “Dangote, Elumelu, Ovia, etc did not graduate as #1 of their respective classes, but they are billionaires. How do you reconcile that?” Let me try.
First, your classroom and the markets have different exams. That you got an A in calculus does not mean you will get an A in customer satisfaction on selling noodles. Simply, what worked for you in school may not necessarily translate directly in business to push you to #1 in your “business class”. Simply, grades are largely meaningless, what matters is the process to the grades!
Yes, that you got an A in UniversityA and end up with a First Class does not mean you can even graduate in UniversityB which has a different standard. In secondary school, I was not the smartest student in my class, but I felt I was the hardest working kid. What talent could not deliver, hardwork helped. If reading Modern Biology four times is a way to get A in Biology, so be it. (One of my teachers nicknamed me “oku na egbu akwukwo” [the fire that destroys books])
Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 16 (Feb 10 – May 3, 2025) opens registrations; register today for early bird discounts.
Tekedia AI in Business Masterclass opens registrations here.
Join Tekedia Capital Syndicate and invest in Africa’s finest startups here.
I took the same bookworm mentality to university. Some of my classmates could get B without any effort but I put an extreme level of effort for A. In both cases, I was the best, but that did not mean I was the smartest or most talented. Not even close: the smartest kid I met in FUT Owerri did not finish the first year because he was too lazy and non-challant to even know the venues of exams. When he failed MTH 101 and PHY 101, they kicked him out.
So, for Ovia, Elumelu, Dangote, etc you have to look at their processes, and not the grades. Largely, over the long-term horizon in life, a student who worked hard and made a C is better than one who did not put in the effort but made a B. Why? The C student possibly had a better process, and that process will serve him or her later in life, over the talented one who will remain frozen if he/she does not change the old processes.
Get it from me: companies hire high graders not because of the grades, but because for them to have made good grades, they had the right processes, to aim and achieve. If those students retain those processes, they could turn out well as work.
So, in summary, focus on developing the right processes of hard work, tenacity and maximal efforts. Those are universal for success irrespective of the short-term outcome like school grades. If you put in your best, the process will serve you well in life irrespective of the outcome of your grade.
[Let me close with this ancestral Igbo proverb: agwa ogbenye ihe eji abu ogaranya, o si ka ya buru ogbenye ya bu. (If you tell a poor person what it takes to be rich, he will possibly accept to remain on his poor status). Go to a Business Retreat with any of these men and see if you can hold on. I had a 4-day retreat with one. We closed at 1am and he said we should resume at 4am for the next day.]
Of course, this is not to say that you do not need good grades. Good grades matter!
---
Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA (Feb 10 - May 3, 2025), and join Prof Ndubuisi Ekekwe and our global faculty; click here.
Your answer is also academic, which will work well for young people who aspire to excel in their careers as employees, but not as entrepreneurs or business tycoons. You basically go to school to learn how to make logical choices and organize your processes, you do not learn how to innovate or invent by going to school. Innovation is a product of passion, management is a product of reason; what you go to business school to learn is the latter, and not the former.
So, to be able to achieve and surpass what the guys you admire have done, you should be able to know how to address a need or create a want. When you can successfully do that and validate same, you can now identify talents who have been trained to run things to help you scale your mission. There’s no other way.
You cannot outsource or model passion, and if you cannot crack that passion code, just polish your CV and go look for a job; it simply means that you cannot become a business mogul. By the time you work for some time, it’s possible that you could develop the ability to crack the passion code, then you can once again try to address a need or create a want and see how the market responds.
No textbook practice on how to become a successful billionaire…