One Rule for Life

(Secret inside: what to do to get an international job after two months of training)

I wish my younger friends would understand one thing early in life:

Life is not a movie. So no one is coming to rescue you. No one; not your brothers, not your friends and certainly not your politicians. You can rely on only God, Allah.

Once you realize that you have to take responsibility for your own life, magic will happen. Because you will begin to create opportunities for yourself. Learn by yourself, for yourself.

That would raise your human capital. You would easily get jobs and people would begin to respect you and help you; because success has many fathers.

Since when I was very little, I wanted to train myself to be employable anywhere in the world. And I started getting international assignments in my early 20s because I wanted to be a collector of skills – a skills stacker.

But there was a time I realized that my options were limited. So I decided to do a Ph.D. with the target of “completing before Yar’adua finishes his first term.”

Now I get regular international job offers – which I largely ignore. So let it be your choice to live in any country you want – at least you should decide whether to live locally or internationally. That would give you unshakable confidence. Don’t allow desperation to make choices for you.

The secret I promised?

One skill you can learn fairly quickly – I dare say within two months – and get a job almost instantly is data science. Highly in demand. The sexiest job in the world it is called. But the world lacks enough people to fill available positions.

I may talk more about how to get ready for this opportunity later. But you already know all you need to know. Even though data science may not be for everyone, you can train yourself to be an expert in any field.

Here are some quotes on data science to motivate you:

“Hiding within those mounds of data is knowledge that could change the life of a patient, or change the world.”

Atul Butte, Stanford University

“Big data is at the foundation of all the megatrends that are happening.”

Chris lynch, vertica systems –

“Big Data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.”

– Dan Ariely, Duke University

“The world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.”

Max Levchin, PayPal Co-Founder

“Data really powers everything that we do.”

– Jeff Weiner, Chief Executive of LinkedIn

“There were 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days.”

– Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc.

“Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine”

– Peter Sondergaard, Senior Vice President at Gartner

“Big data is not about the data.”

– Gary King, Harvard University –

“Without big data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the web like deer on a freeway.”

– Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers

“Consumer data will be the biggest differentiator in the next two to three years. Whoever unlocks the reams of data and uses it strategically will win.”

– Angela Ahrendts, Senior VP of Retail at Apple

“Data is the new science. Big Data holds the answers.”

– Pat Gelsinger, the Chief Executive Officer of VMware, Inc. and former Chief Operating Officer of EMC Corporation

“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians, and I’m not kidding”

– Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google

“War is 90% information.”

– Napoleon Bonaparte, French military and political leader

“You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.” – Daniel Keys Moran, computer programmer and science fiction writer

“The world is one big data problem.” – Andrew McAfee, co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and the associate director of the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management

Do you have an internet connection? Do you have access to YouTube? And Google? So just do it already! That is all you need to be self-taught and self-made.