This year I had the honour of speaking at TEDx Lokoja 2026. My talk was titled "The Lies Before the Start" - and it came from a very honest place.

For almost two years, I have wanted to pursue a masters degree. But I have not sent out a single application.

Not because I am unqualified. Not because I do not know what I want to study. In fact, last year I started five different applications and could not complete or submit any of them. You probably have a version of this story. And we are not alone.

The Research Behind the Paralysis

Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, spent over a decade studying why capable, intelligent people find it so hard to attempt the things they are most qualified for. In 2006, she published her findings. What she discovered was that it is not a resource problem. It is a belief problem.

Most people avoid starting the very things they are best equipped for because starting, and possibly failing at those things, would confirm the story they had already told themselves about why they should not have started in the first place.

All of us have something we have been meaning to do. Another degree. A business. A new career. A relationship. Travel. And we have names for the things stopping us: lack of capital, bad timing, the economy, missing resources. I am not saying those obstacles are not real. But I have noticed that even when those obstacles are removed, we still do not start.

The Lie in the Room

Take this example. You want to start a business. Instead of beginning with what you have, you make a list of reasons why you cannot start yet.

First, you tell yourself you need more capital. Then you raise some capital and instead of starting you tell yourself you need a proper shop first. So you spend part of the capital on a shop. Then you need a website. Then a logo. Then just a little more research.

Meanwhile, someone in your neighborhood has started the same business and is already a month ahead of you. Your enthusiasm fades. You tell yourself you need to research more. Then something else happens and the remaining capital disappears.

What stopped you was not the resources. It was the story you kept telling yourself about why you could not start yet. That is the lie before the start.

People Who Did Not Wait

Jan Koum grew up in a village in Ukraine, lacking even the most basic amenities. At 16, his family immigrated to the United States where he and his mother survived on food stamps. After college, he applied to work at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. He was rejected by all of them.

He did not let that define him.

Jan Koum and a friend built WhatsApp, a messaging platform that grew rapidly across the world. In 2014, Facebook - one of the companies that had rejected his job application - acquired WhatsApp for 19 billion dollars.

Demis Hassabis grew up in a small flat in north London. His father ran a toy shop. His mother was a seamstress. There was no prestigious foundation, no obvious path forward. In 2010, he founded DeepMind and created AlphaFold, a system that solved a protein-folding problem that thousands of scientists had spent decades working on. In 2014, Google acquired DeepMind.

Both men faced real obstacles. Neither had the perfect conditions or the resources most people would say they needed. But instead of lying to themselves about why they could not start, they started.

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How to Overcome the Lie

The first step is honest self-examination. Ask yourself: what exactly is stopping me from taking the first step toward what I want? Not the polished, socially acceptable answer. The real one.

You have to be honest with yourself. Set aside what people might say. Have the private conversation with yourself that you have been avoiding. The answer to that question will show you your first step.

Fyodor Dostoevsky said it plainly:

Do not lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself, the woman who lies to herself, comes to a point where they can no longer distinguish the truth within themselves, and as such loses all respect for themselves and for everyone else.

When you lose that, you lose the capacity to start at all.

The lies before the start are the most expensive ones we ever tell. They cost us the businesses we never built, the degrees we never pursued, the lives we never quite began.

Stop lying. Start.

Thank you TEDx Lokoja for having me.