Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Olamide Giwa. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Olamide, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We believe kindness is contagious and so we’d love for you to share with us and our audience about the kindest thing anyone has ever done for you?

Perhaps my parents did a great job protecting me from the harsh reality of life but I never felt like I lacked anything growing up. Even when my parents said no to something that I wanted to have and blatantly said “that was too expensive, and we couldn’t afford it”, yet somehow, it still didn’t make me feel less privileged. They did a great job teaching me how to be content. All that changed when I moved to the United States alone at 18 years of age.

My parents were privileged enough to afford my school fees but struggled to afford other living expenses like housing, transportation, food, and so on. I am from Nigeria, and the average salary for a college graduate in 2012 was $4800/year (today, it’s reduced to $1200/year). My school fees were about $20,000/year and housing was about $6600/year; this was a huge financial burden on my parents so I felt extremely guilty asking them to pay for anything outside of my school fees.

That predicament, somehow killed the content spirit I had growing up, I suddenly felt poor and less privileged. I was extremely frugal. I lived on less than $500 per semester, which is about $100 per month. I only ate at the school cafeteria and paid for my phone bill.

There was one particular day in the middle of a semester, I was running out of money. I had $20 left in my account and didn’t know how I was going to survive the rest of the semester, and unexpectedly that day, I got an alert from my bank that someone randomly transferred $100 to me, it was my uncle. I never told anyone I was broke, he just from the goodness of his heart sent me money. It felt like I had won the lottery. I have never met anyone so kind as to think of me and just send me money out of the blue. It meant the world to me. This was a man that was not my father, or even a biological relative (in the Nigerian culture we call all our elders, uncle or aunty), yet he was there for me in my most time of need.

This kind gesture continued and got even grander. He would visit my dorm with his family, and his wife, my aunty, would prepare home-cooked Nigerian meals for me. They also paid for all of my furniture and kitchen items when I moved out of the dorm into an off-campus apartment. And the biggest of their kind gesture was helping me build my company Snooze Lane.

But giving someone money, or feeding them, or helping them get rich is not the kindest thing to do in my opinion; however, taking a stranger in as a family is by far the greatest gift, and that is what The OG. family did for me.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am the co-founder and CEO of Snooze Lane, a Luxury Vacation Rental in Houston Texas. I grew up thinking I was left brain and only did things involving numbers and science, so I studied Chemical Engineering in college. But after graduating from college I realized I actually had a creative bone in me, so I explored it. I found a passion in Interior Design and Real Estate. I started attending real estate meetups, watching videos online and experimenting on DIY projects. All of which unknowingly to me was allowing me to amass many essential skills that would eventually serve me well when I started Snooze Lane.

There are many other vacation rental businesses out there but what sets us apart is our excellent customer service and stunning interior designed homes. We are very proud to say that we provide a 5-Star Hotel but homey experience to our guests.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I had to unlearn that failing is a bad thing. I grew up in a culture that was not tolerant of any kind of failure whatsoever. I remember a time when I was so proud to tell my mother that I got a 3.9 GPA in my first semester in college and she asked me what my roommate got, and I said 4.0, then her immediate response was, why didn’t you get a 4.0. This was how my parents and grandparents were raised, failure was not an option and failing to get a perfect score was bad.

I think there are some benefits to that mentality because it helped us strived for the best and work very hard, however, the whole system crashes woefully when the inevitable failure occurs in one’s life. Because one thing is for certain, you WILL fail at some point in your life. So it is best to be well equipped to handle failure, learn the right lessons and move on quickly without destroying and demoralizing one’s spirit. This was something I had to learn the hard way.

I had always been an A student growing up, always the top in my class and got very comfortable and complacent. But in my first year in Engineering school, I got a 50 in a test and I lost it. I panicked and got depressed. I had just tasted failure for the first time and did not know what to do with myself. I thought my whole world was over. I shut down and lost the motivation to do anything. It turned out that unlike my other courses in school, the engineering courses were graded on a bell curve and my 50 was actually a B not a D like I thought. But at that point, it was too late. I had labeled myself dumb and not suitable for engineering and I didn’t put enough effort into studying and striving for a better grade. I thought it was no use, that no matter how hard I tried, I was not smart enough to be an engineer. All those thoughts were of course untrue but I didn’t learn the right lesson and ended up with a mediocre grade in that class which in turn dictated how I performed in the rest of my engineering course.

After this experience, I had to unlearn that failure is a bad thing and learn that failure is actually an opportunity to learn and grow.

How’d you meet your business partner?

My cofounder is actually my husband. We met online when I was in college. He slid into my DMS and he did not get a reply for months because I had deleted instagram earlier to focus on school. Then one day, weeks after getting back online, I made a post about “stalking” and he responded to the post and jokingly asked me not to also “out” him as my “stalker” since he kept sending me messages and I never replied. I laughed so hard and followed him immediately, we got talking and the rest is history.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.snoozelane.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesnoozelane
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thesnoozelane
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@snoozelane