By Ghazali Ibrahim
For the author of Entrusted, life is more than a pursuit of personal success, wealth or recognition. It is a responsibility to make meaningful use of the opportunities, knowledge, relationships, influence and resources placed in one’s hands.
In an interview with BlackBox Nigeria, the author Femi Owoyele (profem) who recently awarded PhD in Peace and Security studies at LASU reflects on the experiences and convictions that inspired the book, explaining how years of navigating family, faith, business, leadership, education, mentorship, service and community shaped a deeper understanding of stewardship.
The author also discusses the lessons readers can draw from the book, the challenge of putting personal experiences into writing and the importance of building beyond oneself.
At the heart of Entrusted is a simple but consequential question: What has been placed in your hands, what are you doing with it, and who is better because it came into your hands?
Below is the full interview by BlackBox Nigeria:
1. What inspired you to write this book?
Entrusted grew out of reflection on my own journey and a conviction that became clearer to me over the years: much of what we call ours is actually something we have been given responsibility for.
Looking across the different expressions of my life — family, faith, business, leadership, education, mentorship, service and community — I began to ask what connected them. I realised that the defining question was not simply what I had achieved, but what I had done with what had been placed in my hands.
Over the years, I have experienced opportunities that worked and others that did not. I have built businesses, pursued education at different stages of life, served in leadership, invested in younger people, raised a family, served in ministry and taken on responsibilities that sometimes required patience, sacrifice and difficult choices. Through these experiences, I came to understand that success cannot be measured only by what we accumulate, accomplish or become known for. There is a more important question of stewardship — what did we do with what we received?
That understanding inspired Entrusted. I wanted to capture lessons from my journey, not as someone who has figured everything out, but as someone increasingly conscious that life itself is a trust. The book is therefore both a reflection on what I have learnt and an invitation for others to examine how they are living.
2. What is the book about?
Entrusted is fundamentally a book about stewardship, responsibility and the making of a meaningful life. At its heart is a simple but consequential idea: life is a trust.
We often approach life primarily from the standpoint of ownership — my life, my talent, my money, my career, my opportunity, my influence, my time. Entrusted invites us to look at these things differently. What if the things we possess are not simply possessions, but trusts? What if our gifts, knowledge, relationships, opportunities, resources, experiences and influence have been placed in our hands not only for our benefit, but also for the good we can create through them?
That changes how we live.
The book explores what it means to live with this consciousness. It speaks about responsibility, service, sacrifice, character, discipline, relationships, leadership, growth, failure, mentorship, purpose and legacy. These are different expressions of the same central idea — that a meaningful life takes responsibility for what it has received.
One of the strongest ideas running through Entrusted is that life should not terminate on self. We certainly have legitimate aspirations and personal needs, but there must be something about our lives that makes other lives better. Knowledge should enlighten more than the person who possesses it. Influence should open doors for others. Leadership should improve the lives of those being led. Wealth should create value. Experience should become wisdom that can guide someone else. Opportunities should become platforms from which other people can rise.
The book therefore gives considerable attention to service and sacrifice. Many of the things that ultimately give life meaning require us to go beyond convenience. Parenting requires sacrifice. Marriage requires responsibility. Leadership requires service. Mentorship requires investing in people without always knowing what the return will be. Building institutions requires making decisions whose greatest benefits may be enjoyed by people we may never meet. There are things worth doing precisely because their value extends beyond us.
There is also a strong emphasis on value-centred living. Life continually presents choices between what is expedient and what is right, between immediate gratification and long-term value, between personal advantage and collective good. Entrusted speaks to the importance of integrity, discipline, consistency and character in navigating those choices. It reminds us that what we become is as important as what we achieve.
Another important dimension of the book is the relationship between privilege and responsibility. Education, access, exposure, relationships, platforms, knowledge, experience and influence are advantages, but they also create obligations. If I know more, I should be able to contribute more. If I have access, I should consider whose access I can improve. If I have influence, I should ask what that influence is producing. If I have been helped, I should consider whom I can help.
This is why the book moves the conversation from ownership to stewardship, from consumption to contribution, and from success to significance.
Entrusted also deals with the seasons of life — success and failure, waiting and progress, opportunity and disappointment. Not every experience will produce the outcome we expected, but every experience can produce wisdom if we are willing to learn from it. Failure does not have to be wasted. Delay does not have to be meaningless. Even difficult seasons can become part of the resources with which we serve, lead and build better.
Ultimately, Entrusted is about living beyond oneself. It is about recognising that family is a trust, leadership is a trust, knowledge is a trust, influence is a trust, opportunity is a trust, relationships are a trust, and life itself is a trust.
The central question running through the book is therefore: If all these have been entrusted to you, what are you doing with them, who is better because of them, and what will remain because you were here?
3. What do you want readers to take away from this book?
I want readers to finish Entrusted with a renewed sense of responsibility for their lives and a greater appreciation of what is already in their hands.
We often evaluate our lives by what we have not yet achieved or acquired. We look at the next position, the next opportunity, the next level of influence or the resources we still need. But stewardship begins with recognising what has already been entrusted to us. You may not have everything you desire, but you have something — knowledge, experience, relationships, time, talent, access, influence, opportunity, resources or lessons learnt through life.
I want readers to recognise that these things are not insignificant. The important question is what we are doing with them.
This is something I have seen through mentorship. At different stages of my life, I have invested time, knowledge and attention in younger people without knowing what those relationships would eventually become. Years later, I have watched some of them advance academically, professionally and personally. Some have also returned at different moments to contribute meaningfully to my own journey. It has reinforced my conviction that what we invest responsibly in people can continue producing value long after the initial moment has passed.
I also want readers to understand that significance is not reserved for people with enormous platforms, wealth or titles. Stewardship begins where you are. It is found in how you raise your children, how you treat people, how you use knowledge, how you conduct your business, how you lead, how you serve, how you respond to opportunities and how faithfully you handle seemingly small responsibilities.
Ultimately, I want the reader to move from asking, “What can I get from life?” to asking, “What has been placed in my hands, and what can become possible because I handled it well?”
If Entrusted causes someone to become more responsible, more intentional about service, more committed to living by values, more willing to invest in others and more conscious about building beyond themselves, then the book would have achieved something important.
4. What was the biggest challenge you faced while writing it?
The greatest challenge was deciding how much of myself to put into the book.
There is a difference between sharing principles and allowing people into the experiences through which those principles were formed. Entrusted required me to revisit decisions, disappointments, failures, delayed expectations, relationships, responsibilities and defining moments across different seasons of my life.
The challenge was to be honest without making the book autobiographical for its own sake. I did not want the stories simply to tell readers what happened to me. Every story had to illuminate something larger than the experience itself. It had to answer the question: What can another person learn from this?
It was equally important not to tell my journey only through successful outcomes. Life does not teach us only through victories. Some experiences teach us what works; others expose our assumptions, reveal weaknesses, strengthen our judgement or teach us what never to repeat. I wanted to preserve that honesty while ensuring that the focus remained on wisdom rather than on the events themselves.
So, throughout the writing process, I kept returning to a simple question: What is the wisdom in this experience, and how can someone else use it? Once I could answer that, the experience became worth including.
5. Any other information you might want to express
One of the broader convictions behind Entrusted is that we must build beyond ourselves. Whether we are building families, businesses, careers, institutions, communities or nations, there should be something in our thinking that considers people beyond us and generations after us.
I believe this is particularly important in our society today. Many of the challenges we face are not simply failures of competence or resources; they are also questions of responsibility and stewardship. What happens when people entrusted with leadership see power as possession rather than responsibility? What happens when knowledge serves only the person who has acquired it, when privilege creates no pathway for others, or when success becomes entirely personal? We eventually create a society in which people are primarily taking from systems rather than strengthening them.
Entrusted calls us back to a different consciousness: leadership is responsibility, privilege carries obligation, influence should produce value, and success should have consequences beyond the successful person.
I hope the book contributes to a generation of people who think differently about what they have been given — people who build strong families, responsible businesses, enduring institutions and healthier communities; people who understand that service is not weakness, sacrifice is not waste, and living for something beyond oneself is not a loss of ambition but a higher expression of it.
Ultimately, Entrusted is an invitation to examine our lives through a different lens: What has been entrusted to me? What am I doing with it? Who is benefiting because it came into my hands? And what will remain because I was here?
For me, those are some of the most important questions we can ask about a meaningful life.
