About
Hi! I'm Gershom Umar.
I like to think of myself as a writer.
More accurately, I am someone actively building a body of work—one idea, one essay, one policy, one book at a time. This website is the home of that work. You could rightly call it my portfolio, but I hope, over time, it becomes something more than that.
I write across a range of disciplines, and I take great pride in that range. Books. Articles. Organizational policies. Business plans. Reports. Strategy documents. Essays. The occasional idea that refuses to stay inside my head until it finds its way onto a page.
Some of what I write is for individuals. Some of it is for organizations. Some of it is practical. Some of it is philosophical. All of it begins with the same question:
What happens if we think a little deeper?
You have just stepped into my mind.
You could have spent your precious time anywhere else on the internet, yet you chose to be here. Whether you came because of something I wrote, someone pointed you here, or simple curiosity got the better of you, I don't take your attention lightly.
The fact that you're here tells me you value my voice, my writing, or perhaps just the strange collection of ideas that bounce around in my head.
You do me great honor.
Thank you.
Speaking of those strange ideas…
We live in a world of roughly eight billion people. That's eight billion different stories. Eight billion perspectives. Eight billion lives unfolding simultaneously.
Every one of us wakes up each morning carrying different dreams, different fears, different responsibilities, different histories. We belong to different families, tribes, nations, cultures, professions and beliefs. We speak different languages. We pursue different ambitions. Sometimes we cooperate. Sometimes we compete.
Yet somehow, all of us share this tiny blue planet suspended in an unimaginably vast universe.
I find that endlessly fascinating.
Life grants each of us a remarkably short window—perhaps eighty years if we are fortunate. During that brief span, we wrestle with questions that have haunted humanity since the beginning.
Why are we here?
What are we supposed to become?
How do strangers become family? How are lifelong friendships forged? Why do some moments shape us forever while others disappear without a trace?
Who—or what—gave rise to all of this?
And if there is a Creator, how does one mind conceive something as breathtakingly intricate as existence itself?
Whether your journey leads you toward philosophy, science, theology or somewhere in between, I believe these questions deserve to be explored rather than avoided.
Even if you hold to the Big Bang as the origin of the universe, or Darwin's theory of evolution as the explanation for life's diversity, one question continues to intrigue me.
Out of every possible chain of events…
Out of every possible planet…
Out of every possible century…
Out of every possible human being…
How is it that you are here?
Reading these words.
Living this particular life.
At this particular moment in history.
That has never struck me as ordinary.
I contend that you are here for a reason.
That you matter.
That your existence is not accidental.
If you believe that—even if only as a possibility—then I suspect you and I will get along just fine.
This little corner of the World Wide Web is where I have chosen to wrestle with these questions in public.
It is where I think through business, leadership, policy, economics, faith, history, technology, culture, society and whatever else demands careful attention. Some days I'll write something practical. Other days I'll wander into philosophy. Occasionally, I'll do both in the same piece.
As I contemplate my place in the world, my hope is that you'll be encouraged to contemplate yours.
I don't expect agreement.
In fact, I welcome disagreement.
Push back on my conclusions. Challenge my assumptions. Ask better questions than the ones I've asked. Good ideas become great only after surviving honest scrutiny.
I promise to extend the same courtesy to yours.
If there is one rule in this space, it is this:
Never stop thinking.
Stopping reading is a close second.
Everything else—the questions, the debates, the uncertainty, the curiosity, the exploration—is exactly why you're here.
Welcome.
I'm glad you came.
And one last thing:
If an idea here challenges you, share it. If it changes you, pass it on.
Before you go, the particulars.
I write from Jos, Plateau State, in Nigeria's Middle Belt. Most of what you'll find here began somewhere close to home — a night on the floor of a police holding cell, a checkpoint on the road back, my father in a hospital bed singing in Hausa that he was not afraid.
I'm the author of Skill to Business: How Nigerian Entrepreneurs Can Build Profitable Small Businesses. Essays of mine have been published in ILLUMINATION. I write for organizations too — Carry Them Ministries, Call to Obedience Ministry Nigeria, H.O.P.E. USA — and I've built governance documents for institutions that needed their rules to actually hold: constitutions, bye-laws, operational frameworks.
I write to brief and to deadline. I would rather be edited hard than published loosely, and I check what I quote. The attributions on this site are verified to source, and where I have got something wrong I correct it in the open.
That's the whole of it. The rest is on the page.