Sugar Water Effect: How I Learned the Science of Opportunity from Selling Pigeons

Image Credit: Berkay

When I was 18 years old, I sold pigeons. Yes, pigeons! The ones you hate seeing flying around train stations and under bridges, as you dock their dumps.

At the time, I was living in Nigeria. Entrepreneurship was my ambition. School wasn’t much fun, so I turned it into something more exciting: my marketplace.

I loved to sell. So, when the idea to sell pigeons came to mind, I took it.

We had a poultry farm, so feeding them cost me nothing. I simply let them eat the chicken feed. My mother wasn’t too happy about that. The poultry was her thing. The only difference was that her birds couldn’t fly. Mine could.

The science was simple. I just needed a few pigeons to start mating. With an egg hatch turnaround of about 20 days, I’d soon have plenty to sell. And that’s exactly what happened.

They were free birds. I made a small opening in the poultry net so they could fly out and come back as they please but to make sure they came back, I laced their drinking water with sugar. A strategy I was taught by another pigeon breeder. Not only did they return, they brought back friends who became part of the roost, which meant I had more to sell. This system became what I call the Sugar Water Effect.

People who couldn’t afford chicken bought pigeons to eat. And young boys, like me, who wanted to compete by showing off their fleet of pigeons bought from me too.

That Sugar Water Effect on the pigeons taught me a valuable lesson about risk that I have come to know.

Risk is about selling, selling your purpose and its associated products or services, and at the same time, consciously preventing what could go wrong. The ‘what could go wrong’ part of risk should only be up to 20% effort when done correctly. That’s operating the 'Sugar Water' dynamically. Loss prevention methods doesn’t always need to be bitter or harsh.

The lesson I learned then cemented my belief that risk is full of opportunities. Some you find, some are given to you and for some, you have to ‘build it and they will come’.

So here’s my question to you; what’s your Sugar Water?

You can read the full story in my book Get Risky or Get Lost to learn the science of opportunities in Chapter 7.

Risk is not a job for me, it is life, and we must know how to live it right, whether it is your life or the life of your organisation or business.

When you realise that your life and the life of your business or profession are the risks you are taking, your entire psyche and the way you relate with the world will change.

WE STOP TAKING RISK WHEN WE DIE!

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Written in my kitchen at 00:10 on 26/07/2025

Chizubel Beluchi