OJI

Since religion is such a touchy subject, navigating it requires tact and subtlety.

Two people walk into a room. One raises her hands and prays loud enough for the back row to take notice. The other stretches out his hand and asks loud enough for the whole street to take notice. Different rooms, different scripts, same opening move: look at me, and give me something for it.

I’ve written about both of these people separately — the performer of piety, and the professional beggar. What I didn’t say clearly enough the first two times is that they’re not two different problems. They’re the same problem wearing two different costumes, and the costume department is leadership. Or more precisely, the absence of it.

The Believer’s Hustle

I wrote a piece asking what most of us actually want — to be righteous, or to be seen as righteous — and landed on an uncomfortable answer: mostly the second one. We pray loud in public and cut corners in private, because loud public prayer pays out immediately (nods, “Amens,” a reputation) while quiet private integrity pays out slowly, invisibly, sometimes never in a way anyone claps for. Given the choice between an instant reward and a delayed one, most humans — not bad humans, just humans — will take the instant one every time. That’s not a spiritual failing. That’s an incentive structure working exactly as designed.

The Beggar’s Hustle

Same math, different setting. I’ve also written about a culture where public need became a career — where showing up empty-handed and desperate-looking gets you further than showing up early and useful ever will. Nobody plans to become a professional beggar the way nobody plans to become a professional performer of piety. It happens one transaction at a time: you ask, you receive, the ask worked, so you ask again. Eventually the asking is the plan. The tragedy isn’t that people beg. It’s that somewhere along the way, begging quietly out-earned working, and nobody in charge noticed, or cared enough to fix the math.

Same Root, Two Weeds

Here’s the thread connecting all three pieces, and it’s the one I keep coming back to: behavior is not an accident. It is designed, whether anyone intended to design it or not. I’ve argued elsewhere that societies get exactly the behavior their incentive structures pay for — reward the queue-jumper and you’ll get a nation of queue-jumpers; reward the visible beggar over the invisible hustler and you’ll get a nation of visible beggars; reward the loudest pray-er over the quietest integrity and you’ll get a nation of loud pray-ers with quiet compromises.

None of these are character flaws in “us.” They’re leadership vacuums, and human nature — endlessly resourceful, mildly feral, never one to leave free money on the table — simply moved into the space nobody was guarding.

Small joke, big point: give a culture a loophole, and it will build an entire cathedral in it. Complete with a choir.

What Actually Works — And Why It’s Uncomfortable

I keep bringing up Nigeria’s War Against Indiscipline under the Buhari/Idiagbon government, and I’ll bring it up one more time, because it’s the cleanest proof I have of the alternative. Queue-jumping didn’t stop because Nigerians had a sudden, unprompted change of heart about fairness. It stopped because the consequence for jumping the queue became immediate, visible, and consistent — candy for compliance, cane for the alternative — and the reward for performing your way around the system quietly disappeared. Nobody needed a sermon. They needed a system that no longer paid out for the behavior it claimed to discourage.

That’s the uncomfortable part for anyone who’d rather talk about culture, character, or faith than about design: you don’t fix performance culture — religious or economic — by asking people to be more sincere. Sincerity doesn’t scale. Consequences do. You fix it by making the real version of the behavior pay better than the performed version, consistently, publicly, and without exceptions for people with the right connections or the loudest “Amen.”

The Part, I’m Actually Asking You

So, here’s where I land, and it’s less comfortable than a tidy conclusion usually is: every time you reward the appearance of something over the substance of it — the loudest prayer over the quietest integrity, the most desperate ask over the most consistent effort — you are, whether you meant to or not, doing leadership. Bad leadership, but leadership. You are teaching the room what gets paid.

The question isn’t whether you’re “in charge” of anything official. Most of us aren’t. The question is what you clapped for last week, what you gave money to on the street corner, what impressed you on a timeline — because that’s the vote you cast for what kind of culture gets built next, one small transaction at a time, exactly the way it always has been.

Same hustle. Different altar. One root cause, and it’s been sitting in plain sight in all three of these pieces the whole time.

If this made you think, subscribe & recommend.

TheReciprocist

By OJI — The Reciprocist

Civilization doesn’t survive on goodwill. It survives on behavior architecture. Leave a human being entirely to their own impulses and they will, with real creativity, stretch, bend, or quietly dismantle any system you put in front of them — not because people are villains, but because human nature is exploratory, opportunistic, and frankly a little bit feral. Give a man a rope and he will test its weight limit for you, free of charge, without being asked.

This is why leadership exists.

Leadership isn’t inspiration. It isn’t charisma, and it definitely isn’t a “vision statement” in a glossy brochure nobody reads past page two. Leadership is response-ability — a word I’ve used before on this newsletter and I’m not done using it — the capacity to anticipate how people will actually behave, design structures that guide that behavior, and enforce standards that keep the whole thing functional. Every society that’s actually thriving is run by leaders who understand one uncomfortable truth:

Behavior does not change by accident. It changes by design.

Here are the core functions of leadership in shaping — and modifying — how a society behaves.

1. Leadership Must Anticipate Human Misuse

If something can be misused, someone is already working on it. If something can be broken, consider it broken. If a loophole exists, somebody has already climbed through it wearing a suit, and somebody else is right behind them in flip-flops.

Effective leadership starts by assuming this, not being shocked by it.

Ever notice grocery carts that lock their own wheels the second you roll them past the parking lot line? That’s not paranoia. That’s a designer who sat down, thought about human nature for exactly four seconds, and built the correction into the cart itself instead of hiring someone to stand in the lot and yell.

Same logic, higher stakes: the bench at a bus stop in most developed cities is intentionally uncomfortable. Not cruelty — foresight. A comfortable bench becomes a bed. A bed becomes shelter. Shelter becomes a settlement nobody planned or budgeted for. The actual problem was never the person who needed to sleep. The problem was a designer who didn’t think two steps ahead.

Leadership anticipates misuse and builds systems that shrug it off before it starts.

2. Leadership Must Engineer the Environment

Social engineering gets a bad reputation it doesn’t fully deserve. Done right, it isn’t manipulation — it’s civilization management.

Barriers. Fences. Narrow pathways. Choke points with someone actually watching them. None of that is oppression dressed up in concrete. It’s order, wearing its work clothes. When movement is structured, behavior gets predictable. When behavior is predictable, a society becomes governable instead of merely hopeful.

This is why functioning societies quietly rely on:

• uncomfortable benches

• barbed wire in the places that actually need it

• higher fences around anything sensitive

• monitored crossings

• pathways that only go where they’re supposed to

None of that is decoration. It’s behavior, poured in concrete.

3. Leadership Must Enforce Consequences Consistently

Behavior modification runs on one unglamorous fuel: predictable consequences.

Idiagbon proved it during the War Against Indiscipline. Under the Buhari/Idiagbon military government in Nigeria, Nigerians formed orderly queues almost overnight — not because a switch flipped in the national character, but because the system rewarded standing in line and punished cutting it. Candy or cane. The incentive was obvious, and — this is the part people skip — the consequence never wavered. That consistency did more civic education in a few months than a decade of “please be more orderly” posters ever managed.

Leadership has to build systems where good behavior is rewarded, bad behavior is discouraged, and enforcement is visible enough that everyone, not just the unlucky ones who get caught, actually believes it’s real.

Without consequences, rules are just suggestions with better fonts.

4. Leadership Must Shape Public Conversation

Commentators love a symptom. Corruption, disorder, inefficiency — great headlines, mediocre analysis. Nobody clicks on “structural design flaw identified,” even though that’s usually the actual story.

Leadership has to drag public conversation somewhere more useful:

• What design flaw let this happen in the first place?

• What environmental change would make it structurally harder to repeat?

• What incentive is missing that would make the right behavior the easy behavior?

When public discourse graduates from outrage to actual solution architecture, a society starts acting like an adult.

5. Leadership Must Build Tools That Reinforce Order

Modern leadership isn’t only policy. Increasingly, it’s infrastructure — the kind you can actually click on.

Digital tools reinforce the same principles offline leadership relies on: clarity, trust, accountability. This is exactly the gap TapApprove.com, EditwithNeo.com, and TapPreview.com were built to close — transparent approvals, precision writing, credible previews. Not conveniences. Behavioral stabilizers. They reduce friction, raise trust, and make workflows predictable — which is the exact foundation every orderly system, digital or civic, is quietly built on.

6. Leadership Must Model the Behavior It Expects

People copy what they watch, not what they’re told. Nobody has ever been lectured into discipline by someone who visibly doesn’t have any.

When leaders show up disciplined, clear, and structurally minded, that behavior gets absorbed downstream, often without anyone noticing it happening. When leaders behave recklessly, the whole system learns that recklessness is apparently the actual policy.

Leadership is a mirror. The public just reflects back whatever’s standing in front of it.

7. Leadership Must Institutionalize Behavior Over Time

Behavior modification isn’t a launch event. It’s a cultural installation, and installations need maintenance.

Systems have to be documented, repeated, reinforced, updated, and protected — in that order, and continuously, because the moment you stop tending a system, human nature quietly starts renovating it without a permit.

When behavior becomes institutional, it becomes tradition. When tradition becomes identity, a society finally becomes stable. Leadership is the architect of that whole staircase.

Conclusion: Leadership Is Behavioral Engineering

Society isn’t held together by hope. It’s held together by design, incentives, consequences, communication, tools, and culture. Leadership is the architect of all six, whether or not it ever gets credit for the blueprint.

When leaders understand that their actual job is behavior modification, they stop reacting to chaos and start preventing it. They stop complaining about human nature and start designing for it — the way you’d design a bench, or a queue, or a grocery cartwheel, for the humans you actually have instead of the well-behaved ones you wish you’d been issued.

This is the leadership Africa needs. This is the leadership Nigeria deserves. This is the leadership that builds nations.

Let me hear from you.

TheReciprocist.com

OJI

Be Present

“I am here, and I believe that you should be there, where you are” That was the statement, I often start out with when we are engaged in executive leadership training. Most of the executives in the executive-coaching classes that we do overall in town sometimes do not actually get to understand the concept. “What?” some may ask, and sometimes I let it sink in a little before getting to work on it to everyone’s understanding

I know how difficult it is to be in the state of presence. It is still a hit or miss but I am getting better with each practice, and I must tell you; it is rewarding. The values I have gained so far. The natural principles and habits formed are felt immediately, and sometimes, they are felt at the end of the tunnel. The main purpose is to just be conscious of presence because you should feel and know it.

“It is not what you think it is,” said Eckhart Tolle in his widely acclaimed book that vividly presents being present in its objective form. It is not possible to think about presence, because the mind cannot understand what it is to stay in the present. The understanding of presence lies in being present, and how do you get to that destination? It takes a doing, it demands of you attitude of actions and present

By being there, you become a part of what is, and by participating you get in the mix of what will be. Refined participation, informed actions and checking results that are aligned with values that determine the results we get.

In one of the leadership pieces of training, a participant told a story of what he witnessed a long time ago. It is about progress in one’s circumstance, life, paradigm, philosophy, and values.

What do you do Now?

Two men were seated on a bench taking a rest at the loading dock of shipping and logistics company. It was their break period, and they had just finished their snacks and were waiting for the half hour break to be over. You know, just lounging, laughing everything off and making corny jokes when a luxury car pulled up. Their curiosity grew as to who was coming to the loading dock through the back entrance with such a fine car.

They looked at each other in wonderment. So many visitors drive up here in very fine cars but, they come in through the front entrance and park their cars at the visitors parking area.

Alighted from the car was a man with well-groomed greyed out bearded.

They noticed and admired the car, and it is the occupant, more so of the car than of the man that just came out of the automobile and was now walking towards to go use the backdoor that is already held open by two uniformed guardsmen.

Missed Chances

As the man walked past both middle-aged men he toned a familiarity greeting to one of the men, his name is Herold. “Hi Herold, how are you?”, the man said. “I am doing well Mr. George, long time! How are Debby and the kids?” Harold responded and asked in return. Mr. George went on to answer and ask, “They are all doing great, how is the family?” “The grandkids are getting older now, right?”. “Yes, they are, and we are all doing very well, thanks for asking” Herold replied, and as Mr. George walked past the guards that were holding the heavy brownish and freshly polished oak wooden door, he looked back at both men, waving at them he said; “Y’all take care now, you hear?” They both retorted, “and you too George/boss”

“Do you know who that is that you just …? I mean, do you really know that man that said hi to is?” Jeffery asked Harold. Gasping for air. “That is the Group General Manager of this company. He runs this great company, and I hear he has a private plane that gets him where he wants to go fast. And you just called him by name as if you knew him in the past” His eyes lightening up with excitement, his body quivers with the pride and swagger of a kid that may have just shaken the hands of his favorite sports hero.

“Yes, I do know who that man is, we came here together; the same day we were employed and we started out doing the same thing that you and I are doing now” Herold replied. His head hanging low, his gaze seeming far and his all-bubbly attitude a minute ago became withdrawn.

“You know, I don’t mean to ratchet it harder or something but, what happened? How come you are here all these while and he is up there? I must ask just know what happened so that I can make corrections if I am placed in that circumstance” Jeffery said to Harold as if he was actually making all attempts to distance himself from Harold.

The Body Tells the Story

He shifted from one cheek muscle to the other. Lifting his right thigh and placing his right-hand flat underneath and doing same to the left side as if in protest to how bad life has treated his friend for all these years. Muttering beneath his breath, he made a goiter audible that becomes a feeling of disdain for this company that he has grown to love after all this was the only company that gave him a chance when he got out of prison and couldn’t find a job.

Leadership Is Taking Action With Informed Philosophy

“You know Jeff!” Harold gently said. Still looking in the distance and the regrets of history visibly taking over him, the countenance of the face of this happy-go-lucky middle-aged tells all the stories there is about roads nothing, opportunities not sized and paradigm not shifted.

“When we got here! The time we got here after our interviews, selection, and orientation, and training” Harold said with a childish shines, fear and guilt. Pausing in between words and swallowing hard as if he was making every attempt to keep the breath of air that has just gone down is lungs down there.

The veins on his neck are all stretched now, and on a closer look, you will relatively the throbbing of his heart as it increases and you may actually sense the steady and rapid collision of blood platelets as they leave is the brain in search oxygenated mixture.

One Characteristic of Leadership is Initiative

“Jeff” Harold called out again. “When we got started out, Mr. George, the now present GGM came to work for the company with everything he got. He was here but I, for me, I came to work for three dollars and a quarter” “You know” he continued, “these things don’t go unnoticed”

Now, I want you to follow through with this exercise that I learned from the wonderful book about staying in presence. Close your eyes and loudly say to yourself: “I wonder what my next thought is going to be.” Now, become very alert and wait for the next thought. Be like a cat watching a mouse hole. What thought is going to come out of the mouse hole? Try it now.

Here, fill in what your thoughts are ………….

Leadership character is developed if you go, if you ask, if you seek and if you knock. I must tell you that staying in a state of intense presence opens and gets you ready for service right there and then where you are, to contribute where you are. You will find and helps you make a choice when you get to the two roads that diverged in a rough terrain. – It worked for me.

I just don’t write to make you think, I write to make you feel.

I’d love to have you here: thereciprocist.com

— “OJI”

An average Nigerian in Nigeria without question is a beggar. Yeap, I said it. We are it and you are one of us, period. Don’t jump off the hand rail yet and reserve your colorful language for some other times, the truth they say hurts; you position on the maturity gradient and self-truth should be high now for a good dose of patience to read through this material.

https://bit.ly/4c9UpS

C

There are everywhere, you know!

Have you had an opportunity to request a need or service from a person or business in Nigeria? Have you been accosted by an overzealous man or woman, uniformed or not that is willing to help you with doing little or nothing? I am sure that you have in one or two occasions. Come on! Am I alone here? I often get the “welcome sir” greetings, and the subsequent “Oga, we dey loyal ooh!” What about the “wetin you get for us na?” Behaviors of these sorts are blossoms of acts by which a person is characterized; Donald Trump is expected to be outrageous and if he starts making sense most of us will see that as out of character flaws. The very beautiful act of civility that is glorious in functional customer servicing is now a call for beggar-training 101. Hold your comments here now, okay; it seems like the old teaches the new and the new is responsible for returns and results at the end of the day. It is so seamless and assumingly symbiotic that has become a commonality of normalcy.

Is you money a Foreign Naira or local Dollar?

I am sure these acts maybe in the rear view mirrors of some of us with powers beyond the Naira level, they have bevies of road-clearers and may not be privy to the luxury of the harassment that comes next.

Who cares if you buy or not

Customer services pleasantries takes a hike as you walk into these seemingly respectable enterprises, you are greeted and attended to by some of those seeming stoics behind counter; they will gaze through you with threatening looks of displeasure. At first, the belief is that this person would rather be somewhere else; cordiality is entirely removed from services and the notable act of wooing a customer for repeat business relations was maybe left in the locker-room. You are left wondering what you did wrong and if you happen to be a first-time visitor and you are not shock proofed, guilt of act takes over.

Here the come!

With your bags in hand and nervous gaiety work to the door, “oga, wetin you get for us now?” is bemoaned through toothy smiles that call for long and continuous dental appointments. You are made to understand in one instance that arms giving are not charity or for the handicap, it is actually a demand and in one sweet swoop you will be told how hard life is “for this country” as if you have just tightened a thread or two on the difficulty screw. Starting from hunger and starvation to a need for help in sponsoring kids whom you did not take part in making through school – “Oga, help me na; money no dey to pay school fees I beg”. How did we get here? Okay, you think that is bad?

Who will protect you?

How about the hostage takers and the blackmailers. Ah; ah; ah! I am not talking about the rampant kidnappings of which the custodians of security in the nation could do little or nothing about. For the later, there is a name, and they are outrightly called criminals and maybe prosecuted if caught. Here, we have the uniformed-hostage-takers; these are the people upon which our safeties and securities are entrusted upon, and they are by no means in short supply. They are found in all of our commutable links. Airports entrances/exits and other motorways.

Just pinch you nose, take deep breath.

They actually are the worst and in my book the scum of the earth and if there is anything worse than my choice of words above, they are it. These are subhuman mongrels that grind your balls to a halt when you are most vulnerable; like a vampire, they will sink their teeth and fangs deep into your veins for the last droplets of blood. On your entrance into the country, they are aware that you are carrying foreign currency of which you may have earmarked for a purpose, the local currency is what you do not have and they that, now, how best to separate you with you hard earned foreign currency is what they are hard at for there and then.

Have seen fear and rolling laws?

On your exit out of the country too; you have some local spices that madam and you only have acquired the taste for growing up, and she had asked you by all means to bring some back, and that is another sure bet circumstance to get the last drop whatever it is that you have out of you. These ingredients that most of these uniformed hostage-takers may have just had, by all means, becomes a prohibited exportable product, a contraband that requires an MIT trained chemist for proof of chemical content. They will threaten you with jail term for possession an ingredient that they may just have availed themselves with or may have just eaten. Here, you are susceptible to all the verbal fear-lazed cajoles. You do not want to miss your flights, coupled with the fact that now you have little or no local currencies; all you have is probably little foreign currency you may have tucked away for coffee/sandwich at your transits or for taxi or trains at your final destinations; it is a need for you but they want it too.

Just Concur

That is what they want and you have to give it to them. I was told by one these guys that I will be made to stay in their office with my egusi/ogbonor over the weekend, as I was traveling on a Saturday, until Monday when the forensics and chemists will resume. That is the time the experts will be available to test these ingredients so as to make sure that it does not contain hard drugs. This was after a long frustration, and I decided to forgo the ingredients and board my flight to Frankfurt. Nobody cares if you have to walk, crawl or stay thirsty and hungry for the duration of your journeys that may span over 24 hours. That is not their concerns, they are here to collect and probably give returns at the end of the day. Selfishness, self-centered hypocrites, have no place in civilized societies.

Our Public Representative Officers at work

These are the faces of Nigeria, they give the first and probably the only impression of what our society is all about, and if these subhuman mongrels are allowed to continue telling our story, I wonder who will buy Nigeria. Where are the leaders, the managers, and supervisors of these herds? Who do you complain to and how do you reports these vices? Hello! Chain of command, where are you? Who makes these rules they adhere to, and who signed off on them? Well! You be the judge of our societal decisional considerations – leadership vacuum, you say?

Let me hear from you.

OJI

Responsibility. Say it slow and it splits right open: response-ability. The ability to respond. Not to respond well, necessarily — just to respond at all, to something.

To what, though? An action. A word someone said that’s still rattling around in your skull three days later. A person. A circumstance you didn’t order but got delivered anyway. Your own attitude, which — plot twist — is also just a response, to how you feel, which is itself a response to what you know, which is a response to whatever philosophy you’ve been quietly assembling out of every stray nugget of information you’ve absorbed since you were old enough to have opinions. It’s turtles all the way down, except the turtles are your personality and none of them asked to be there.

Not following yet? Good. Neither did I, the first fifty times I thought about it. Stick with me.

Here’s the part that isn’t optional: readiness is the actual diploma. Not the paper one. The one that says you’ve graduated from “someone things happen to” into “someone who handles things.” And once you’ve got it, the buck doesn’t just stop with you — it moves in, unpacks its bags, and starts paying rent.

The Tortoise, the Hare, and Uncle Ben

Aesop already called this one two and a half thousand years ago, and Spider-Man’s uncle summed up the stakes more recently: with great power comes great responsibility, and with great unpreparedness comes, generally, a great fall.

So — from the ground up. Everything you’ll ever face sorts into one of two bins: acute or chronic. Acute is the guy who says “it came out of nowhere,” and technically, for him, it did — he’s reacting on pure reflex, no time to think, and whatever happens next, he still owns the outcome. He just didn’t get to rehearse for it.

Chronic is different. Chronic is the hurdler. He’s known about this race for months. Every huddle on that track has his name on it, metaphorically, because he’s been jumping identical huddles in practice since before the season even started. Gun goes off, he runs, he clears every hurdle, he crosses the line first, and then he does the thing winners do — hoists the trophy, thanks the coach, thanks everyone who helped him get ready for a day he always knew was coming. That’s not luck. That’s a very long response to a very predictable prompt.

Ignorance Is Not Bliss, It’s Just Undocumented Risk

Now, the guy who wanders off a cliff by accident — nobody’s writing his eulogy as a cautionary tale about bad luck. He’s a cautionary tale about not carrying a stick. That’s it. That’s the whole lesson. People who can’t see well tap their way across intersections and down staircases every single day, with nothing more sophisticated than a stick and the humility to admit the ground might not be where they assume it is. You’ve got two working eyes and a smartphone with a flashlight, and somehow you’re the one more likely to trust a shortcut you’ve never taken. Test the ground. It’s cheaper than the alternative, and considerably less permanent.

Being Proactive, or: What the Farmer Knew That the Grasshopper Didn’t

Aesop again, sorry — but he was clearly onto something, because here’s the ant-and-grasshopper problem restated as agriculture: the farmer doesn’t wait for hunger to show up before he plants. He plants in season, on a schedule dictated by a harvest that hasn’t happened yet, because he’s already decided the crop matters more than his current mood about doing labor today.

Will locusts eat some of it? Sure. Will a bird get a worm that might otherwise have grown up and made more worms? Also sure. Nature doesn’t hand out guarantees, and I’m not going to pretend I understand why some fields get spared and others don’t. Nobody does. That’s not the point. The point is the farmer planted anyway, because “I don’t control the locusts” was never a reason to skip the planting.

That’s response-ability, in one image: how prepared are you, given that you don’t get to control the weather?

To meet what’s coming: accept the challenge instead of negotiating with it. Put roots down deep enough that the next storm is an inconvenience, not an extinction event. Take everything life hands you and treat it as raw material instead of a verdict. Try. Actually try — think well, read well, live deliberately, and struggle with the parts that don’t come easy, because that struggle is not a design flaw. It’s the whole assignment. That’s what makes any of this worth doing — the reaching for a high ideal instead of the coasting, the turning of your particular acute-and-chronic mess into something that’s unmistakably yours.

So: how prepared are you? How equipped, and how much more should you be? And underneath all of it — how willing are you to actually develop the ability to respond to the good, the bad, and the genuinely ugly, whether it shows up as a word, a circumstance, an environment, or just you, catching yourself mid-excuse?

Yes. You.

Let me hear from you.

OJI - Thereciprocist

New here? Good. Before you scroll into the archive and wonder what you’ve wandered into, let me save you the confusion.

Thereciprocist runs on one idea: you get what you give. Not a slogan — a working theory of how thought shapes circumstance, how leadership starts with the self before it reaches anyone else, and how the small, repeated choices in a day quietly become the person you turn into. Cynics call it karma. Economists call it externalities. I call it strategic giving, and I’ve watched it work often enough to stop being surprised by it.

I’m not a guru of any kind — gurus have yachts, I have a very reliable bus pass, a sharp eye for which supermarkets discount bread at 8 PM, and a personal record for spectacular wrong turns that could probably win awards if there were awards for that sort of thing. I write from inside the questions, not above them.

What you’ll actually find in the archive:

Leadership essays that treat “responsibility” as a verb, not a personality trait. Corruption pieces that ask uncomfortable questions about the systems we quietly accept — from beggar-nations to the ostrich acceptance of what we all pretend not to notice. Honest, occasionally irreverent takes on religion and the hypocrisy that rides along with it. Self-development writing that skips the six-pack-abs, seven-figure-bank-account noise in favor of small, boring, consistent blocks of progress — because that’s what actually works. And yes, the occasional retirement-budget essay, because “the golden years” and “actual bank balance” are not always on speaking terms, and somebody should say so.

It’s not always funny. It’s not always comfortable. It’s always honest, and it’s always circling back to the same thread: what you put in is what comes back, eventually, rarely fast, rarely fair, still true.

Why subscribe

Because I call my readers co-learners, not an audience. My own traffic tickets, bus-pass economics, and wrong turns have taught me more than any textbook, and when you subscribe you’re not sitting in a lecture hall — you’re in a workshop where your “oops” moments are worth as much as my “a-ha” moments. Share your map, compare your potholes, and let’s laugh at the absurdity of it, right alongside the harder questions.

It’s free. It costs five seconds and an email address. Unlike that gym membership you’re still paying for, this one won’t guilt you for skipping a week.

Bring your spanners, bring your skepticism. Just don’t bring the get-rich-quick pamphlets — I’ve got a bin for those.

Let me hear from you.

OJI

Before you go

Everything on Thereciprocist comes from the same instinct that built these three tools — solve a real, everyday problem honestly, and the trust comes back:

TapApprove — never let another customer review sit unanswered. EditwithNeo — AI-assisted writing that still sounds like you, not a chatbot. TapPreview — see exactly where your post gets cut off before you publish it.

You get what you give. Give one of them a try.

Okay, let us all first agree that majority of the people from 55 years and above may be calling quits from work place without the many zeros in the bank or stocks to be sold, and that is soon, and I say soon, I really mean SOON! I mean that majority of us in or near the 4^th quarter of our lives may not finish the race with millions of Dollars in the bank. When I say 4^th quarter, that is judging from the book of antiquities that informed us of three scores and ten lengths of the journey. We may not have a lot seating and waiting as nest eggs to service the length of the process, however long the expectancy may be.

You know, as our acquired materials begins to feel the pain of prolonged use, like our cars, when they begin to indicate further needing of attention ala – check engine lights, in the same context we may begin that concerns or prolonged use as retirement calls gets louder and nearer. All the financial should’ve, could’ve, that were missed in first 40 years of living begins to crystalize. How do you think through, maintain body, mind and spirit to start building in small chunks and blocks, a process that can keep you occupied for as long as you are able to?

Yes, the check engine lights for so many might just be for low windshield wiper fluid which may not be require a major repair but on the other hand, some may be looking at major sign of transmission or engine needing remake or entire change, which may cost plenty. Now you are retired, now, not much is coming in and now you need it to keep the engine going.

Yes, it is a together-walk through. We are all in this journey together and we are going to co-learn and co-create how, why and purpose for this process together. You and everyone of us will have an opportunity to contribute and showcase your exciting knowledge and maps, sometimes your navigations that includes the stop, the continue, the yellow and reds light, and even the police warnings, tickets – paid and unpaid and even court appearances to defend traffic miss in this process called life.

For you, The Real McCoys of the automotive industry, we are going to be needing you for technicalities as we correlate this process with your well-beloved automobiles upon which you are well pleased.

You see, what is very common and to some extent very obvious that I find humorous is that getting advice when you have it, the ‘it’ I mean is money. Having people that are willing and able to tell you what to do and how you can do what you want to do with your dollar is everywhere but, how about telling you at this time what you can do this time at your age is scarce. That is what we will be talking about here, that is the bracket where the majority of the population lies, those are the people that will be needing these contributions in this blog

Now that they are grown, now that they know better, now that they have gotten their mistakes out of the way, and now these people to whom I refer to as the 4^th quarter group, what learnable scripts can you bring to stage for all steps. Bring your spanners and all tools to this workshop

Folks,

Is it a go? Me say, Let’s go! Let me hear from you.
Joe

Reading makes me better

     Yes, writing has always been my thing, I have always enjoyed telling stories in details that sometimes my audience can retell a story from me verbatim. Lately also, I have started participating in social media and I have joined a couple of groups that includes some writing and publishing groups as well. In fact I have become an active question asking member of a couple of these groups; indeed,  I have been able to unanimously asked questions of my hidden fears and have had responses that marveled me. 
Responses
     Responses that I could have paid money to get if I had the money or even inquired about, that is, if I had the courage to ask a shrink/expert; here I am getting it for free from all angles, from a group of people with diverse background that barely know me and I vis-à-vis. I have told them briefly about my love for writing and telling stories, my fears of rejections and my fears of not being taken serious. Well, I for one do not take yours truly that serious, why in the land of Wallendas and Soleil should someone else? I ask myself sometimes. You can see that I have always wanting to use those two words together “Wallendas and Soleil” gotcha right?
 Questions They Ask

     I have been asked for samples of my writings, I have been asked for references and I have been given writing challenges to come up with readable materials for a taste. Surprisingly, even to myself, I have not disappointed the challengers. At least that is the response I get, that is the feedback I was able to pick up and those are the assumptions that I have been able to make in the meantime. “If you write this good then” one of the group members who happened to have wished me well from the onset after reading my brief bio maintained, “I believe you should start a blog” Huh! A blog? I loudly retorted to myself, the computer screen and the empty room. A rhetorical question, it was supposed to be but subconsciously, I verbally responded loudly as well. Yes, a blog. 

The Intent   
    I can do this and I know I can do this, if not for any other reasons but for the fact that I am engaged in something that I actually enjoy doing and for the fact that somewhere, somehow, out of the estimated seven billion people in the globe; someone may actually read what I have written. The person may read it for any reasons that best satisfies him/her but at least it is being read.

I have picked up free news papers here and there, just to occupy my time while riding the public transportation systems near and in DC; I must tell you that I did find the reading very invaluable as I journey down to and from work through the tube. In some cases as it became; contents therein could be enriching you know. 
Interesting Reads, Actually
     Yes, I have found some of them to be that good, guiding and purposefully important each day. Now, I must tell you that the reading serves other purposes and not just for the content, or for the beautiful pictures or for the corny or dry humor that it contains. I have observed that this intermittent state of seemingly busy state of mind sometimes shields me from attempting to read people’s intent as they go by their daily routing. Don’t ask and don’t judge; you have done it somewhere and somehow too.

Imagination is Huge
     Your thought sometimes wonders into what people are thinking at a given time as the day unfolds. I am sure that I am not alone in this business and you have done it too. Maybe one time or two or three; yes you have because I know you have. If you say you haven’t, then I need my vitamins then. Okay! I am going to ask you this question then, haven’t you been in a public transportation, public event or even in your individual space throttling your thoughts along and you take notice of people that for some reasons cannot contain themselves for one reason or the other? Those who may dress so loudly or somewhat inappropriately that you notice them miles away. How about those may think that their singing is so good that they have convinced themselves that Simon Cowell of the famous “America got talent” will be inviting them to a personalized acappella recital? Still want some more? I can go on and on about different scenarios to the extent that you will begin to ask yourself about societal sanity. How about the ones who leave their homes or places of work and for a reason best known to them end up letting the world know how uncomfortable their partners sleep-less at night. 
In The Midst of It All
     The public transportation becomes a snoring competition, and aha! How about the cell phone-megaphone group? I have had the fortune of being in the same coach with a number of these closet celebrities so many times; any form of escape from reality tends to be just fine for me. That folks is what burying my head, my interest and/or getting immersed in free material reading outside the confines of my privacy is all about.

Take a Little & Leave a Little

     I am hoping therefore that, if not for any other reason; if you stumble into my blog and decide to go to town with some of the materials therein, let it serve a purpose for you, make personal meanings out of the contents. Let it touch you, let it enlighten you and leave a better you than before your visit.