Long is gone the time when talkers would vent against the issues preventing them from diving into the trenches. In these modern days, a man must do; and in doing so, meet his luck at the corner of the next action.
“You can just do things” was my personal theme for 2025. I say it as someone who spent six years doing the opposite.
Six years of “later”
In 2019, I was looking for an app that would help me spend time with God and, at the same time, keep me close to my local church. I could not find one that did both. At some point, I understood that if this missing piece was going to exist, I would have to build it myself.
So I talked about it. A lot. Everyone I told agreed that the need was real. Then nothing happened, because I did nothing. My head was full of very reasonable objections:
- It is not good enough yet.
- This is not the right time.
- Where will the money come from?
Then Covid came, and with it more free time than I had ever had. You would think that was the moment. It was not. The idea quietly faded away with the lockdowns.
In 2025, the same year I picked my theme, my church chose its own:
I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.
Night cometh. The “later” I had been repeating to myself for years became “now”.
So I started with something small: a lectionary, and that’s all. My perfectionist self found it embarrassing. The first people who tried it loved it. That small thing became Lectio. Young people from my church joined in, then people from other countries and other continents, most of whom I had never met. Today, more than 400 people open it every week, in French, English and Wolof.1 Lectio has no big budget behind it,2 and yet it exists.
Nobody is watching. And if they are?
I sent dozens of messages and letters about Lectio. Most of them never got an answer. I posted it online and got a handful of reactions. At first, it stung. Later, it freed me, because I understood that most of the time, nobody is watching. People are busy carrying their own lives. When nobody is watching, failure is cheap. You can try, break something, fix it and try again; the only witnesses are you and God, who is very patient with beginners.
But sometimes, people are watching. Some will even laugh. That is fine too.
Nehemiah went back to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, a city in ruins. His neighbours did not stay silent. Sanballat mocked the builders in front of an army: “What do these feeble Jews? will they fortify themselves?” Tobiah, standing next to him, added that if a fox walked on their wall, it would fall down.3 Nehemiah did not stop to argue. The Bible simply says:
So built we the wall; and all the wall was joined together unto the half thereof: for the people had a mind to work.
The wall was finished in fifty-two days.
Mockery is loud, but it does not build anything. You can hear it, take what is true in it, and carry on. What carries you is hope: the quiet certainty that the thing is worth doing, even before anyone agrees.
The fear of being seen, the fear of being judged, the fear of failing in public: none of them came with us at birth. A child will sing badly in front of the whole family and enjoy it. We learned those fears somewhere along the way, which means we can unlearn them, along with a few other things.
They said a million years
On 9 October 1903, The New York Times published an editorial about the latest failed attempt at a flying machine. Its conclusion: a machine that really flies might be achieved by the combined efforts of mathematicians and mechanics “in from one million to ten million years”.4
Sixty-nine days later, on 17 December 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright flew for twelve seconds.
The Wright brothers were bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio, without a university degree between them. Better-funded and better-credentialed men were working on the same problem. The brothers just kept doing things: building, crashing, measuring, and building again. When they found that the published data was wrong, they built their own wind tunnel.
Experts are often right. But a confident prediction is still only a prediction. Somebody, somewhere, is already building the thing you were told is impossible.
The boy they called crazy
On our own continent, there is William Kamkwamba. In 2001, a famine hit Malawi, and his family could no longer pay his school fees. He was fourteen. Instead of giving up on learning, he went to the village library and found a book about energy, with a windmill on the cover.
Out of scrap metal, bicycle parts, a tractor fan and blue gum poles, he built a windmill that brought electricity to his family’s house. Many people in his village called him crazy while he was building it. The same people later came to charge their phones.5
He had a problem that kept him awake and a book from a small library, and he started with that.
Let no man despise thy youth
In our African context, age is often treated like a licence. You wait your turn. You don’t speak before the elders. You don’t start the thing until someone older says it is time.
There is real wisdom in honouring our elders, and I want to keep it. But age, fear and seniority must not become barriers to action. The baton of change has to be carried by someone, and very often, it is placed in young hands. Carry it with respect, ask for blessing and counsel, and then run.
Paul wrote to Timothy, a young pastor:
Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.
In French, we read it as Que personne ne méprise ta jeunesse. The verse goes on, and the rest matters: Timothy is asked to be an example in what he says, in how he lives, in love, in faith and in purity. That is how a young person earns a hearing from the elders.
Around me
Doing things is not only about apps and windmills.
When my wife and I got married, we had the guts to shape our wedding exactly as we wanted it. We chose our own venue and our own vendors. We had a simple, alcohol-free wedding of about 75 people, while some elders pushed us to invite two or three times that number. We took time for a private honeymoon. It was never about money; we had it. It was about boundaries. Some people were probably frustrated here and there. But it was amazing, and today we have no regrets, only a head full of memories. The other way around, living someone else’s version of our own day, would have been terrible.
Flore has been running SantéMentaleAfro for four years, all through medical school. It has multiplied her visibility tenfold and, more importantly, helped her change lives for good. She did not wait to graduate first.
A good friend of mine postponed his podcast for a long time. He finally started it. The joy in him now is something to see, and people love it. Another friend has been learning Chinese every Monday for four years. I admire that a lot.
As for me, this year, I picked up reading; I am at ten books already. Two of them stayed with me: Osho’s Liberté6 and Eudes Séméria’s Les quatre peurs qui nous empêchent de vivre.7 One of Séméria’s four fears is, simply, the fear of acting. I also started writing properly. These essays are me doing the thing.
Mediocrity is a habit
Many of us grew used to low expectations: things that half work, projects that start and never finish, c’est comme ça. After a while, mediocrity feels like the weather. Don’t become part of it.
Standards are contagious. Spend time with people who build. Read people who did hard things. Their courage rubs off on you. Negativity is contagious too, and faster. Leave, as politely as you can, the rooms where every idea is killed before it can stand up.
The fire in your bones
Jeremiah tried to stop. He was tired of being mocked and decided he would not speak anymore. He could not:
But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay.
You probably have something like that. The piano in the corner. The guitar you bought and never learned. The book. The business. The hard problem that keeps you awake at night. The fire God lit in you, which will not go out, however long you ignore it.
More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle noticed something simple: “the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre.”8 Nobody becomes a guitarist by thinking about guitars.
The recipe
If you remember nothing else, remember this:
- Name it: write down the one thing you keep postponing. Just one.
- Start small, today: one page, one chord, one phone call, one version that does a single thing.
- Show it before you feel ready: silence is not a verdict, and mockery is not a wall.
- Choose your company: stay close to people who build, and far from people who only criticise.
- Keep going, and have fun: rest when you must, then come back. If you never enjoy it, something is off.
Now, go and pick up that guitar. You can just do things.
Footnotes
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I told the whole story, in French, as a three-part Bible plan on Lectio: Le courage d’agir. It names the people who made Lectio grow far beyond my first idea. The Plans and Notes features, for instance, were Flore’s suggestion. ↩
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When I wrote that plan, Lectio had raised 25,000 FCFA in total, about 38 euros. It is modest. It is also enormous, because every franc came from young people and strangers who believed in it. ↩
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Nehemiah 4:2-3. The wall was finished “in fifty and two days”: Nehemiah 6:15. ↩
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“Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly”, The New York Times, 9 October 1903. ↩
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He tells the story himself in The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (2009), written with Bryan Mealer. ↩
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Osho, Liberté : le courage d’être soi-même, Éditions Jouvence, 2007. Originally published in English as Freedom: The Courage to Be Yourself (2004). ↩
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Eudes Séméria, Les quatre peurs qui nous empêchent de vivre, Albin Michel, 2021. The four fears are the fear of growing up, of asserting yourself, of acting and of separating. ↩
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Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, translated by W. D. Ross. ↩