Most men can build anything.
We can fix cars, patch walls, wire a house, write code, make money.
But here’s the question that messes most of us up:
Can you rebuild yourself?
If I was your enemy and I wanted to end you, I wouldn’t come for your bank account, your body...or your dog (See, this is what the bad guys got wrong with John Wick).
I’d hit the one thing you’re not equipped to rebuild -your SELF.
And why aren’t you equipped?
Because most of us never really built ourselves.
We just took what we found as adults -what our parents, pastors, and mentors handed us- and tried to make something of it.
We didn’t build from scratch.
We inherited habits, fears, expectations, and called it identity.
Then life showed up one day and hit the foundation we never poured.
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It was a late summer evening.
I worked from home. She didn’t have to work.
The business was flying -three grand a month had turned into a $192,563 -monthly.
We were at the height of the wave. Everything looked perfect.
Or so I thought.
Then came the sentence.
One line that split me clean down the middle.
“If I knew you’d be an entrepreneur,” she said, “I wouldn’t have married you.”
I looked up from my Xbox, half-smiling, thinking she was joking.
She wasn’t.
She said she wanted a husband who went to work, came home in the evenings, and talked about his day.
She missed that rhythm.
The thing is -I told her from day one I was entrepreneurial.
She knew.
So to hear that, right when life was finally working…it hit like a sniper round to the carotid.
I don’t blame her.
She probably felt lonely and said what she felt.
But her words landed on a wound I didn’t even know I still carried.
A quiet belief that maybe I wasn’t enough unless I made people proud.
That day, something inside me just went quiet. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t sadness. It was like the voltage drained out of my soul.
The next morning I sat at my desk like always -Macbook open, coffee next to me- and for the first time in years...
My mind was blank.
The ideas were still there, but I couldn’t move.
Not with a bang. With a dimming.
That’s when I learned silence can feel like death.
And here’s the thing about America.
Nobody’s coming for you.
No neighbor with soup.
No phone calls to check in.
It’s harsh, but it’s clean. Nobody pitied me. Nobody said, “You’ll rise again, Waju.”
Because for most fellow-immigrants, my success had been a mirror they didn’t like looking into.
And now that I’d fallen, balance was restored.
So I sat alone in that silence—no applause, no validation—
just me and the echo of one woman’s sentence that found my weak spot and pressed.
The next year, it got worse.
Sales dried up.
I started doing DoorDash to keep bills paid.
Imagine that -a man who used to make six figures a month now delivering fries to college kids.
Then one day, a text from her:
“You used to be the man for the job.”
I didn’t reply.
There was nothing left in me to defend.
But don’t hate her for me. That’s not the point.
Most men would have walked away -angry, humiliated-
and missed the opportunity hidden inside the insult.
But that’s where the real work begins.
See, when the old you dies, you don’t lose everything.
You just lose the version that ran on applause.
And when that version goes, the silence feels unbearable -until one day, it doesn’t.
Because underneath that silence, something else starts whispering.
A spark. A pulse. A question.
“If the successful old me is gone,
and I resent the man I’ve become,
who’s the one watching all this?”
That’s when I met him -the Creator.
Not the hustler.
Not the fixer.
Not the performer.
The one who doesn’t chase energy—he is energy.
The one who builds from peace, not pressure.
The one who isn’t trying to prove anything -anymore.
You’ll know you’re ready for that man when you no longer need an apology.
Not from them.
Not from yourself.
That’s when the repair begins.
But here’s the thing no one tells you...
Repair doesn’t start with fireworks.
It starts with fatigue. It starts with staring at the same screen every day, trying to make yourself care again.
The old fire doesn’t come back.
The prayers don’t hit the ceiling the same.
You try to motivate yourself, but motivation is a language you forgot how to speak.
And that’s when you learn -motivation isn’t dead.
You are.
At least, the version of you that used to run on noise.