Unready, Unwilling, and Somehow Here

I’ll start this edition with an unfiltered truth.

I never liked marketing as a kid. And the idea of corporate work never appealed to me either, because I genuinely believed it wasn’t for me.

Here is the backstory. I studied Theatre Arts and Media. My entire life, to this day, is built around art and the creative world. Church dramas. School plays. Musical concerts. Theatre projects. Even into NYSC, because art is my core identity. I was one of the very few best graduating tripartite thespians back in theatre school, and I wore that with quiet pride.

So, how did I end up doing two of the things I never liked?

Simple. I figured that marketing was the best vehicle for putting my creativity to work and actually earning from it. And the corporate world? The corporate world didn’t ask for my opinion. It simply chose me when I was unready.

I started my marketing journey as a freelancer. Transitioning from freelancing into a structured corporate environment wasn’t easy. I had to figure out who I was inside a system I had never planned for and, more importantly, whether the version of me that had thrived on freedom could survive the corporate scene.

Freelancing gave me the first four letters of the word on a platter.
I was in charge of my time, my projects, and my pace. A typical day back then looked like this: wake up, do a home workout, work deeply until early afternoon, attend a few meetings, batch-create content, then head to the gym in the evening or stop by a friend’s place to decompress.

I’d say, “Yes, I am living the life.” Honestly, I was.

For a while, freelancing gave me financial independence, time freedom, and location flexibility. Imagine earning between $750 and $1,500 while working barely 15 hours a week. I shopped without looking at price tags. I turned down jobs that didn’t excite me. I answered to nobody, moved interstate at will, and called it a lifestyle.

I genuinely saw freelancing as my escape from the corporate idea I had always resisted.

Then came the albatross around my neck: a prolonged silence where clients had simply stopped coming.

Almost a full year of silence. Proposals going nowhere. LinkedIn pitches disappearing into the void. I went from being picky about clients to doing anything legitimate just to get paid. The same guy who once shopped without checking prices became scared to open his banking app in the morning.

That version of freedom had a different name. It was called survival.
The turning point didn’t arrive cleanly. It came in phases.

But before I get into that, here is the part that still makes me laugh whenever I remember it.

I found my way into the corporate world by screenshotting my LinkedIn profile and posting it on my WhatsApp status with the caption, “I am a digital marketer. All jobs can come in.”

That was my strategy. And it worked, just not in the way I expected.
A friend saw the post, reached out, and told me about an opening at his workplace.

I turned it down immediately.

The office was far from where I lived. I still had my freelancer ego firmly intact. “So, I will be waking up at 5 a.m. just to keep up with the pace of Lagos?” “I will lose my time freedom.” “What about my gym routine?” I was not ready to give any of that up.

Let me be honest with myself and with you. I was a broke guy doing shakara over a corporate work schedule.

My friend, to his credit, did not give up. He kept at it for almost two weeks. And then, in one quiet moment, I asked myself the only question that actually mattered.

What is the worst thing that could happen?

The answer changed everything.

I showed up.

The first few weeks took me completely by storm.

Almost everything felt unfamiliar. Reporting lines. Office politics. Timelines that belonged to the organisation, not to me. Having to translate creative instincts into boardroom language and formal presentations. People who sent follow-up emails. Actual calendars. Monday morning meetings that started on time, whether you were ready or not.

I suddenly became the guy who had to attend COPs, contribute to strategic planning sessions, and navigate the kind of structured collaboration that freelancing had never required of me.

The contrast between the life I had left and the life I had entered stopped being an idea and became my daily reality.

For a while, I kept fighting it.

Then I stopped.

Not because the structure became less demanding, but because I realised something. The discipline I had been resisting was the same thing I had been lacking. Freelancing gave me freedom but no scaffolding. Corporate life gave me scaffolding I didn’t know I needed.

I stopped fighting the structure and started utilising it.

Here is what I know now that I couldn’t have learned any other way.
Freelancing gives you freedom. That part is real, and it is valuable. But freedom without structure can quietly become a ceiling. The corporate world gave me something different: sustainability, accountability, feedback loops, career capital, and exposure to people and rooms I would not have accessed on my own.

The corporate space opened doors I did not knock on myself. I met people who carry genuine weight, attended high-level events, and grew in ways that were happening quietly, even when I wasn’t showing up loudly online.
Things may not always go according to plan. But whatever situation you find yourself in, the move is to figure out how to use it.

I wasn’t ready for the corporate world.

But the corporate world wasn’t waiting for me to be ready.

And somewhere between that WhatsApp status and a Monday morning meeting I didn’t ask for, I became someone I wouldn’t trade back.