There is a version of over-explaining that feels like communication but is actually anxiety management.
You build something. You are excited about it. You want the people around you to see what you see. So you explain. At dinner, at family gatherings, in the DM. You lay out the logic, translate the vision, make the case. And then you wait. For the nod. For “ah okay, I understand now.” For some signal that they see it.
That is not communication. That is seeking permission.
Nigeria is a specific environment for building something new. Lagos especially. The culture does not hold your vision for you while you figure it out. It will meet you with a very particular set of questions: are you making money, how much, when are you hiring, what exactly do you do. If your answer takes more than thirty seconds and involves words like “platform” or “scale,” the environment reads that as confusion. As something that has not worked yet.
So you explain harder. You develop a whole routine around justification. Any silence about what you are building feels dangerous. Any sceptical question feels like a test you must pass. You start carrying everyone else’s confusion about your path as if it is your job to resolve it.
It is not your job.
Most of the people you are explaining yourself to cannot evaluate what you are telling them. Not because they are not smart — many of them are very smart — but because they do not have the reference points. You are explaining a go-to-market strategy to someone who spent twenty years in government contracting. You are explaining why you turned down a stable salary to someone who never had the luxury of that choice. They respond from their experience. Their experience tells them this sounds risky. You cannot fix that by explaining harder.
There is also something more uncomfortable underneath all of this. The over-explaining is not always about informing people. Sometimes it is about needing them to believe before you fully believe yourself. If enough people around you say it makes sense, it must make sense. Which means you are outsourcing your conviction. You are using other people’s agreement as a substitute for your own clarity. And conviction borrowed from other people’s agreement evaporates the moment someone pushes back. It will not survive the actual difficulty of building anything.
I still talk about my work constantly. I share what is working and what is breaking. But I stopped asking for permission. I stopped waiting for the room to validate the direction before I move. I stopped explaining as a way of managing anxiety.
There is a practical distinction that helped: updates versus proposals. An update says here is what we did and where we are going. A proposal says here is what I am thinking — what do you think? Updates invite acknowledgment. Proposals invite objection. I do not need more objections. I need to execute.
The people who cannot see it yet will see it when it is done. They always do. Your job is not to convert them. Your job is to build the thing.