They Taught Us Not to Speak. The Job Market Punishes Silence.

There’s a sentence almost every Ghanaian kid learned before they learned to write their own name: don’t talk when adults are talking.

It sounds like manners, and a lot of the time it was. But sit with it long enough and you notice what else it trains. Wait your turn. Don’t interrupt. Don’t ask the hard question in the room. Don’t look too hungry. Don’t make anyone uncomfortable.

Then we graduate, open LinkedIn, and wonder why the people who get hired are the ones who look a little too comfortable talking.

School rewarded the quiet ones who could sit still, take notes, and wait to be called. Asking too many questions could feel like disrespect. Finishing early and asking for more work could feel like showing off. By the time you leave campus, silence has stopped being a rule and become a reflex.

The job market, whether in Accra, remote, or abroad, doesn’t grade that reflex kindly. It rewards the graduate who shows their work before anyone asks, reaches out before the posting closes, and says out loud what they can do without waiting for permission. We spent sixteen years building the opposite muscle.

Ɛnyɛ hwee

There’s another phrase we all know: ɛnyɛ hwee. It’s nothing.

The plumber fixes your sink and it’s leaking again by Sunday. “Ɛnyɛ hwee, I’ll come back.” The carpenter’s door doesn’t close properly. “It will settle.” The electrician leaves the wires hanging out of the socket because the cover was “finished at the shop.” The tailor promised Friday, and it’s now the next Wednesday. The mason’s floor tiles go up crooked, and when you point it out you get a shrug and a smile.

Ɛnyɛ hwee.

We laugh about it because it’s everywhere. But think about what the phrase is really doing. It shrinks the standard until anything clears it. Late is fine. Almost is fine. “It’s working” means it works when you hold it a certain way. Nobody is lying, exactly. We’ve just collectively agreed that close enough is the job.

And it isn’t only the fitters on the roadside. It’s the office email that sits unanswered for a week. The report submitted with the template text still in it. The government form that needs four visits because nobody told you about the fifth document. The event that starts two hours late while everyone acts surprised. We’ve built a whole culture of okay, and we call it being relaxed.

The problem is that ɛnyɛ hwee is also what the world hears when it looks at our work. If the job is “nothing” to the person doing it, it becomes nothing to the person paying for it. That’s how a whole country of talented people ends up being seen as a risk: the work was never bad because we couldn’t do it. It was bad because we decided it didn’t matter.

The handyman and the graduate are closer than we like to admit. One leaves the leak. The other submits the CV with typos, skips the follow-up, and turns up to the interview having never opened the company’s website. Same shrug. Same “it’s nothing.” Same result.

Disco is not a hiring strategy

Then there’s the laid-back rhythm. The “we’ll figure it out” energy that feels like freedom until the deadline belongs to someone else and they’ve already moved on.

Disco is fun. Disco is not a hiring strategy.

A graduate in Accra is competing with someone in Nairobi, Lagos, or Bangalore who treated the last six months like they meant it: proof of work, outreach, follow-ups, same-day replies. Against that, “I’ll apply when I’m ready” is how you lose a race you didn’t know you’d entered.

Look at how a lot of us job hunt. Upload a CV. Refresh the portal. Ask a friend to “put in a word.” Wait. Hope HR remembers you exist. That posture makes sense if you were trained to wait for adults to call on you. It fails in a market where nobody enters the room unless your work makes some noise.

I’m not saying become loud for the sake of it. I’m saying the silence we were taught was never free. It costs interviews. It costs referrals. It costs the chance to be exceptional in a room that doesn’t know your name yet.

It follows you after you’re hired, too. Sitting through meetings without speaking. Waiting to be assigned instead of owning a problem. Finishing the task exactly as written and stopping there. “I did what you said” is the classroom version of adulthood. Work pays for something else: here’s the problem, here’s what I tried, here’s what broke, here’s what’s next.

What the opposite looks like

Getting hired isn’t a personality transplant. It’s a few habits. Ship something people can click, like a project, a write-up, a small tool, or a case study from an internship. Write the message instead of drafting it in your head for three days. Ask for feedback like you plan to use it. Treat every application like it has a deadline, not a vibe. Prepare for the interview like the company is real, because it is. Follow up.

And finish the job. Fully. Check the tap twice. Close the door properly. Proofread the CV. Send the thing on the day you said. The people who look “lucky” are often just less frozen, and a little less willing to say ɛnyɛ hwee about their own work.

Grades help, but they aren’t proof. The graduate who can explain one problem they actually solved, even a small one, will beat the clean transcript with an empty portfolio every time the bar is serious. Global teams aren’t hunting for potential in the abstract. Potential is everywhere. They’re hunting for signal.

The world won’t unlearn our culture for us. We can keep the respect and drop the freeze. We can keep the warmth and drop the shrug.

Speak when it matters. Finish what you start. Treat your work like it’s something, because the moment you call it nothing, so does everyone else.

Permission isn’t coming. The ones who win will be the ones who stopped waiting for it.