You can’t be rich by following the examples of the rich.
When you hear the stories of most of the people who made it big from small beginnings, there’s always a point where you are kept in the dark—and that is where everything changed.
How did Despite move from selling cassettes into music production, building Peace FM, and all these businesses? You won’t ever know this. Did he save the small money earned from selling cassettes to make it this big? Something happened, and that was the key—and that is what we’ll never know.
How did Prince Kofi Amoabeng make it this big after leaving the army with very little?
All the rich people with small beginnings have beautiful and inspiring stories to tell, but you realize that it is impossible to follow their footprints to where they are. This is because they flew at a point and left no footprints for you to follow.
You can sell cassettes and save all the money you make from it, but that won’t give you Peace FM, UT, Okay FM, Special Ice, Best Point Savings and Loan, Best Insurance, You Too Iodated Salt, and what have you.
You can join the army, retire as a major, and start everything Prince Amoabeng started, but that won’t give you UT Holdings. There’s always a point where all the struggles and hustle break the door for you to enter so that you can grab all that makes your sweat worthwhile.
That is the point where you cannot learn the trick that did it for them anymore because those happenings don’t follow the script. Some had to break the rules to experience this moment, whereas others had the rules broken for them by an unseen hand they’d call fate.
As a Christian, at the moment when the story stops following the logical pattern and results in the radical leap in life, I see the God factor. I see the hand of God breaking the rule of ant-like progression, the barriers, and silencing the giants on the promised land. I see God breaking the walls to give His chosen one entry at the point where there are no examples and footprints.
This can be meeting a good Samaritan, winning a lottery, getting an unexpected contract, or getting that business idea which required little capital and promised good returns.
Every successful person has their unique experience and opportunity. What they have in common, though, is that they can teach you only to a point. You can replay their lives and live it, but you will get to a point where it no longer depends on you—and that is the point where you get lost.
At this point, they cannot teach you the “how-tos” any longer because the truth is, they either think you shouldn’t know it, or what happened doesn’t even make sense to them.
It starts with making the most out of your time during the small beginning.
It comes from learning the lessons a tabletop business presents and getting prepared to handle a group of companies from the small beginning.
The silent moment separates the rich-from-nothing from the wannabes.
You can’t learn it. You can’t be a Despite or Prince Amoabeng by doing everything they did with their lives and end up like them. You need the hand of God to lift you from walking so that you can fly.
When people fly, they don’t leave footprints for others to follow. Everything becomes their unique experience that cannot be shared, however hard they try.
What we can learn from these people, though, is to be prepared for that one opportunity that changes everything.
The difference between the Kennedy Agyapongs and people who started like him and are still nowhere near him isn’t always because he had opportunities while they didn’t. Some may have fluffed bigger and better opportunities than he had.
Even if you experience everything some of these people experienced, take the exact decisions they took, you may still not make it like they have.
Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard and started Microsoft; others dropped out of something with the genuine intention of starting something with more expertise, drive, and resources than Bill had, and still failed.
For whatever resulted in making someone successful, the same has rendered countless failures.
This is an extract from William Shakespeare’s legendary Romeo and Juliet:
When Romeo learned of Juliet’s death, he went to an apothecary to buy poison and die. It was a weekend, and Mantua laws, where the apothecary operated, punished by death those who sold poison during the weekend. This is how Romeo broke his resolve:
ROMEO
Art thou so bare and full of wretchedness,
And fear’st to die? Famine is in thy cheeks.
Need and oppression starveth in thine eyes.
Contempt and beggary hangs upon thy back.
The world is not thy friend nor the world’s law.
The world affords no law to make thee rich.
Then be not poor, but break it, and take this.
[Holds out money]
Weakened by these strong words, the apothecary replied:
APOTHECARY
My poverty, but not my will, consents.
Finally, Romeo gave him money—enough to change his life forever—and got the poison he wanted.
This is my point: from that night of selling the poison to Romeo, the apothecary’s own life’s story changed. As far as the people of Mantua were concerned, he was a hardworking apothecary who made it working all his life.
The truth, though, is this: between his poverty and riches is a rule broken that will never be told. Even if he decides to tell it, people cannot use his example to make it.
I have read a lot of “10 steps to riches” and “how to be a billionaire.” If you have read similar books and tried to live the instructions provided, if you have listened to motivational speakers wow the audience with brilliant ideas for making it and tried following suit, you’d realize that life does not follow a pattern.
This is why, in this life, our priority should be to chart our own course and make the most of the opportunities that come to us, because they are usually unique to us. Following the examples of people will lead you nowhere because there is always going to be the point where it does not depend on you.
We all have our story, and life deals with us according to our unique script that we cannot share because we do not know.
There is a point where your normal routine effort opens abnormal windows of opportunity for you. To be at the right place at the right time and in the right frame of mind, you can learn from those who have made it out of nothing. However, in terms of recognizing and seizing it, everything depends on you because their strategy and examples may not work for you.
Remember this: for everything people did to succeed, countless others failed doing the same.
Don’t try so hard to be another person or follow their path to success; you are only good at being you.