Why The Best Minds Outside the West Hit a Ceiling
Blog post description.
OP-ED
The problem with LinkedIn isn't the platform. It's the lie it tells.
It sells us on meritocracy. It promises that the next great thinker - the next Seth Godin or Rory McDonald - could come from anywhere.
But look at the results. The 'best' minds, the 'viral' insights, the 'global standards' always seem to be concentrated in a handful of Western nations. I find myself asking:
Is the talent really so disproportionately stacked, or is the whole game rigged?
I cannot accept that entire continents cannot produce a world-class strategist. It baffles me.
The Brutal Summary
The global stage is rigged by an internal and external system that forces you to choose between two fatal errors:
The Imitation Trap: Spending energy sounding like the West, losing your unique voice.
The Burnout Trap: Trading the time needed for deep, world-changing insight for the shallow dopamine of "hustling."
1. The Invisible Tax on Non-Western Genius
The easy, stupid answer is racism. And while I believe systemic racism is part of the equation, the deeper root is the coloniality of knowledge - the invisible ceiling we built ourselves.
The West didn't just export capitalism; it exported the lens through which we see success.
We internalize their academic standards, their style guides, and their definitions of "thought leadership."
Any wisdom from outside that system—from our own history, philosophy, or culture—is instantly relegated to being "local," "niche," or "unscalable."
We spend our energy desperately trying to imitate the voice of the people we should be challenging, seeking their validation. We are looking for the next Seth Godin in Sri Lanka who sounds just like the last one in New York.
The greatest minds outside the West are forced to wear a cultural disguise just to be heard. And the tragedy is, we've become comfortable in the mask.
2. The Self-Sabotage: Why We Choose Burnout Over Breakthrough
But the problem isn't only external. We've imported a second fatal flaw: The Cult of Hustle.
This whole obsession with constant output, with "the grind," is arguably the dumbest thing to come out of the West. And we bought it wholesale.
True, world-changing insight—the kind of wisdom that defines a generation - requires deep, quiet reflection. It requires time to sit, to think, and to unpack the complex assumptions we hold.
"Hustle Culture" punishes this stillness. It demands shallow posts and immediate results, forcing us to trade deep insight for high frequency. It’s an anti-wisdom machine that sells the idea of success, but only rewards burnout that keeps us distracted.
We are so busy giving our free energy to news channels and social media arguments that we have no bandwidth left to formulate the ideas that matter.
The Pushback Starts Within
This forms the basis of individual consciousness: the capacity to stop, reflect, and have your own ego play god. It’s a concept Western thinking still struggles to fully grasp. The challenge is clear: we must stop being busy giving our free energy to news channels and social media arguments and instead invest that bandwidth into formulating the ideas that matter.
The stage is already set for our genius, but it demands our quiet dedication. We don't need the West to validate our thinkers; we need to reject the shallow noise, look inward for our unique wisdom, and finally become the Sun around which the world revolves.