Email Archive
Hey, it’s André…
This is a two-part themed series, which will come together in Issue 18. I hope you enjoy it.
⦿
When I left school (class of 1991), I didn’t know what I would do for a living.
I was eighteen, clueless, and didn’t have the resources to go to university. Entering the labor market was my only option.
Naiveté has perks, especially for a dumb kid with no life experience…
About the only thing I knew “in my bones” was that, at some point, I would be self-employed.
It never entered my mind I would have a job until retirement. Employment was a means to an end.
However, I also had no clear route to independence, at least not that I could see.
This was in South Africa…
Nelson Mandela had been released from prison a year earlier, having served 27 years…
The apartheid system in South Africa was ending (1990 to 1993), so finding decent employment was a challenge for a white kid.
So, my best friend and I — “the schemers” — spent hours searching the classified ads for opportunities, then ordered them through the mail.
There wasn’t commercial internet in the early 90s.
Each time, it would take weeks of patient waiting for our envelope to arrive containing a “secret” that could unlock some doorway to wealth creation. We’d be rich!
In 1993, ten days after my twentieth birthday, this package arrived (which I still have):
(It came from Portland, Oregon, USA.)
KIM
KNOWLEDGE IS MONEY
It was a little 20-page booklet, and right there on page three, this was written:
Fu$%!…
I remember being lit up!
There was magic imbued in those words for a cash-poor 20-year-old, hinting at a transformative promise of possibility, an allure, a mystical quality…
Of all the mail-order opportunities, this one felt different.
However, the implications were lost on me, just unreachable, like a distant feeling, an echo of something important.
So, of course, I did absolutely nothing with the information in that little booklet.
But I kept it…
… similar to when Bilbo Baggins found the Ring in the caverns beneath the Misty Mountains and kept it. It felt powerful, but he didn’t know to what extent.
It wasn’t until ten years later that everything changed.
It was October 22, 2003…
The crime, the ever-present danger (it’s terrible to say this; South Africa had some of the highest incidences of rape in the world, and Durban, the city of my birth, was leading the stats in the mid-90s; maybe it still is), and lack of employment opportunities in South Africa, caused me to immigrate to the United Kingdom in 1999 thanks to ancestral links. (I’ve never returned to South Africa.)
I was working in London, England.
October 22, 2003, was the day I was “fired” (well, “made redundant” technically) from the last job I’ve ever had.
October 23 was my first day of “freedom”! (Which is a story for another time.)
I’m not into woo-woo sh#t (I say this with respect, tho)…
… but it’s weird how some things come around; serendipity.
This was when I learned what that sentence truly meant: “I made my fortune publishing and selling ‘How To’ books.”
There was no internet when I received that little mail-order booklet, but in 2003, there certainly was.
It was a whole new world!
A world of limitless digital opportunities…
A world where “leverage” took on an entirely new meaning … and it sucked me right in. I was hooked from the beginning! (I still am.)
What have I learned in the 21 years since getting my ass fired? (Or the thirty-something years since receiving that little booklet from Logan Powers?)
A whole lot. {grin}
For one, “knowledge is money” doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s fundamentally correct.
But if that statement were objectively true, everyone would be billionaires with six-pack abs. (I have neither.)
Our reality is that we are knowledge workers in a knowledge economy…
And knowledge is freely available everywhere.
If you want to figure something out, you Google it, watch YouTube videos, ask AI, and can learn just about anything.
For free.
Perhaps a more accurate statement is: knowledge is the potential for money.
What’s missing is leverage. (And the Magic Beans!)
Leverage comes from remixing ideas and concepts and themes in unique ways that create interesting intellectual property (IP) that’s valuable.
But not mass market valuable! That’s the exclusive domain of VC-backed billion-dollar unicorns.
I’m talking valuable to a pocket of people — an expression of Keven Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans.
When I figured this out, I “unlocked” the potential of knowledge and how to express value in ways that are meaningful to some people.
People who overvalue the unique blend of creativity and leverage bound up in the knowledge I have.
When that happened, the money followed. For me, not billions, but millions. Which suits me just fine.
As knowledge workers, the internet has unlocked an opportunity for all of us, no matter our ability. We live in the best time in history.
What’s missing from the narrative above is the “Magic Beans” part, but more about that in Issue 18 next.
I’ll leave you with a hint: Jack and the Beanstalk.
Something to chew on for a couple of weeks.
Enjoy your weekend!
André “KIM” Chaperon
P.S.
“Formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune.” — Jim Rohn