Becoming who you were made to be

We spent weeks choosing it. Becoming who you were made to be. Six words. Faith-resonant without being preachy. Universal without being vague. Future-facing without being naive.

It is the spine of ATTP — A Talented Tribe with Purpose — and the answer to a question we get more than any other.

What is ATTP for, exactly?

A podcast that started in a bedroom in Lagos on Christmas Day 2020 with an audience of fewer than ten. Five years on, sixteen countries. The same question runs through every episode: who are you becoming, and is anyone helping you?

Then the Teen Innovators Challenge. A bedroom in Lagos. Now a classroom in Oyo. A flood alert WhatsApp bot in Lekki Phase 2. A paper triage redesign in a Mushin clinic. A Yoruba archive of forty proverbs from a sixteen-year-old's grandmother.

Then the Accelerator. Then the Fellowship. Then this — Launchpad — the operating layer underneath it all.

Every arm exists for the same reason. None of them exist to entertain. None of them exist to train. They exist to make becoming a thing you can actually do, on a Tuesday, with the time and tools you actually have.

What we mean by 'made to be'

We do not mean a job title. We do not mean a niche. We do not mean the trending Twitter philosophy of how to optimise the self.

We mean the actual person you have been pointed at since you were thirteen — the work, the temperament, the question, the calling — and the long, ordinary process of getting closer to it.

Some of you reading this know what that is. Most of you do not, and that is fine. We are here for both.

What this blog is for

Reflections from the host. Alumni essays. Programme updates. The occasional manifesto. Honest, specific, allergic to corporate sentence structure.

The first proper essay drops next week.

Until then — welcome to the Tribe.

— Akintunde