First in class… does not mean First in life. Those of us who prided ourselves in our top grades throughout school, but struggled to find our footing in the real world, learned this firsthand. Anyway… back to my insight from the “Outliers” book. First of all, it was the story of Bill Gates (as narrated in the book) that drew me to the book. Why? Because I’d studied Computer Science in Uni. One story that was told to us to keep us motivated was that Bill Gates was a programmer and that he created Microsoft. Therefore… be a really good programmer and you can be as successful as Bill Gates. We didn’t question the narrative. We dove right into our programming textbooks and spent countless hours in the Computer Lab practicing. I got really good. I was proud of it. And here I was, reading ‘Outliers’ - a book that revealed the real secrets to his success. Bill Gates attended Lakeside High school in Seattle, an institution that had perhaps the only supercomputer in the whole of Washington State… and one of the very few in the whole world. This placed him at the bleeding edge of a new global opportunity. Though the plan was for him to study Law (taking after his father), he became extremely interested in spending as much time as possible with the computers. There he formed a strong peer group that included his future co-founder, Paul Allen. If Bill had been sent to a different high school, we might never have heard his name. I need you to focus here… it wasn’t about computers per se. It was about being positioned at the epicenter of the dominant opportunity from the ground floor. Furthermore, Bill Gates could afford to be at Lakeside (an elite private school) because his parents were rich. His father, William H. Gates Sr. was a powerful lawyer and well connected in elite circles. Billionaire founder of Starbucks Coffee, Howard Schultz, has credited him for helping him start the company. See the video here: https://obidi.co/howard-gates-story His mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, was from a wealthy banking family and was herself, one of the most powerful American women of her time. Her own father was the president of a national bank. She served on corporate boards including First Interstate Bank, United Way and even IBM. Bill Gates was not born to peasants. His parents understood the world clearly, so even though he was currently obsessed with computers, he would NEVER be a footsoldier in that field. He was primed to be an owner. And that’s what Kings do. Kings do not plough another man’s field. They own their own field and get other men to plough it. That’s what Lord means - OWNER. And as the OWNER of this WhatsApp channel… *I’m hereby raising my price to 2,000 reactions before I drop the next part of the story.* You can do it. I’m rooting for you. — Lord Obidi