Author: ZaibaaHoosen

In the early 1980s, the world witnessed an unusual phenomenon that would forever change the music and technology industries. It all began with the release of Michael Jackson’s song “Thriller” in November 1982. The song was a global hit. However, it wasn’t just the song that took the world by storm; it was also the music video for the song, which also became a hit due to its entertainment value and production quality. The “Thriller” video featured elaborate special effects, state-of-the-art makeup, and meticulously choreographed dance sequences. Basically, it had the production quality of a high budget movie, and as a result it quickly gained attention and was widely broadcasted on television, reaching audiences around the world. Around the same time, the VCR (Video Cassette Recorder) industry was in its infancy. VCRs were becoming more affordable and accessible to consumers. But sales were very slow. But the timing was perfect. As “Thriller” gained immense popularity, many people wanted to own a copy of the music video. This led to a massive boost in sales of the Thriller video in VHS (Video Home System) format tapes, and as a result millions of VCR’s were sold. To further promote the song and the music video, a documentary titled “The Making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller” was released. This was a behind-the-scenes look at the production of the music video, and itself was a huge hit, and naturally generated even more interest in owning a VCR to watch it – leading to even more sales. It was a strange phenomenon. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” had not only become a cultural milestone but had also played a pivotal role in the growth of the VCR industry. Now, when I was a kid, the only way you could watch a movie or any video was using one of these VCR’s. Many younger people have likely never have seen a VCR. Some might have spotted one at their grandparents’ homes, and you probably wondered what that big machine was. VCR’s were large, clunky machines worked with large clunky cassettes, which were about as big as a book. To watch a movie, you would take that tape, put it into a machine, press rewind, when it was done rewinding, you would press “play.” At its peak, the VCR industry was huge. After the spike in sales experienced thanks to Michael Jackson, the VCR industry did not slow down. It continued to grow and grow. The industry employed millions of people across the entire supply chain, from research and development to manufacturing to logistics to sales and distribution to after-sales service. Even the cassettes had their entire own industry, all the way from manufacturing down through to sales and distribution. And there was an entire industry that was involved with transferring movies and videos onto cassettes and marketing them. And then there was the video rental industry, where stores like Blockbuster hired out cassettes with movies on them. It was a huge industry worth billions of dollars. An unstoppable juggernaut. But it was not meant to last. In the mid 1990’s, DVD’s became mainstream and the VCR industry disappeared almost overnight. Now what do you think happened to all of those millions and millions and millions of people who were involved in that industry? They died of starvation, right? Wrong! What happened to them was they reskilled, upskilled, and got into other jobs. And today, we don’t find millions and millions of people standing with placards on the street corners saying that “I used to work in the VCR industry and now I’m starving.” This is just one example. There dozens of different industries that were wiped out by technology, and it was the same pattern over and over again. Take the camera industry for example, which involved everything from manufacturing and sales of cameras and film, to processing those films to produce photographs. All of those industries went by way of the dinosaur. What happened to those people? Again, they found other jobs. They went into other skills, they went into other professions, and the world went on. So in the place that we are right now in the present, we are finding more and more new technologies coming out, and there are fears of those technologies taking jobs away. And no doubt, a lot of jobs will become obsolete. A lot of professions will become obsolete. But what’s going to happen is that human beings, being resilient and adaptive, are going to move to other things. And we are always going to find jobs, and that is what is great about the future. We are always going to have opportunities. But the true leaders of the future are those who are going to have the skills to embrace and own all of these new technological advancements, and to turn them into opportunities. And that, my friends, is what this book is all about. Previous Chapter | Table of Contents

Let’s take a trip back in time. In the early 1800’s, the Jacquard loom was invented, which was a machine that made fabrics manufacturing much faster and cheaper, and enabled factories to produce fabrics with much more intricate designs than before. Thanks to these machines, clothing was commoditized, and millions of common people could now afford to dress in clothing that was previously only available to the rich. But this came at a price: thousands of weavers lost their jobs almost overnight. Many of them revolted against the rise of the loom machines, to no avail. No one really cared about the weavers, because the new manufacturing method made economic sense. As a result, they decided to take matters into their own hands. They started an “anti-loom” movement that began breaking into factories and destroying the new loom machines. The movement was led by a man named General Ned Ludd, and the people involved in the movement were called the “Luddites.” The Luddite revolt was short-lived and totally ineffectual. Interestingly, the word “Luddite” is still in use today to describe people who are averse to technology. But that was just the start. Over the next century, the industrial revolution went into high gear, and machines were introduced in pretty much every industry. Suddenly, there were machines in factories and in farms everywhere. This mass industrialization caused a lot of concern. Many people were convinced that human beings were doomed, that there were not going to be enough jobs, that there would be mass unemployment, poverty and starvation. That there would be no way to feed the world’s population, which was a billion at the time. Doom and gloom all around. A slice of doom and gloom for you, sir? What actually happened? Not only did people survive, they thrived! Over the 20th century, the world’s population grew from 1 billion to 7 billion. Did humans get wiped out by the machines? No. People found other things to do. Human beings found other jobs that they could do. And today, the world economies are stronger than ever. Then what was all the fuss about? You see, there are many people, particularly sensationist media, who want you to believe that, thanks to technology, we are doomed. That technology is going to take all jobs away and leave us all as human beings high and dry. And that we are probably going to starve to death. They terrify you with talks about scarcity and unsustainability. Or worse still, some suggest the AI systems will realize that human beings are the scourge of the planet, and we are part of the problem rather than the solution, and completely wipe us all out of the face of the earth. Both scenarios are very, very scary. But really, what is the truth? What is going to be the situation going forward? Let me tell you. Now, what I’m about to tell you are not just fluffy words that are intended to make you feel good, but a reality based on facts. Let’s go. • Fact 1: None of this is new. You saw it in the story above. There is always some new tech that threatens to take your job away. Always. • Fact 2: History repeats itself over, and over again. The story of the looms was just one example. When computers were invented, office workers were supposedly doomed; when spread sheets were invented, accountants were doomed; when social media came into existence, news media were supposedly doomed. Are you seeing the pattern? None of that materialized! • Fact 3: Tech does, in fact, take jobs away. There is no hiding from that fact. But tech creates other opportunities. It frees us to evolve to higher order types of work. For example, before spread sheets, accountants had to do all the calculations manually – an extremely time-consuming and error-prone work. Then along came spread sheets and freed them up to focus on more important things. Are you getting the picture? • Fact 4: When change happens, there are always the leaders and the followers. Who are the leaders? They are the ones who become the tech entrepreneurs and revolutionaries of their times. They become Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sam Alman and Mark Zuckerberg of their time. The followers end up working for them. • Fact 5: Leaders possess more than just tech skills. They possess the 6 power skills covered in this book. Previous Chapter | Table of Contents

“Go” is an ancient Chinese game that is kind of like Draughts, where you play on a board with black and white beads. But the similarity ends there. Go is very different from Draughts in the sense that it is a lot more complex. So complex that they call it “the world’s most complex board game.” As such, Go requires a lot more strategy, intuition, and creativity to play and win. Now, the trouble with the game Go, unlike with Draughts and with Chess, is that it was impossible for scientists or computer programmers to create a game of Go. The reason is that, when computer programmers are creating a game like chess, what they do is they typically program every possible move into the computer. Then, as you are playing against the computer, then with every move that you make, the computer determines every possible move that it can make in response to your move. And then every counter-move that you will make subsequent to that, right until the end of the game. Which means that with every move, the computer is already visualizing multiple end results of the entire game, not just the next move or the next two or three moves. Now, with the game Go, this was impossible. Why? Because Go has too many potential moves to programm into a computer. In fact, they say the number of legal moves in a game of Go is more than the number of atoms in the known universe! That is a lot of atoms. No one on earth can input so many moves into a computer programme. As a result, it was declared impossible to programme a game of Go. In fact, some computer scientists declared that we will only see an actual Go-playing computer closer to the year 2100, when computing power is a lot more capable. But some scientists at Google didn’t accept this. They decided to challenge this idea, and to find a solution. There was no way they would wait until the year 2100. So they created a supercomputer called AlphaGo, and they gave this computer machine learning algorithms, and they showed it thousands of games of Go being played. AlphaGo observed these games, and just by its observations, it learned the basic rules of the game. Basically, it learned to play the game by itself. And then it did something very creepy. It split itself into two personalities, and then it started to play against itself. It did this 24 hours a day, game after game. Naturally, (or artificially) it became extremely good at the game. And when they tested it, by playing against it, they found that this thing was actually really good. When the scientists played against it, it won every time. It wiped them out. So they decoded to give AlphaGo a challenge, by bringing in someone really good at the game, European Go champion, Fan Hui. Unfortunately, he too, didn’t stand a chance; AlphaGo wiped him out. So they decided to bring in the big gun. Lee Sedol is a Korean Go player, who is also the world Go champion. But he is not just the world champion; he the best Go player in known history. In other words, this guy is really good. They put the challenge to him to play against AlphaGo, and he accepted. And so they set up a match between him and AlphaGo. The date was set: 15 March 2016. The media was informed. The day arrived, and everybody was there, present, watching with eager anticipation. It was a highly publicized event. The bets at that time were that Lee Sedol would beat AlphaGo four games to one. What happened instead was that AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol four games to one, and people were shocked across the world. How could AI beat a human being? And that too, the world champion? It did not make sense. Go needs intuition and a bit of creativity to play. There was no way a computer could play with intuition and creativity. Or was there? What was important and significant about this event is that it showed us, for the first time, a number of things. Number one, that artificial intelligence will do things that we don’t expect and at a speed that we don’t expect. The second thing is that artificial intelligence will be able to observe and teach itself a number of different skills without anybody having to teach it. Number three, that artificial intelligence can apply or simulate intuition and creativity. All these things put together showed the world what AI was going to be capable of. And exactly as predicted, artificial intelligence continued to progress at an incredible rate, which only further emphasized what AlphaGo had already told us back in 2016: that artificial intelligence might just be more capable than we ever imagined. The only remining question is, will human beings be able to compete against AI? The answer is, no. We will never be able to compete against AI. But the good news is, we will never have to. Previous Chapter | Table of Contents

I’ve given you enough stories about people who I take inspiration from because they’ve made it and they are living the lives that I believe make them really truly happy. People who started from nothing and who found success. And I gave you my own story as well. From being in a job that I hated, to running my own business and enjoying myself despite all the challenges, despite the roller coaster ride that business is. It makes me happy to pitch up for work every day and to see my team’s faces. To work with them gives me joy. Added to that, I love getting feedback from my students. There are hundreds of them all over the place, and nothing makes me happier than one of them messaging me out of the blue, telling me that they have started a dream job, or have gotten a promotion. But enough about me. Enough about others. Let’s talk about you. I want you to think about you. What is the life that you want? Is it the life that you are living right now? Or are you living a schizophrenic life – living one life but desiring something else? Do you feel that there should be more to this? Do you feel that you should be doing something more? If you feel that way, then this book is definitely for you. This book will show you how to get up and bring about the change in your life that will take you closer to the life you want. It will help you to get out of the life that you hate and construct and nurture and develop the life that you want. It will help you to design the life that you want and then work towards it until such a point that you find success. On the other hand, if you do not feel that way, if you are one of the lucky people who are living the life of their dreams, then congratulations, well done, kudos to you. But this book is for you too. Let me tell you why. The problem with life is, it’s not always going to be smooth flowing. There are always going to be challenges. There are going to be unexpected turns of events that you will need to deal with. Life is a sine wave. You go up and down, up and down, up and down. That’s a guarantee. To deal with such situations, you will need the skills in this book. Having these skills will enable you to push through all those challenges and turn every problem into an opportunity. So, whoever you are, I want you to think about it again. What is the life that you would ideally love to live? Take a pencil and a page. Go and separate yourself from everybody. Put the phone away and just pour your heart out onto that piece of paper. And describe the life that you want and let it inspire you for what’s to come next. Previous Chapter | Table of Contents

There’s another person who inspires me considerably, but it is not because of her financial success. As I said before, happiness is not just about money, it’s not about having millions or billions. We generally delude ourselves into thinking like that. I’m not saying money is not important. No, that’s a naïve and stupid thing to say. Having no money, or not enough money, is bad. Very bad. I’m not one of that says that money doesn’t bring happiness. Money does bring happiness. Just being able to buy a gift for somebody you love, or take your kids for a holiday, or buy the clothes you want, or drive the car desire; these things do bring happiness. But money has its limitations, and only brings happiness to an extent. There are lots of stories about billionaires, celebrities and movie stars who are deeply unhappy, many of whom turn to drugs and alcohol as an escape. That is because there is a lot more to life than money, like surrounding yourself with people you love, and who love you; like doing work that gives you fulfilment; like engaging in selfless pursuits. So, coming back to the person that inspires me. There is a lady who runs a little youth empowerment centre in a township not far from where I live and she’s been doing this for decades. She takes in kids from the community from pre-school age, and takes care of them until they are adults and are able to fend for themselves. I visit her center frequently because we partnered with them a few years ago, to teach the youth digital skills. I truly enjoy my visits there. Whenever I speak to her, she exudes happiness. During my visits she updates me on the goings on at the centre, telling me about the progress of her kids. She will inform me of one of the kids that she brought up, who recently got a job at a large company; or of a recent wedding where two of the kids that she brought up, got married. When she tells me these things, I feel the joy that she feels. She is one of the happiest, most content people I have ever met. And yet, she is by no means a rich person. She has just enough money, she drives a simple car, and lives a simple life. She is long past retirement age, but she refuses to retire because she loves what she’s doing so much that she cannot imagine a life without it. I can imagine that for a person like her, separating from her work would be grief. It would be like tearing away a part of her life. How amazing is it, to wake up every day and to do something that you love so much, that you cannot imagine your life without it? Now that’s definitely a life worth living. Previous Chapter | Table of Contents

Another person who inspires me is this Senegalese youngster, Kaby Lame. This guy is a TikTok sensation. The last time I checked, he had the highest TikTok follower count in the world, at over 160 million followers. That’s a lot of followers! Of course, his fame and massive follower count meant big sponsorships and advertising deals. To date Kaby has worked with some big players, like Pepsi, Hugo Boss and Epic Games – the makers of Fortnite. He has even partnered with major Hollywood studios like Paramount to promote Mission Impossible 7, Universal Pictures to promote Idris Elba’s movie Beast, and with Disney to promote the Marvel movie, Guardians of the Galaxy 3. In short, this guy is super-famous and super-successful. But it wasn’t always like that for him. Kaby, Khabane, was born in Senegal. His family moved to Italy when he was one year old. He grew up there, and studied in Italian schools until he was fourteen, when his parents decided to temporarily send him to study at a Quranic school near Dakar. On his return to Italy, he began to work at a car factory. Unfortunately, he was laid off during the Covid lockdowns, and could not find a job after that. That’s when he came up with the idea to become an online content creator. He began to create funny videos with his cell phone and to post them to TikTok. He started doing these funny videos where he recorded himself reacting to other people’s “life hack” videos, and he did it in a very funny way. His videos caught on and they started doing well, and his follower count started to grow and grow, and the rest is history. Today he’s a very successful person who has come a long way. Think about it: a young unemployed kid, loses his job, tries to get another job, fails, and then comes back and builds himself up to a point where he’s worth tens of millions of dollars, and doing videos with some of the biggest movie stars in the world; and being paid by some of the biggest movie studios in the world like Disney to promote their movies. Now that is incredible. That is a life worth living, if you ask me. Previous Chapter | Table of Contents

Not long ago, I interviewed a young lady for a column I was writing for a newspaper. What I found interesting about her, was that she had started her own Instagram business, and was quite successful. She works a full-time job at a bank, and decided that she needed to start a side gig to supplement her income. After doing her research, she found that the best platform for her to run her business, was Instagram. Having made up her mind and getting all her ducks in a row, she got started. It took her years, but eventually she grew that business to a point where the amount of money she was earning from the business was equivalent to the amount of money she was earning in her job. And what was her business? Her business was that she used to buy second-hand clothing off the streets, take them home, wash them, make them look smart, take photos of them, and put them out on Instagram. Where did the idea come from? She told me that the idea came from her own practice because that’s what she used to do. Since her salary wasn’t that much, she couldn’t afford to buy brand new clothes. So, she used to go to the streets and buy second-hand clothing for herself and her family. And then one day the idea struck her: “Why don’t I do this for other people as well?” She reasoned that not everybody had the opportunity to go to the streets and buy clothing. There market out there, of people who are sitting in offices, and who would love to buy some of these things at these cheap, discounted prices. So she thought, “why don’t I somehow make these things available to them?” And so, that’s where the genesis of the idea was. 25 Like all new businesses, she started with no leads, no customers, no networks. It was dead. Nobody was buying. Sales were zero. But she learned how to market herself on social media. She learned how to grow her following. And eventually, she built up a large following, and the sales started rolling in. And things started to snowball from there. She said to me, ‘I’ve come to a point where I put out pictures on Instagram in the morning, and by afternoon, everything is sold out!” She said people even fight with her sometimes when they miss out on an offer. “But what can I do? These are second-hand clothing, and I don’t have the choice of what stock I get. Whatever I get, I sell.” Even though she earns as much money in her side gig as in her full-time job, she has no intention to leave her job. She enjoys her work, and likes her colleagues. The only problem she had, was that she was not earning enough; but she solved that problem by starting a side gig, and has literally doubled her income. “It’s a win-win situation. I have a job I enjoy, plus I now have enough money to look after my family, to buy whatever I want, to go on holidays, and to basically spoil them. And I’m very, very happy right now,” she said. Now, this young lady is not a multi-millionaire, not a multi-billionaire, but she inspires me. She inspires me because she is a person who is living the life that she is happy with. And when you speak to her, you can sense that deep down inside her, she’s a happy person. She’s a person who is living the life she wanted to live. Previous Chapter | Table of Contents