One · The penalty box
Somebody trips in the box.
You know the scene even if you have never played. Somebody goes down in the penalty area, arms out, appealing. And before the referee can decide anything, half the pitch is already shouting.
Because it turns out the man who fell had been holding a shirt thirty seconds earlier. And the man who fouled him had been offside before that. Everybody has done something. Everybody saw everybody.
So the verdict arrives, and it arrives from the players, not the referee: ojoro cancel ojoro.
You cheated. I cheated. They cancel. Play on.
And everybody agrees, because everybody is implicated, and the game continues, and somebody scores at the other end eight minutes later and it is forgotten.
But I want to stop the tape there, because there is a question underneath that nobody in the box is asking.
What actually got settled?
Nothing. Not one thing. Two wrongs did not become right. They became unexamined. The cancellation was a social agreement to stop looking. It let the game go on. It did not make anybody a better player.
That is the phrase I have been carrying for a while now, and I have come to think it describes something much larger than football.
Ojoro cancel ojoro is not a resolution. It is an agreement to stop looking.
Two · Can I be honest
Can I be honest? Don’t answer that.
Because somewhere right now, someone is paying for knowledge they have no intention of using, and calling it an investment.
I saw a comment on TikTok a while ago that stopped me mid-scroll. Someone was in the replies of a digital marketing course creator, frustrated that the course hadn’t worked. Hadn’t worked. As in: they had bought it. They just hadn’t done it.
And listen, I am not here to shame anybody. Life gets busy. Tabs stay open. Good intentions are genuinely real, and I have a folder of them.
But there is a specific kind of magical thinking that has taken root, and it goes like this:
If I pay for the thing, I become the thing.
Credibility does not work like that. Neither does skill. Neither does judgement. And I stayed with that comment much longer than it deserved, because I recognised something in it that I did not want to recognise.
The person in that comment section was not lazy. That is the part everybody gets wrong. They had found the course. They had paid for it. They had shown up in the replies to complain, which is itself work, of a kind.
They were not avoiding effort. They were avoiding a particular kind of effort. And I know exactly which kind, because it is the same kind I avoid.
Three · The word
Ojoro is a Yoruba word that came into Pidgin and never left.
Òjóró. Cheating. Fraud. Foul play. It travelled from Yoruba into Nigerian Pidgin the way a lot of our best words did: sideways, through the street and the pitch and the playground, picking up texture as it went.
It lives most vividly in football. That ref dey do ojoro. It is not a courtroom word. It is not formal. It is the word you shout, and that matters, because the phrase belongs to games, to the places where rules are held by the people playing rather than by an institution.
Which is precisely why ojoro cancel ojoro exists as a rule at all.
When there is no referee, or the referee has lost the room, you need a mechanism for continuing. Somebody cheated, somebody else cheated, and rather than unpick it, you cancel and play on. It is a genuinely elegant piece of social engineering. It keeps the game alive.
But notice what it does. It is a rule for dissolving consequence. Its whole function is to make sure nobody has to answer for anything.
And a rule like that is fine for a Saturday afternoon.
It is a catastrophe for a life.
Four · A necessary correction
I want to be very clear: I am not against shortcuts.
Let me say this early, because otherwise you will read the rest of this as a lecture about diligence, and it isn’t one.
I take shortcuts. Constantly. I have a body that requires it. There are days when my hundred per cent is thirty minutes, and thirty minutes does not permit the scenic route. I have built an entire practice on the premise that most struggle is unnecessary and should be engineered out.
The name of my philosophy is NO GraGra. No unnecessary struggle. No frantic grabbing. If there is a faster way and it does not cost you anything real, take the faster way. Please. Somebody has already solved it; use their solution. That is not cheating, that is literacy.
So no, this is not an essay about how you should be suffering more.
It is an essay about which struggle was necessary, and the fact that we have almost entirely lost the ability to tell.
Because here is what I notice about the word unnecessary. It is doing enormous work in my own philosophy, and it is the word everybody skips over. NO GraGra does not say no struggle. It says no unnecessary struggle. Which requires you to have decided, on purpose, which struggle was load-bearing.
Most people have never made that decision. They have just noticed that struggle is unpleasant and optimised accordingly.
Five · The line
You can shortcut the doing. You cannot shortcut the knowing.
This is the whole distinction and it took me an embarrassingly long time to arrive at it.
A shortcut in execution saves you effort on something you already understand.
A shortcut in formation saves you the understanding itself.
The first one is intelligence. The template, the tool, the delegation, the person who has done it before: all of that is you refusing unnecessary struggle, and it is correct.
The second one is ojoro. And it does not feel any different in the moment. That is the trouble. Both feel like efficiency. Both feel clever. Both produce something you can show people by Friday.
So here is the test I use, and it takes about four seconds.
Could I rebuild this without the shortcut?
If yes, it was efficiency. You own the thing; you simply declined to do it the slow way this time.
If no, you did not build anything. You rented a result, and the rent is still running.
The template you could have written yourself is a tool. The template you could not have written yourself is a costume.
Same file. Completely different object. And only you know which one you are holding, which is why nobody else can catch this for you.
Six · The microwave
We were sold speed, and we bought it wholesale.
I want to be fair to my generation and the one behind it, because the appetite did not come from nowhere. It was sold to us, relentlessly, by people with something to gain.
Six figures in six months. Ten thousand followers in thirty days. The five-step system. The one thing that changed everything. Just do this, and it will come.
And the reason that promise works, the reason it will keep working long after this essay, is that it is not entirely a lie. That is what makes it so difficult to argue with.
Some things really are that fast now. Distribution is fast. Publishing is fast. Finding your first ten customers is faster than it has ever been in the history of commerce. The tools are extraordinary and I use all of them.
The lie is not that speed exists. The lie is that speed generalises.
We watched the delivery mechanism get faster and we concluded that everything got faster. But the things that got faster were all transmission: getting a thing from here to there. Nothing about formation changed. Judgement still takes the same number of years it took your grandmother. Taste still requires being wrong publicly a hundred times. Knowing which client to decline still requires having accepted the wrong one and lived through it.
You cannot download that. There is no version of that available on a payment plan.
So we have ended up with a generation of people, and I include myself, who can deliver faster than they can think. Who have world-class transmission attached to under-built judgement. And the gap between those two things is exactly where ojoro lives.
Everything about delivery got faster. Nothing about becoming got faster at all.
Seven · The thing nobody says
The person doing ojoro is working extremely hard.
This is the part I most want you to take, and it is the reason this essay is not about discipline.
We picture the shortcut-taker as idle. Lounging. Waiting for it to fall in. That person barely exists.
The person doing ojoro is exhausted. She is up at six. She has three drafts of the offer. She has rebuilt the website twice this quarter and redesigned the logo again. She is posting daily. She is in four communities. She has bought the course, and the second course, and she is genuinely, visibly, admirably busy.
She is doing gragra, and it is worth knowing that gragra is a Yoruba word too, gìrà gìrà, that came into Pidgin exactly the way ojoro did. Frantic, forceful, showy motion. All the flash. Sparkle everywhere.
And underneath all of it, the two or three basic things she is actually supposed to be doing have not been touched in eleven months.
So gragra and ojoro are not opposites. They are the same person. They are what one person looks like from the outside and the inside on the same afternoon.
And once you see why, you cannot unsee it: effort goes where the feedback is fastest.
Redesigning the logo gives you a result in an hour. Getting genuinely better at the thing you sell gives you a result in eighteen months, quietly, with nobody clapping. Of course the effort migrates. It is not a character flaw. It is a perfectly rational response to a system that only rewards what it can see immediately.
Which is why willpower has never once fixed this, and why I stopped treating it as a discipline problem years ago. You do not have a motivation deficit. You have effort pointed at the visible thing and absence at the invisible one, and the invisible one is the one becoming you.
Eight · The mechanism
It doesn’t cancel. It defers.
Back to the penalty box, because now we can answer the question properly.
Ojoro cancel ojoro promises symmetry. Two wrongs, neutralised, nobody owes anything. And in a football match that is roughly true, because the match ends at ninety minutes and the cheating does not compound.
Your work is not a match. Your work is a structure, and structures have load.
The foundational skills are not a stage you pass through and leave behind. They are the substrate every later thing rests on. Which means when you skip one, you have not removed it from the building. You have moved it to a later date, and added interest.
And here is the cruelty of the timing. The bill never arrives while things are small and quiet and easily fixed. It arrives at scale. It arrives when you finally have the room, the client, the platform, the contract you spent four years trying to get.
The pricing conversation you avoided learning at three clients arrives at thirty, in front of somebody who matters.
The fundamentals you skipped because the shortcut worked arrive on the one project where the shortcut does not apply.
The hard conversation you have never had once arrives with someone who can end you.
And it is always harder then. Not marginally. Categorically harder, because now you are learning a foundational skill under load, in public, with consequences attached, at an age where people assume you already know. There is no beginner’s grace left. You used it. You spent it on the years when nobody was watching and you were doing gragra instead.
That is what I mean when I say ojoro makes the work more difficult later. Not as a warning. As arithmetic.
Nine · The boring work
And yes, it is genuinely boring. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
There is a version of this essay that tells you the foundational work is secretly thrilling if you approach it with the right mindset. That version is dishonest and you would know immediately.
It is boring. That is not a framing problem. That is the actual texture of it.
It is the same handful of things, repeatedly, without applause, for a length of time nobody specifies in advance. It is unwitnessed. It has almost no feedback loop, which means for long stretches you cannot tell whether it is working. And that, not the tedium, is the genuinely hard part. Boredom you can sit through. Uncertainty about whether the boredom is productive is what makes people leave.
It also looks like nothing. There is no post in it. You cannot show anybody. And in an economy where visibility functions as proof of life, work that produces nothing visible feels perilously close to not existing.
So people do not skip the boring work because they are weak. They skip it because it is the only work that offers no evidence you are doing it.
Naming that honestly is the only thing that has ever helped me. Not motivation. Motivation is for things that are interesting. You do not need to want to do it. You need to have decided that it is load-bearing, and then stopped renegotiating.
Slow first. Then precise. The order has never been decorative. It is the instruction. Precision is what the slow part produces, and if you take the slowness out you do not get precision faster. You get speed with nothing underneath it.
Ten · What it actually costs
You cannot own what you did not build.
This is where it stops being about productivity, and becomes the thing I actually care about.
Everything I do sits on one distinction: independence is freedom from. Autonomy is ownership of. And ownership is not a feeling. It is the position of being the one who decides, and who can answer for it.
Which means ojoro does not cost you a result. It costs you the ownership of the result.
Look at what you can and cannot do with a rented outcome. You cannot adapt it, because you do not know which parts were load-bearing. You cannot defend it, because you cannot explain why it is built that way. You cannot rebuild it when it breaks, and it will break, because everything does. And you cannot teach it, which is the cleanest test I know: you can only teach what you actually built.
So the person who bought the course and did not do it did not fail at discipline. They did something more specific. They attempted to purchase a version of themselves.
And you cannot buy that. Not because the universe is stern about it, but because there is no transaction that installs judgement. Judgement is the residue of having done a thing badly and stayed to find out why.
Which is exactly why the boring work is not a tax on autonomy. It is autonomy: the part where you become someone who can decide, rather than someone waiting for the next person with a system.
Skip it and you stay in the position I have written about before: outsourced. Not lost. Not lazy. Just permanently dependent on whoever built the thing you are standing on, because you never learnt to build it and cannot fix it when it goes.
Eleven · The box, again
Play on. But somebody still can’t defend.
Return to the penalty area one last time. Everybody is shouting. Ojoro cancel ojoro. The referee waves it away. The game continues, and honestly, it should. You cannot stop a match every time someone is dishonest.
But nothing was settled and everybody knows it. Nobody learnt anything. And the man who has been cheating all season, quietly, in small ways, because he never properly learnt to defend: he still cannot defend. The cancellation covered it for another week. It did not teach him.
Eventually he plays somebody good, and there is no shirt to hold, and it is all visible at once.
So I am not telling you to stop taking shortcuts. Take them. Take more of them than you currently do. Most struggle really is unnecessary and you are probably suffering through things a template would solve this afternoon.
I am telling you to know which struggle you are removing.
Skip the effort. Never skip the formation. And when you cannot tell the difference, which is most of the time, because they feel identical, ask the four-second question. Could I rebuild this without it?
Everything you can rebuild, you own. Everything else, you are renting.
And the rent is still running.
- What is the boring work I have been doing gragra to avoid?
- Which of my results could I not rebuild from scratch, and what happens when that one breaks?
- What did I once decide was unnecessary struggle, that was actually the whole thing?
Ojoro, from the Yoruba òjóró: cheating, foul play. Gragra, from the Yoruba gìrà gìrà: frantic, forceful motion.
Written slowly. As it should be. NO GraGra: slow first, then precise.
