THE LEAST ACTION

An introduction to leverage

A chapter 3 preview special asset

Àwé Àlágbò

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THE LEAST ACTION

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By ÀWÉ ALÁGBÓ

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© 2026 ÀWÉ ALÁGBÓ

CONTENTS

FOREWORD 6

MAIN TEASER: 8

CHAPTER 3 – AGRICULTURE AND REALITY (ABRIDGED) 9

I. The Blueprint of Abandon 9

II. The Microcosm of the Hearth 11

III. The Compounding Noose 13

THE BLUEPRINT: 17

WHAT IS THE LEAST ACTION? 18

THE NEXT VECTOR: 20

UNLOCK THE BLUEPRINT 21

FOREWORD

THE MATH OF THE TRENCHES

If you are reading this hoping for a polished, romanticized account of a comfortable tech entrepreneur who casually stumbled into wealth, close this file immediately. This is not a lecture delivered from a pristine university podium. This document was forged inside a foxhole.

By training, I am an architect—a student of load paths, equilibrium, and systemic structures. By circumstance, I became a man waking up at three o'clock every morning beneath the crushing, suffocating atmospheric weight of a ₦90 million financial liability.

When you owe that kind of money, theories die. The popular cultural gospel of "working harder" exposes itself as a mathematically bankrupt lie. A man armed with nothing but a cutlass cannot clear enough agricultural ridges to outpace a wildfire of compounding interest.

If raw physical grind alone created prosperity, the smallholder farmers of Africa would rank among the wealthiest individuals on Earth. Few humans work longer hours. Few endure harsher conditions. Yet, they remain permanently trapped in subsistence. Why? Because nature has never rewarded force. It rewards alignment.

What follows is an abridged cut of Chapter 3 from the gateway memoir, The Least Action. It is the gritty, unfiltered case study of what happens when clean, university-educated spreadsheets run headfirst into the brutal friction of reality. It is the story of my descent into the soil, designed to show you why brute force will always break you—and why you must learn to build systems of scale if you ever hope to liquidate your limitations.

Read the math. Observe the friction. Then, decide if you are ready to change the geometry of your life.

MAIN TEASER:

CHAPTER 3 – AGRICULTURE AND REALITY (ABRIDGED)

I. The Blueprint of Abandon

I arrived in Ipele in January 2019. The world was locked in the dry, chalky grip of the harmattan season, a pale dust settling over everything like a reminder of time passing. The house my father had built on the farm settlement—a community known locally as Ofi—stood weatherbeaten and faded, having received no human care for nearly three decades. If the exterior was a grim monument to neglect, the interior was worse. It was a sorry sight: memories layered over by decay, age, rodents, and the slow, corrosive damp of seasonal abandonment. I had returned to my father's land, but the land had spent thirty years trying to erase his footprint.

Yet, as I walked through the overgrown greenery of the compound, another sensory memory hit me. My mother had always loved gardening; I grew up watching her cultivate plants, wild roots, and traditional herbs—the agbo that ran through our home as a permanent baseline of health and survival. In my mind’s eye, fleeing to Ipele wasn't just an escape to my father’s soil; it was a subconscious return to my mother’s herbs. I was stepping directly into their combined inheritance, seeking an emergency exit map in the roots they had both left behind.

The first asset I examined was the infrastructure. Five kilometers from the house, close to the main express road, sat the old waterworks my father had played a monumental role in establishing. It was designed as a centralized pumping station meant to deliver water to the surrounding homes from a reservoir filled by rain, a deep borehole, and a larger grid system rooted in Owo town.

When I hacked through the thick brush to inspect it, I found it entirely buried under a shroud of weeds. The equipment had been carted away by thieves; the pipes were rusted out, and the concrete structures were deteriorating into dust. Standing in that quiet jungle, a heavy sadness settled over me. My father’s structural worldview, brilliant for its time, was completely outdated. Centralizing public utilities like water supply was a dead architecture in modern Nigeria. The system had collapsed, and society had adjusted by decentralizing: everyone now dug their own private boreholes or wells to survive. The macro-system was broken, so I was forced to act locally. With the help of my elderly uncle, we rolled up our sleeves, engaged workers who dug a well by hand in the compound, and rigged a crude pump to connect a water supply to the house.

Amidst the ruins, there was one living link to the past. Baba Saidu, the Hausa caretaker who had guarded the property since the afternoon of my father's fatal accident in 1992, emerged from the adjoining boys' quarters. He was wizened now, his face a complex map of deep wrinkles, his frame advanced into his nineties. Yet, when he looked at me, his eyes cleared. He recognized me. He spoke my name.

When he asked after my mother, the air grew still. I told him she had passed away just over a year prior. He nodded slowly, untying a memory. Way back before, when I was still barely a teenage boy navigating the immediate shock of losing my father—years before I had ever drawn a blueprint or even conceived of becoming an architect—she had looked Baba Saidu in the eye and told him with absolute confidence that one day, I would return to take charge of this farm. At the time, it was an impossible prediction. I was just a boy wanting a life of minimum resistance, completely convinced I would leave Ipele behind forever. Yet, she turned out to be right. Overjoyed that her long-held vision had finally manifested, Baba Saidu refused to let his frail condition stop him. He picked up his old hoe and cutlass, stepping into the harmattan dust alongside the occupants of the boys' quarters to help me hack away the thicket of weeds choking my new life.

II. The Microcosm of the Hearth

With the initial utility cash exhausted on digging the well and clearing the compound, I was forced into a period of keen observation. To understand the economics of Ofi, I began taking long walks from the farm back to the main town of Ipele. My path cut directly through settlements of decades-old mud houses belonging to Ebira migrant workers from Kogi State—a resilient, generational community that formed the literal backbone of local agriculture.

I watched them closely. They were masters of a high-friction, binary rhythm: yams and cassava. The yams consumed their calendar from October, when the brutal work of land clearing and manual heaping commenced, extending through the dry planting months of November and December, into the early rains of February for staking, and finally culminating in the grueling harvest between June and August. The remaining pockets of their time were entirely dedicated to cassava.

Every cluster of Ebira mud huts featured a shaded processing area roofed with dry palm fronds. This was the center of their universe: the garri hearth. I would stand at a distance, watching the tedious, dusty choreography. Barefoot children and adults sat in the dirt, peeling mounds of tubers with small knives before washing them with water hauled from nearby hand-dug wells. They carried the heavy sacks to a basic diesel mill within the community to grate and mechanically press the mash, before lugging it back to sieve and roast it over open flames.

This was where my internal attention zeroed in. I looked at the sheer volume of manual human energy expended on grating and pressing, and my analytical mind saw a classic structural inefficiency. I naively concluded that a modest infusion of capital into mechanical processing would yield an automated margin high enough to achieve financial freedom.

I reached out to my schoolmate, Mrs. A, and her husband, a medical doctor working in the Arabian Gulf. Armed with an optimistic spreadsheet, I convinced them to invest ₦600,000 into the venture under a strict agreement to return the principal plus a 20% to 25% annual return. I split the cash immediately: I purchased a diesel-powered cassava grater, a manual mechanical press, a set of wide frying pans, and a faded, gold-colored 1995 automatic Honda Accord wagon to serve as our primitive logistics vehicle.

The operations had barely commenced before the first foundational flaw exposed itself: the peeling crisis. To process just a single ton of cassava, you required ten pairs of human hands working continuously for two to three days. But in a rural agrarian community, human labor does not belong to the highest bidder; it belongs to the sky. The Ebira laborers owed their first allegiance to their own farms. If it rained, or if they had a rotational community schedule to help clear a neighbor's plot, your factory floor emptied instantly.

This layout created an unsustainable hazard. If you purchased a ton of raw cassava on a morning when a sudden rainstorm rolled in, your labor vanished into the fields. You were left entirely alone in the heat with a highly perishable asset. Within forty-eight hours, the transformation began. A distinctive, sour fermentation smell filled the air. The white flesh of the tubers turned a sickly brown, the peels began to slip away from the root, and clouds of black flies festered over the piles. With each passing hour, your usable capital rapidly mutated into rotting waste.

It was a brutal realization. The rural market didn't care about quality, hygiene, or systemic efficiency; it cared exclusively about the lowest price. The Ebira cottage processors could survive this because they had zero overhead: they used their own children as free labor, scavenged the forests for free firewood, and intentionally left their garri wet and heavy with moisture so it weighed more at the point of sale, even if it meant the product would spoil faster on a retail shelf.

Because I was a university-educated outlier, the community viewed me as a deep pocket to be exploited. They were perfectly content to take my cash, perform the absolute minimum amount of labor, and then turn around and actively demarket my product in local trade circles. If my high-quality, dry garri went unsold, I carried the compounding interest of the debt; if theirs went unsold, they simply left it on credit for months because their survival matrix didn't include bank deadlines. I quickly realized that a commercial processor saddled with paid staff and rigid investor agreements could never win a brute-force price war against a system powered by poverty. I needed a far more sophisticated strategy. I needed to move up the value chain.

III. The Compounding Noose

My search for a higher-margin vector led me away from garri and into industrial byproduct extraction: cold-water laundry starch. I sold more equity and raised new funds to purchase two large aluminum boiling pots, dozens of plastic storage containers ranging from twenty-liter drums to half-liter retail bottles, a 200-kilogram drum of polyvinyl acetate, twenty-five liters of toxic formalin as a preservative, and fifteen liters of concentrated fragrance oil. I was determined to build a clean, premium brand.

To secure regulatory approval from NAFDAC, the state required me to obtain a formal Certificate of Fitness from the Federal Medical Centre (FMC) in Owo. I walked into the hospital feeling completely healthy, but when the radiologist processed my chest X-ray, the room grew cold. My heart was strangely, severely enlarged. Unknown to me, I was actively battling an early, aggressive strain of the COVID-19 virus without showing outward symptoms. Barred from completing the medical evaluation myself, I had to think structurally. I brought one of the local workers from the Ofi farm to the hospital, ran the diagnostic tests under his profile, and secured the medical certificate under his name.

What remained was an exhausting, manual paper trail: a fumigation certificate, Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) registrations, a mountain of handwritten Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) documents, physical label samples, and product photographs—all requiring repeated, expensive motorcycle trips to the bureaucratic labyrinth of the NAFDAC office in Akure. We had barely cleared the hospital evaluation when the calendar hit March 2020. The government announced a total national lockdown, and I found myself abruptly severed from my machinery, trapped inside the walls of my house in Ibadan.

The lockdown did not stop the ticking of the financial clock; it merely blinded me to the destruction of my assets. Before the gates of the city closed, the same local worker who had lent his name to my NAFDAC medical certificate had convinced me to diversify into short-term poultry production. He claimed to be a seasoned poultry expert. Desperate to find an income stream to offset my growing liabilities, I raised short-term debt to purchase five hundred day-old broiler chicks, intending to utilize the empty storage sheds at the farm.

The transaction was a catastrophe from the opening hour. I paid the supplier in Ibadan on a Thursday afternoon, but she delayed the consignment for two days. When she finally onboarded the chicks into a transport vehicle, it was the dead heat of a Saturday afternoon. The driver she hired was dangerously inexperienced; he packed the ten fragile cardboard cartons into the unventilated, claustrophobic trunk of a Toyota Sienna, piling heavy commercial luggage over the air holes.

I spent that night pacing the dark asphalt of the checkpoint junction in Akure, waiting under the stars. When the Sienna finally pulled up and the driver popped the trunk, my breath caught. It was a silent, horrific anticlimax. Over sixty percent of the chicks were already dead, smothered by the heat and lack of oxygen. The supplier later sent a discount batch of two hundred birds to patch the loss, and the driver paid me a meager ₦5,000 twice before changing his phone number and ghosting me entirely. I was left with a severely depleted flock, while the price of high-protein feed bags skyrocketed to ₦2,500 each.

With the gates of Ibadan locked, I was completely untethered from the ground. I had two parallel layers of aggressive debt tracking me—the investment capital from Mrs. A, and a high-interest short-term loan I had taken out to buy a decrepit, white Ford Transit bus from a local junkyard for ₦270,000, spending an extra ₦130,000 in repairs to serve our logistics channel. I had structured these liabilities into neat monthly tranches, relying on my old architectural spreadsheets to maintain the balance.

But spreadsheets do not account for human nature or national paralysis. For three agonizing months, my only conduit to my investments was an erratic mobile phone signal. From my bedroom in Ibadan, I listened to the local handler tell me that the poultry feed had run out, that the birds were contracting respiratory diseases, and that the Transit bus kept breaking down, requiring endless cash transfers for mechanical repairs.

When the lockdown lifted and I finally managed to travel back down the potholed road to Ofi, the true architecture of the scam was laid bare. My poultry project was an empty shed of droppings. The local handler had used my feed capital to raise the remaining birds, transformed the farm into a highly lucrative, unauthorized chicken retail outlet for his own pocket during the peak of the lockdown food scarcity, and used my Ford Transit bus as a private commercial transport to haul goods between rural settlements. He had pocketed every single kobo of revenue while routing the structural maintenance bills, the dead assets, and a ₦500,000 vehicle repayment debt directly to my name. I was completely scammed, entirely trapped, and standing in the wreckage of a system that was starting to eat itself alive.

THE BLUEPRINT:

WHAT IS THE LEAST ACTION?

What you have just read is the anatomy of unaligned force. It is the picture of a machine running at top speed, burning through capital, relationships, and psychological sanity, while achieving zero forward velocity.

Most business literature tells you that when your business is failing, you need to double down. Work sixteen hours instead of twelve. Force the market. Sweat more. But physics teaches us a completely different law: The Principle of Least Action.

In nature, a river does not engage in a fistfight with a mountain; it maps the topography, locates the vector of minimum resistance, and carves a massive canyon anyway. A beam of light does not attempt to brute-force its way through the density of a glass pane; it instantly shifts its angle, traveling along the path that takes the absolute minimum amount of time.

Nature does not grind. It optimizes.

Everything I lost in Ofi taught me one uncomfortable truth

Success is rarely determined by effort

It is determined by structure.

When the structure is wrong, effort merely accelerates failure

When the structure is right, modest effort compounds into extraordinary results.

The Least Action framework rests on three universal design principles:

1. Align your effort with your comparative advantage instead of competing where others already possess structural superiority.

2. Build systems that continue producing value long after the initial effort is complete.

3. Close every possible loop so that today's outputs becomes tomorrow's inputs.

These principles apply whether you are managing a farm, raising a family, leading an organization, designing a nation, or building a digital enterprise. Digital systems are simply one of the highest-leverage expressions of a much older law—a law that nature has followed from the beginning.

My ₦90 million debt was a monster that physical, localized hustle could never defeat. It forced me to stop asking how I could physically work harder, and start asking how the system itself could work smarter. The question changed everything.

THE NEXT VECTOR:

UNLOCK THE BLUEPRINT

The story does not end in the ruins of the Ofi poultry sheds. The total, catastrophic collapse of my physical systems was the exact crucible required to force a psychological leap.

The machine had to break entirely so the true engine could finally be built.

Your problem is rarely a lack of effort. It is usually a structural mismatch between where you are applying effort and where the environment naturally creates leverage.

If you are tired of running on a high-friction treadmill, burning through your potential energy while staying stuck in the same financial container, the full architectural manual is now live.

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Remember this:

Effort multiplies structure.

It cannot replace it