Every disappointment is a blessing! Really?

Labelling disappointments as blessings is disingenuous; but there’s certainly lessons to be learnt through disappointments

Life is a series of events, activities and circumstances that we hope or expect to have positive outcomes that will be beneficial to us. However, the outcomes don’t usually turn out as hoped for or expected. When such expectations are unmet it is natural to feel hurt and disappointed. But, we are often encouraged by people around us to see the bright side in such situation. And one often used expression as a way to boost our spirits is “every disappointment is a blessing in disguise.”

Is that expression really true? Is every disappointment a blessing in disguise? I very much doubt that that is the case. An individual has just lost a lucrative appointment/contract, watch his company seized from him or go bust, have his property confiscated due to debt, have his vehicle stolen, watch her children going wayward, midwife a collapsed marriage, get deported, or sustained injuries from an accident. What would be the blessing that was disguised in all of the above scenario. Why should a blessing even come disguised?

The human spirit is capable of great and mighty things when properly directed. If one considers the momentous developments around us that we see every day: building machines that can perform surgeries thousands of miles away, enabling people with speech disabilities to talk well, building underwater rail lines across ocean, transforming a desert area to one of the most arable landmasses in the world, and going into space to explore our universe, then there is little doubt that humans are indeed great. Sometimes though, disappointments may kill that spirit within us. Hence, the need for constant encouragement.

The human spirit needs uplifting from setbacks; it needs strength and a reason to believe that it can overcome obstacles. Thus, my interpretation of the statement is that it’s meant to point the individual hurting towards other possibilities that may not be so apparent to him but which he or she could and should explore. It is also a way to give strength and to uplift the spirit.

Every disappointment is a lesson to be learnt

A disappointment is a disappointment. Something has been lost; something didn’t go our way; we didn’t get what we expected or hoped for, either through our fault or due to external factors. There’s no blessing in not getting the outcome you expect. However, in every disappointment, there is a lesson to be learnt through retrospection. The lesson is learnt only when one casts his/her mind back to the event or situation and do a thorough postmortem to know what went wrong and why it went wrong. Having such understanding helps an individual to course-correct and ensure he gets a better outcome the next time.

So, rather than be weighed down by disappointments and setbacks, we should continue to learn invaluable lessons from the disappointing outcomes in both our personal and professional lives. I do. Such disappointments form the springboard that constantly propel me to the next level of success.

Two momentous professional disappointments and key lessons I learnt

Early Business journey

Early in my entrepreneurial journey, like most young minds, I was vivacious, enthusiastic and full of ideas that if stacked together would rival the tallest building on Marina Street Lagos. But I was naïve in business management; I lacked the understanding of how to properly structure my business. I was running the business on verbal contracts, and on top of that I took a bank facility. Any average business mind could smell disaster brewing, but not me. I had the ideas, I secured the verbal commitments, and I managed to convince a bank to fund the enterprise. What could go wrong, I thought. Of course, everything that could go wrong went wrong. People reneged on commitments, I had difficulty getting new market, and the business was hemorrhaging faster than water from a burst dam. The business eventually went bankrupt. That was in no way a blessing. Time, efforts, sleepless nights, finance, my expectation, and the hope of others who believed in me all went down a drain. But I drew defining lessons from that disappointing episode, one of which was that a business must have a proper structure to stand a chance of survival. Another is that in business contracts must be in black and white and appropriately signed.

SparkXplorer, Tutor.com, and the birth of Xplorer+

This takes me to the recent setback I experienced in the EduTech business I established. I had set up SparkXplorer, an afterschool on-demand tutoring platform designed to help young school children catch up or master difficult academic skills. We signed up with Tutor.com, the US tutoring platform, to ensure we served students on the SparkXplorer platform the best. The partnership with Tutor.com was good and worked seamlessly to help thousands of scholars from the African immigrant community in the US learn daily, build academic confidence, and improve their grades.

Then the unexpected happened. Tutor.com suddenly pulled the plug on SparkXplorer, hanging us out in the afternoon sun like weekend laundry, when it decided to discontinue the partnership. The tension we felt when this happened was so thick you could use it for duvet because Tutor.com was the very foundation of our tutoring system (see Businessday of 19 October 2025). Every effort to make Tutor.com change its mind failed. That was a huge disappointment, a heartbreaker; it wasn’t and couldn’t have been a blessing.

But lessons were learnt and natural creativity and resilience kicked in leading to the birth of Xplorer+, the Spark Tutor Portal, our own in-house secure tutoring platform.

Lessons learnt from disappointments

What are some of your expectations this year that remains unmet? What disappointments have you had to face in the year? What lessons did you learn from your disappointments? How have you put those lessons to use? Perhaps you want to look back on this year and take stock. Regular retrospection helps us to critically examine some of the activities that we have found little joy in and to determine why that was so, and then course-correct where necessary.

On the societal level, I know that many of us have found little or no joy in the current harsh economic realities over the past two years: inflation that is running faster than a cheetah on a hunt; foreign exchange that is so volatile that a tottering baby looks steady in comparison. Or is it the insecurity and associated fear that covers the nation like rashes on the body. Those are clear cut disappointments and cannot be blessing in disguise. No.

But the lessons learnt and acted upon will lead to the desired outcome and become a blessing. For instance, the economic situation has thought many to live within their means by cutting out frivolities; many have learnt to develop hidden skills and talents and utilise them to augment their income. Many have found it convenient to japa for better opportunity and a more stable environment. That is called adaptation; what I have always termed the ME Economy.

We should be clear: labelling disappointments blessings requires a healthy dose of optimism, which is good. But, problem is too much optimism could and sometimes lead to inactivity or inertia.