The Dangers of Proximity to Success

A couple of years ago, one hot afternoon, I met Rita in Abuja. She ran a small restaurant in a village in Kurudu. At that time, I was working on a project on one of our sites and I had not had breakfast. When I ordered, I was not expecting much from the makeshift restaurant shed that could barely fit seven people. As a result, I was surprised that her food was great, the surroundings were clean, and notably, her English was superb.

I struck up a conversation with her about how good her food was, and she went on to tell me about how she was a chef. One thing led to another, and we found ourselves talking about the restaurants she visited in Germany, Australia, the UK, and so many other countries. I was curious, of course, how you could visit all the dream countries of an average Nigerian and still be selling tantalizing Jollof rice in a makeshift shed in a village.

Rita explained that she worked with a boss who gave her access. Within three months of working with him, she got her passport and could travel with him locally on private jets and internationally on commercial airlines. Within a year, she found herself spending all her salary and allowances trying to meet up with the image and standard of those she found around her. When he finally had to leave Nigeria, she struggled to maintain the lifestyle. She struggled to fit in with her own people, the same people she had before she got the job. When she started a restaurant immediately after, she targeted the same people in her boss's financial and social class. They never came. She burned through her savings and had to face reality. That reality is her current restaurant in Kurudu village.

Her story helped me understand a vital truth about unmetered proximity to success: access, without preparation, is a trap dressed up as an opportunity.

When Proximity Becomes a Distortion

If you look closely around our professional circles, you will realize Rita is not an isolated case. Her story is a quiet pattern playing out all the time.

There is a well-documented psychological principle behind what happened to her. Social Comparison Theory, which dates back to the 1950s, argues that when we do not have a clear baseline for who we are, we simply borrow the identity of whoever is closest to us.

Upward social comparison, measuring yourself against someone doing better, can either inspire or damage you, depending on whether you genuinely believe their level of success is within your reach. For Rita, the comparison was not gradual. It was total immersion. She was not just observing success from a distance; she was sitting inside it, traveling inside it, and eating inside it every single day. Without a baseline framework for how that world actually operated, her mind did the only thing it could do: it started treating that borrowed world as her own.

This is where the danger begins. Proximity without context does not teach you how successful people think. It teaches you how they spend.

We see it all the time with lifestyle inflation. It is that subtle shift where luxuries slowly start feeling like basic necessities. For Rita, the process was even more insidious because the income was not even hers. She was consuming a lifestyle funded by someone else's wealth, in someone else's name, on someone else's timeline. And when that person left, the lifestyle did not leave quietly. It left a void she felt compelled to fill.

Lifestyle creep is incredibly common among young adults who experience a sudden jump in access or income. What makes it dangerous for many Nigerians who find themselves in similar positions is that the spending is not driven by an actual increase in earnings. It is driven purely by an increase in exposure. There is a massive gulf between the two.

The Numbers Behind the Pattern

Rita's story might feel deeply personal, but the data confirms it is structural.

Data on Nigerian SMEs shows an overwhelming majority fold within the first five years, mirroring global trends where nearly half of business failures happen simply because there is no real market demand for what they are selling. This is rarely a story about bad products. It is a story about targeting the wrong people.

When Rita opened her restaurant, she knew how to cook. Her food was genuinely good. What she did not know was her customer. She had spent so much time in the orbit of wealth that she had lost the ability to accurately see the market she actually belonged to. She aimed her pricing, her aesthetic, and her expectations at a clientele that had no particular reason to drive to Kurudu for a meal. Many Nigerian businesses collapse not because of a lack of skill or effort, but because of miscalibrated expectations and a fundamental misunderstanding of who their customers are and how much those customers are actually willing to spend.

This is the second danger of unmetered proximity to success. It does not just distort your personal spending; it distorts your professional judgment. It recalibrates your entire sense of what is normal, what is achievable, and who you are building for.

What Rita's Story Tells Us About Our Careers

These lessons apply whether you are a student, a climbing professional, or an entrepreneur trying to scale.

Access is not the same as preparation. Being close to success is not the same as being ready for it. Rita had access to business-class travel, fine dining, and high-level conversations, but none of that translated into capital, systems, or business knowledge when she needed it. Proximity gave her exposure, not a foundation.

Your environment shapes your baseline without your permission. When the people around you set a lavish standard, your brain quietly adopts that standard as the bare minimum. You stop seeing it as exceptional and start seeing it as normal. This happens gradually to everyone. The only question is whether you are self-aware enough to notice it happening before making irreversible financial decisions.

Knowing your actual market is a strategy, not a compromise. Rita's restaurant in Kurudu is not a failure of ambition; it is a failure of targeting. There is a thriving market in Kurudu, and she is successfully serving it today. The tragedy is not where she ended up. The tragedy is that she spent her life savings chasing a customer who was never coming, when the customers who would genuinely value her work were right in front of her. Knowing your market is the single most important strategic decision you can make.

The Advisory Gap Nobody Talks About

What Rita needed, and what many people in her situation need, was not more access. It was structured guidance. She needed someone to sit with her before she opened that restaurant and ask the uncomfortable questions: Who is your customer? What can they afford? What are you building toward, and what do you actually have right now to build with?

That kind of raw, grounded conversation is rare. Most people navigate their careers and businesses based entirely on what they see around them, what their oga is doing, what their colleagues are spending, and what their peers seem to have. Very few people have access to honest, structured advisory support that helps them separate where they are from where they are going, and build a realistic bridge between the two.

This is exactly the work we do at Traction Outsourcing. Alongside a team of experienced professionals, we offer career and business advisory services designed to help individuals and organizations build from a place of clarity rather than comparison.

Whether you are a young professional trying to figure out your next move, an entrepreneur preparing to launch, or someone who has found themselves caught in a reality shift and needs a hard reset, the conversation starts by understanding your actual reality, not the one you have been borrowing.

Rita's food is still good. It was always good. What changed the outcome of her story was not her skill; it was the absence of a plan rooted in truth.

You do not have to make that same mistake.