Adeola Olubamiji

“If you’re a leader, the community needs you beyond what you do. You’re not created to warm the bench, come, eat and close your door and say it’s you and your children. People can use your support, your skills and motivation. Do more!”

“I founded the company because my passion is to get more black people into successful areas because it is possible. This is the life I want to live, one that is not selfish, the life that makes it possible for others. I’m thankful to God for it.”

“I think the suffering brought out the zeal to ‘fight’ to excel.”

“Biomedical was so new that people wanted me to cross over to mechanical, but I told them biomedical was for those who could see the future. Did I get discouraged by Africans? Absolutely, because we’re always playing safe. Africans do traditional stuff to know how it’s going to end, if so, nobody wants to go in that path. Where the world is going today, you cannot play safe.”

“I needed to encourage black people to understand that the future of work is going to have new innovative technologies.”

“What do you need? You have to ask yourself because we are in the hood this year. What can you add this year? If you need skills, go get it. But if you evaluate and your skill is enough, maybe you need to switch strategies and begin to collect influence. That’s how I got the job. I was headhunted.”

“I knew that I needed to focus on something that would get me out of poverty and for me, it was education. So, education was a do or die affair. I kept going, and I started seeing results.”

“At a very early age, I knew that I could use education as my compass to navigate wealth.”

““If they cannot see us, they cannot become us.”

““People wanted young Black people to have someone like me in their lives.””

“Comfort zone is your enemy. Easy is your enemy. What you believe in, if well calculated, do it and the results will follow.”

“To students, you may be going through a tough season now; you can’t lose yourself right now. You have to find your way out. For me, it was 3D printing. I knew 3D printing was the future. I crossed without funding but three months later, I had funding. The new funding was not as good as the old funding. I knew if I endured that, I was going to soar, and at the end, before I graduated, a job was waiting for me. Sometimes, you need to make that call. In the beginning, it may not be good enough but with perseverance, you will come through.”

“I remembered how I paid my tuition and that was the biggest motivation I needed. It fuelled my passion and fight for quality education, my fight for being the best at anything. I went back to school like it’s a war zone, like I had to ‘fight’ to scale through in life.”

“In the beginning, if I didn’t have a role model, I could have been demoralised, and this can cause you to have low self-esteem, make you feel like you shouldn’t talk where others are. Physics was so tough, it wasn’t an easy subject to take on, but I knew where I was going. Whatever anybody was saying didn’t really affect me. I just look at them and how they don’t really get it. It was okay. I’m happy I took that path because with physics, multiple doors opened.”

“My parents did not have education so we were relatively poor. My mum is hard working; I saw her waking every morning at 3:00 a.m, to go to Shasha market to buy what she sells. My mum sold pepper and dry grocery. She went from Shasha market to Bodija market twice a week. I call her the lioness. She just believes in working hard and not asking anybody for money. How my father supported her was very encouraging. I grew up in a home where, doing the house chores, taking care of the kids was something my father was open to doing.”

“During that time in school, what went through my mind sometimes was fulfillment in the sense that, nobody gave me money; I made it myself even though my mum gave me the land. I felt it was a training on how to be independent, make your own money, manage your life yourself. At a young age, I became independent and I was proud of myself when I made money from it.”

“The technologies that will drive 30 years from now have not been created, so you cannot play safe.”