I’m Motheo. I’m figuring out my twenties out loud.

Where it started

Like most people, I was on a path that everyone had already decided was right for me. Mechanical engineering at the University of Bath. And for a while I didn’t really question it, I just kept going because it was the thing in front of me. But somewhere along the way I started realising something that I want you to realise too, which is that you’re allowed to hope for more than what’s normally expected of you.

Coming to Bath had genuinely been a dream of mine for years, but once I actually got here I hit something I hadn’t planned for. I think I put my values into the wrong things and lost sight of why I was even there in the first place, which was my family, my own growth, and the dreams I’d carried with me all the way from Botswana. I was doing everything that looked right on paper and still felt like I’d lost the plot somewhere in the middle of it.

The opposite of drifting isn’t hustling harder. It’s being intentional.

What changed

I started treating my own life a bit like an engineering problem, which probably sounds strange, but I mean it in the sense of noticing what’s actually happening, questioning the defaults I’d been given, running small experiments and just keeping what actually worked. Not to optimise myself into some sort of machine, more the opposite of that really. I just wanted to make sure the life I was building was one I’d actually choose again if I had the choice.

I had to relearn what a good week even looks like, and sometimes that’s just making my bed, doing the laundry, eating properly. I’ve had to be more patient with myself than I thought I’d need to be, and I’ve stopped waiting around for confidence to show up before I act, because I’m realising now that it grows through small steady habits rather than all at once. I’m still working on the rest of it, staying open to new people even when the right ones take longer to show up than you’d like, and actually writing things down, because you only really see how far you’ve come when you take the time to look back.

Why the show and the letter

I don’t think most people my age are short on ambition. I think they’re short on access to the right conversations and the right kind of honesty, and that’s the gap I wanted to help close.

With Intention is the podcast, long conversations about purpose, identity and ambition with people who’ve actually found real clarity, along with honest solo episodes of my own. WILIOM Wednesdays is the weekly letter, a public journal, one honest reflection at a time.

If you’re somewhere between eighteen and twenty five and you feel that quiet pull to actually do this decade properly, you’re exactly who I’m making this for.