Qiesto — What’s In A Name?. “Kwesto or is it Kuesto? How do you…
Tags: Youth, Africa, Employment, Careers, Qiesto

“Kwesto or is it Kuesto? How do you pronounce it? What does it even mean?”.

We’ve gotten this question a lot since announcing Qiesto (pronounced ki-es-to) to the world earlier this year. Most of the people asking are Nigerian so read the sentence with that accent ;-)

At Qiesto, we are building a platform to connect young Africans to opportunities to use and showcase their competencies as a pathway to a meaningful future (jobs, further education or entrepreneurship).

We then get asked how we chose the name and how it’s relevant to the challenge we are trying to solve.

In this post, we hope to shed a bit of light on these questions.

Know Thyself

Qiesto is a play on the French translation of the ultimate self-inquiry question: “who are you?” which, in French, translates to “Qui es tu?”.

At the heart of our work at Qiesto, we help young people take up opportunities that help them develop into highly sought after value providers. Achieving this outcome requires a deep focus on self-awareness and self-reflection as they go through a myriad of learning scenarios.

Amongst the areas around which we hope they develop more awareness includes:

Their beliefs: what are the things they believe that inform the way they think and act? How can they identify and make the effort to transcend limiting beliefs that may hamper their performance? How can they take on new positive beliefs about themselves and the world that will improve their outcomes?

Their values: What things do they hold most dear? How can they build a life and career that is in alignment with their values?

Their personal & professional interests: What issues do they have interest in? What new interests are they developing? How can they build a life and career aligned with their interests?

Their ideal work environment: In what kind of work environment and team scenarios do they thrive? In which ones do they struggle? How might they factor this as they start and build their careers?

Their strengths and weaknesses: What are they naturally great at? What things do they struggle with? What strategies can they use to harness these in order to become their optimal self?

Their personal & professional vision: Where do they see themselves in 1 year? 5 years? 10 years? How has this changed over time?

To learn these and much more about themselves, we have self-reflection and group feedback integrated into the learning experiences we provide young people. This makes every person’s experience unique and particular even if they are going through common learning experiences.

We believe that the more young people know about themselves, the better they project themselves to potential employers, teammates, partners, clients, investors etc, depending on which pathway they choose.

Our name reinforces this belief — “Who are you?”

Work as Fun

The name Qiesto also represents the idea of work being fun.

The popular belief that important things should be serious and generally, work being boring is not considered abnormal. In the industrial age, workers were prepared for this reality by going through an education (schooling) system that bored most children near to tears.

Work is consistently portrayed as drudgery or as the worst aspect of adulting.

There’s no shortage of memes and GIFs expressing the tragic end of the weekend or the need for a vacation in order to escape that “terrible” job. An entire industry has even sprung from the idea of leaving your 9-to-5 for a remote job to be done at a beach somewhere across the world.

This is the ideological environment in which young people today find themselves. In needing and wanting a source of income, they resign themselves to the fact that they might never get a job they love so they settle for whatever they can get.

At Qiesto, we think the common sense on this is nonsense. How you earn your living should be fun for you. It may not always be the raving fun of playing a great video game or attending a great party, but it should be innately pleasurable.

If you will spend 40–60% of your adult life working to earn a living, it should be fun. Postponing fun till vacation or after you have retired is a pretty sad way to live. That’s more existing than living.

To this end, we have designed a learning and working experience built to emphasise the fun. On our platform, members don’t work on projects, they go on missions, challenges or quests (the other source of our name). These quests are deployed by real-world organisations to achieve very clear business and/or social outcomes.

In taking this approach, we introduce our members to a new way of framing work that ties into the achievement of a higher purpose, into the thrill of overcoming obstacles and into the sense of personal growth and mastery.

In this way, we hope to produce a mindset shift to the idea that a job should not mean sacrificing your passion and pleasure. They can be seamlessly integrated with intention.

Getting meaningful work experience can be a fun journey. It can and should be a quest in self-discovery. It can and should be a quest into self-awareness.

Our name Qiesto is therefore a play on the word Quest.

Now You Know, Let’s Talk

So in more than a nutshell, that’s the idea behind the name Qiesto. What do you think? Let us know in the comments below.

If you like the ideas behind our name and want to be a part of the broader experience we are creating, feel free to connect with us on any of our platforms — our website www.qiesto.com and @QiestoEn on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

We look forward to engaging with you