Introduction
Lola Oyelayo-Pearson spent her childhood fighting anyone who tried to dumb her down, then spent her adulthood learning to sit comfortably as the least informed person on a call about zero-knowledge cryptography. That reversal, from needing to prove she was the smartest in the room to choosing to be the most curious, sits at the centre of how she now leads teams, hires people and handles failure as Director of Product at Mysten Labs, the company behind the Sui blockchain.
The geek who refused to be bullied into being smaller
Lola describes herself as a child who moved between school systems, arriving in England two years ahead academically after skipping grades in Spain, and finding herself an easy target for bullies as the new, unfamiliar kid. Her response wasn't to blend in. She fought back physically when pushed, while refusing point blank to dumb herself down to make herself less of a target. That instinct, protect your right to be exactly as capable as you are, while still standing your ground physically and verbally, shaped a childhood identity built almost entirely around being the first hand up, the correct answer, the smartest person in the room.
Learning to be the stupidest person in the room
That identity didn't survive contact with adulthood intact, and Lola is candid about what forced the change: boredom. Anyone who stays invested in being the most knowledgeable person in every room eventually either becomes insufferable or gets bored senseless, because senior careers are full of rooms where you genuinely don't know the answer. University humbled her first, and losing an entire academic year forced a recalibration she carried forward. Now, in meetings with cryptography researchers where she says her head genuinely hurts trying to follow the conversation, she asks the basic question anyway, on the working assumption that several other people in the room have the same question and lack the confidence to ask it. Reframing the dumbest question in the room as a service to everyone else, not a personal admission of inadequacy, is what makes the position bearable.
Two kinds of failure, and why only one is actually yours
Lola draws a sharp line between what she calls personal failure and situational failure. A project that doesn't land, a launch that underperforms, a decision that goes the wrong way, these are situational, and she refuses to internalise them as evidence of personal inadequacy unless she did the entire thing alone with no input from anyone else. Personal failure is a different, heavier category: did she act in line with her own values, did she show up as the version of herself she has decided to be.
The skill of keeping those two categories separate wasn't innate. An early boss taught her to externalise her thinking constantly, presenting options with clear upsides and downsides rather than simply making calls in isolation, so that everyone involved had opted into the same acceptable risk together. When a downside then materialises, it isn't a personal failure, because the decision was shared and transparent from the start. Where she does hold herself personally accountable is in the harder, greyer moments: staying quiet when someone said something inappropriate in a room, or accepting an outcome that quietly violated her own value system. Those, she says, are the moments that actually challenge her.
From Warrior to Alchemist
One of the most concrete tools Lola shares came from a coaching relationship built around a simple observation: her instinctive response to a values conflict at work was to go to war. Working with her coach, she identified a physical signature for that state, tight chest, shallow breathing, readiness to fight, and worked to build an alternative persona she calls the Alchemist: someone who cares about exactly the same things but responds to conflict as a problem to be solved rather than a battle to be won.
The practice wasn't about suppressing the instinct. She's clear the Warrior still shows up, it's part of her nature. What changed, over roughly seven months of deliberate practice, was learning to notice the physical cue early enough to take a breath, drop the tension to her stomach, and choose the Alchemist's response instead of reacting from the Warrior's. It's a framework for converting justified anger into a more useful form of leverage, rather than pretending the anger isn't valid in the first place.
The line she wouldn't cross for any daily rate
Lola tells a detailed story about a well-paid banking contract she quit after seven months, not because the work was hard, but because the culture demanded a version of professionalism, forced formality, hostility mistaken for rigour, and public humiliation of colleagues, that conflicted directly with her values. The breaking point came when she intervened after watching a manager shout down a product manager in front of the team. She gave her notice the next day.
She's unusually honest that walking away that easily was also a form of privilege: confidence that another role would follow wasn't only self-belief, it was the product of timing, industry access and the kind of early-career opportunities to fail and learn that aren't as available to people entering the same industry today. Rather than downplaying that privilege, she treats it as an obligation to use deliberately on other people's behalf.
Building staircases, not ladders
That sense of obligation shows up concretely in how Lola hires and mentors. She actively questions defaults that quietly disadvantage people from different backgrounds, recognising qualifications from universities outside the UK and US that colleagues might dismiss unfamiliarity with as a lack of quality, and prioritising a candidate's thinking and growth mindset over a conventional CV path.
She describes pushing back on an interview format at a previous employer that was designed to surface a candidate's growth mindset by making them keep talking without a clear question to respond to, an approach she and colleagues from other high-context cultures found genuinely difficult, because pausing to wait for a direct question read as respectful, not evasive. Rather than scrapping the interview, which the company had reasons to keep, she began coaching candidates she felt might struggle with its format specifically on how to navigate it, while leaving technical assessments untouched. It's a precise example of what she means by building staircases: not lowering the bar, but recognising where the bar itself was built around one cultural default.
The curse of the competent
Lola names a pattern she has both experienced and watched play out repeatedly, especially among people of colour and women in technical roles: being so reliably good at extra, uncredited work, taking notes, organising team activities, absorbing side requests, that it becomes invisible labour standing between you and the recognition that should come from your actual craft. She calls it the curse of the competent, and warns that the warm gratitude that comes with being endlessly helpful can quietly substitute for the promotion that never arrives, because visible seniority gets built on core craft, not on being reliably available for everything else.
Her practical fix is communication, not refusal. When someone asks her for something extra, she lays out what she's already committed to and asks them to weigh the new request against it, or asks directly how the request connects to her stated career goals. Framed that way, she's not saying no, she's asking the person making the request to own the trade-off consciously, rather than letting boundaryless yes-saying quietly cost her the recognition her actual work deserves.
What leadership actually requires
Asked to define leadership, Lola names three things: agency, authenticity and courage. Agency, because a leader who visibly isn't making their own decisions is nearly impossible to follow with confidence. Authenticity, because people connect to people, not to a polished performance of leadership, and that connection is what earns trust when a hard, unpopular decision has to be made. Courage, because leadership eventually requires acting on incomplete information rather than endlessly deferring, and she's watched how demoralising it is to work for someone who never actually decides anything.
