I just watched a report from BBC Africa about a Nigerian model who was told by a scout that she would never walk a runway. She ended up on Chanel’s runway. According to the report, she had taken to Instagram and made the streets of Lagos her runway.
Great story. But a phrase in the report rubbed me the wrong way.
“She manifested it!”
I’ve had my qualms with this phrase for a long time. The most recent being the idea that we have complete agency over the outcomes of our lives. For every outcome we experience, there’s a thick layer of luck and happenstance that we naively exclude when discussing our contribution to it. Other people made decisions. Circumstances came together. Something happened that we could neither have planned nor produced ourselves. Yet, when we tell the story, all of that disappears into the background.
She manifested it.
That line could have said any number of things. She put in the work. She broke the rules. She took her chances. Literally anything that recognised her effort without handing her complete authorship of the outcome.
This young lady has many qualities worth praising. Especially the courage to stand up to a dissenting voice and keep applying effort towards her dream. Someone told her she would never walk a runway, so she made the streets of Lagos her runway. There’s creativity in that. There’s conviction. There’s a willingness to put yourself out there without knowing whether anything will come of it. But all of that was reduced to “she manifested it,” as though reality had finally succumbed to her desires.
Now, why do I care? Maybe I don’t. Maybe I once believed I had complete agency over the outcomes of my life and learned the hard way that I didn’t. And I’m still salty about that.
But more importantly, maybe it’s a dangerous narrative to be beholden to. The more tightly you grip your sense of control over your reality, the easier it is for you to break when you discover you don’t have as much control as you thought. You believed. You did the things you were supposed to do. And it still didn’t happen. What are you supposed to make of that when you’ve been told that the outcome is yours to determine?
That’s my fear. The way we tell people’s success stories paints an incomplete picture of the role of our agency in the outcomes of our lives. We praise what they did as though it explains everything that happened. And because we know how the story ends, we make the ending seem inevitable.
Your input is necessary, but it isn’t sufficient. You can do the work, take the chances, stand up to the dissenting voices, and still need something you cannot arrange for yourself.
It’s a hard belief to live out sometimes. To act purposefully and intentionally knowing that results aren’t guaranteed. To put your time and effort into something that may never become what you hoped it would. But when you choose to live it out, I think it makes for a much more measured life. You take responsibility for your contribution without assuming responsibility for everything that follows.
Maybe if I too had manifested a GHS 100M business, I’d have a different opinion.