The Road(s) I Didn’t Take
Life is filled with pivotal moments that shape our destinies. Inspired by Flavio Augusto da Silva’s best-selling book, “Inflection Point,” I invite you as my guest as I revisit some of the most impactful decisions I have ever made.
In his book, Flavio Augusto da Silva defends that it is relatively easy to recognize defining moments looking back. The real challenge, however, lies in identifying an inflection point the moment it is happening.
“We make a ton of decisions in our lives. However, there are a few which aren’t simply ordinary. They are decisions which hold the power to alter the course of our entire lives. We call them — inflection points.” — Flavio Augusto da Silva
Similarly to what Flavio did in his book, in the following paragraphs of this article, I would like to go back in time and share some of the most significant inflection points that have shaped my path. These decisions have not only transformed my life but also held the potential to rewrite the narrative entirely.
Inflection Point 1: Parent’s Mini Market
Influenced by the sudden change in our family lifestyle due to my father losing his job, from their savings, my parents embarked on a six-month journey of setting up a mini market just in front of our yard.
As the last touches were done on the construction and shelving, I would ask almost every day about the date we would eventually open doors, expecting to hear the same story “I am not sure, a lot of other products still have to be purchased”, my mother would say.
The year is 2008 or 2009, I no longer recall precisely. Neither my mother (who is on a phone call with me as I proofread this) seem to remember as well. What she remembers, however, is how that day went.
On the morning of 17th September, National Heroes’ Day in Angola, a public holiday, my mother recalls spending the day between open markets and wholesalers, sourcing for the best deals on milk, cooking oil, and pasta — they were some of the missing products, she says.
At the time, I knew somehow that stock wasn’t really the primary reason we couldn’t start operations but the lack of someone to work at the mini market. My mother worked relatively far from where we lived, and my father had just been hired after nearly two years unemployed.
The mini market was their initial trial to build an additional income stream to serve as a backup against the instability of the job market. However, hiring a cashier seemed way too risky for an endeavor they were just trying out.
Back on the 17th of September. My mother states that once she returned from buying the additional stock, I had just decided to open the doors of the mini market that morning and started selling what we already had in-store. Being the firstborn and witnessing quite a few challenges our family had first-hand, I learned early the importance of stepping up and taking initiative.
That was an incredible moment in my life. Video games, soccer, television, you name it. Very few things excited me more than putting the little price stickers on shelves, arranging the merchandise, taking note of the stock that was sold on a notebook for my mother to reconcile at the end of the day, stock takes, and simply supporting customers — it was beautiful.
From that day, every time I arrived from school I would spend the afternoon working at the mini market. Weekends were the best. My parents, siblings, and I all worked there together.
The timing was perfect. It was a new neighborhood and there was almost no competition. As a result, the business grew. After almost a year, we were then able to hire the first employees and since then my parents ventured into commercial real estate. This constant exposure set the foundation for many of the areas I became attracted to later on.
Inflection Point 2: Moving to Namibia
One of my childhood dreams was to pursue my tertiary education in the United Kingdom. I didn’t know exactly how this would happen, but the doubt couldn’t suppress my desire.
Late in 2010, my family and I had our first trip to Windhoek, Namibia. It was our first time in the country and the contrast was shocking. If you ever had the opportunity to spend some time in Luanda, you’ll know what I am talking about.
Days later, it was simply brought up in a random conversation that if my brother and I were interested, we could move to Namibia for high school the year after, and that we had the upcoming 12 months to decide while they got everything in order.
I said yes right away, and it remained my answer twelve months later. At the time, I couldn’t foresee the challenges of growing up far from home, all I could see was an important cornerstone for my trip to the United Kingdom, since now I would learn to speak English.
My brother never fully agreed and wasn’t happy leaving Angola, I used the firstborn’s card and made the final decision. So in November 2011, we both moved to Windhoek. He was 12 and I was 14 years old.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path.” — Steve Jobs
Inflection Point 3: Blogging Journey
Despite all the adaptation challenges faced in Namibia, I never regretted my decision. Learning English was by far one of the most important skills I developed in my life.
It enabled me to engage with people from all over the world, enroll in a few online courses, read books, and consume an infinite amount of online content from the greatest business minds — yes, my interest in business only continued growing since the mini market.
As a result, in December 2014 I started @successcode on Instagram. Initially as a book club but then the community grew pretty rapidly and I had bigger ambitions for what it could become. That’s when I brought my best friend, Daniel Neto on board as a co-founder.
He’s amazingly creative and so he focused on our Instagram, while I learned all I could about setting up websites on WordPress. On May 15, 2015, we launched successcodeblog.com and between 2015 to 2017 the blog had accumulated a strong base of frequent visitors.
We had readers from all over the world, about 200 original articles written by ourselves in Portuguese and English. We also had +50k followers on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Tumblr, and Pinterest.
We had never built a business so our aim was never to teach people how to become entrepreneurs. Rather share the best content we could as we learned to become entrepreneurs ourselves.
Two years into blogging, emerging startups started reaching out asking for content marketing services — we didn’t even know what this meant. Nevertheless, we said that we could do it and were already offering it to other brands. We would then prepare the first proposals and send them. This is what became Kuenda Digital later on.
Kuenda Digital was a digital marketing agency we started back in 2017. We leveraged the relationships we had built with entrepreneurs we interviewed for our first customer base and ended up building the initial online presence of some of Angola’s biggest startups and other traditional companies.
We were doing this while in our first year at university and managing 7 full-time employees, remotely. Daniel eventually left Angola for university in the United Kingdom and I was still based in Namibia. Heytor, another close friend of ours, was in Luanda, studying law and running Kuenda’s daily operations and sales.
Inflection Point 4: Career Change
This was the latest inflection point I had in my life. I shared all details here.
In 2020 I joined a great company in the e-mobility sector as an Electronic Engineering Intern, becoming fully employed later on and leaving after a year to pursue my passion for entrepreneurship.
It wasn’t so romantic. On one hand, people believed I was being irrational and immature, and on the other hand, I heard that I was making the right decision by following my intuition.
Both assumptions were right, so I made a promise to everyone that after being in engineering for a year, once I also tried business administration for a year, I would know what I would be doing for the rest of my life.
I then shifted into something I believed I could add way more value and build a massive influence — deep down I knew I couldn’t achieve that in Engineering, simply because the same passion just wasn’t there.
Life’s inflection points are catalysts for personal growth and transformation. They teach us to trust our instincts and dare to veer off the well-trodden path.
I want to end with my favorite poem:
Originally published on April 15, 2022.
