Problem No Dey Finish

“That’s not a place you cry when you don’t understand something.”

My brother said that to me twenty years ago when I was getting into university.
Jeeeezzzzz! Has it really been that long? 😱 Looks like someone’s getting old.
I digress.

Excellence has always been a value of mine. I grew up hearing the phrase, "Anything worth doing is worth doing well." It's one of the ones you can say really sunk in.

Early on, I hacked the process. I realized that if I truly understood the how, I could solve almost anything.

As a result, I wasn’t intimidated by complex questions. In fact, I craved them. Math, Physics; the harder, the more exciting. Solving them was proof that I understood the concept, not that I’d memorized it.

And when I couldn’t solve them?

Well… I cried.
Sometimes, I wailed. Loudly.

My dad would often ask my brothers to help me out. So, by the time I was getting into the university, they felt justified in drilling it into me:

Madam, that is not the place for crying. If you don’t understand something there, you’d better find another way to deal with it.

And honestly? They were right.

Crying as a founder?

Fast-forward two decades.
I’m a founder now.
And I’m… not crying anymore.

Excellence is still a value of mine. I still want everything worth doing to be done well. I want things to work. I want every bug a user encounters to be a rare anomaly. I want happy users—always.

But as you probably already know, everything will not always work.

There will always be an edge case you didn’t think about during implementation. Something that makes a user pause and say, “Uhmm… what just happened?” (You can ask Probound; they started integrating with Metrifox this week 😅)

But what does that mean?
That our work isn’t excellent?
That we should throw in the towel and start another venture?

Hell to the no!

On the contrary, it signals that there is something equally important we should pay attention to:

How fast we respond when something goes wrong.

How quickly do we move from:

• “There’s a problem”
  to

• “We understand the problem”
  to

• “The problem is fixed”; or at least, “It’s no longer a problem… for now.”

In incident management, this is called MTTR — Mean Time To Recovery (or repair, response, resolve).

It’s simply a measure of how fast you go from incident to all-clear.

And honestly? This concept applies far beyond engineering.

MTTR For You

In life, I think of MTTR as a measure of resilience.

When something goes wrong, how long does it take you to move from wailing about the problem to acknowledging it and forging ahead?

And let me be clear:
You are allowed to wail.

The question is: does it take three minutes or three days?

The same applies to business. No matter what kind you run.

• How quickly do you respond to customer issues?

• How fast do you move from "this is unexpected" to "okay, we're here now, what's the way forward?"

You can’t prevent every problem. That’s unrealistic.
And every time something breaks, you can’t cry like a certain younger version of someone we know.

So what can you do?

Acknowledge.
Feel.
Strategise.
Implement.

And when that solution uncovers another problem? You rinse. And repeat.

Sometimes, you don’t even need the feel step; you move straight to strategy and execution. Other times, you do need to sit with it for a bit.

Just… don’t spend one year feeling.

Get up.
Dust yourself off.
And move.

Problem no dey finish

There is a Nigerian saying: "Problem no dey finish."
It simply means problems don’t end.

The earlier you accept that challenges are part of life’s journey, not interruptions to it, the easier it becomes to breathe, recalibrate, and ask, “Okay... how do we proceed?”

Ah! did I just smell a quote? 😄

The earlier you accept that challenges are part of life’s journey, not interruptions to it, the easier it becomes to breathe and recalibrate.

Abiodun Olowode, Dec 2025

So, dear reader, get comfortable.
We’re here for the long haul.

’Til next time, amigo. And always remember… problem no dey finish 😉