“Wake
up Nancy!” Susan said to her lovely daughter. It was a charming morning, bright
beautiful sunlight and birds chirping. Today was going to be a good day. Why
not? She thought to herself…. Her long lifetime pal had just accepted her dear
Nancy to work part time in her prestigious law firm. Just like that lucky Nancy
was on the ‘set for life’ path as a result of her affluent background. She was
a third year law student and yet she had secured what the average advocates
were going to work tooth and nail to get. She lived in a house like that
pictured above, brought up lacking nothing and has connections with all the
right people.
Now
back to the subject matter, just who exactly is an outlier? Mathematically, as
applied in statistics, it is a point that is distant from other observations.
Based on this concept, we are focusing on the term in respect to human beings.
An outlier is a person who becomes extremely successful based on intelligence,
ambition and background. One who goes the extra mile and strives harder than
the rest.I guess the closest example to home for me would be the 19 year old
with a net worth of more than $500,000!
Many
of you could be walking in my shoes. We may not be as lucky as Nancy and have
to actually strive in the rat race to become successful. Not that I have
anything against people like Nancy, in fact why lie, I sometimes envy them. We
all have dreams and aspirations and this message is especially to those people
who want to make it real bad. People who like me want the finer things in life
and to live comfortably.
All that talk about ‘your past does not determine
your future’, ‘your background does not matter’, ‘you can be anything you want
to be’ is encouraging isn’t it? But honestly, I believe that your background does
have a huge impact on how you turn out. To put it in black and white, the
affluent have a head start that we need to work harder to reach. That’s just
how it is.
The
reality is for those of us who are not from affluence; we more or less have to
work twice as hard for the same prize. So in short, we need to be a cut above
the rest. I know we have met and gotten the chance to interact with the Nancys
of this beautiful country. I for instance, went for a wedding and got the
chance to meet new people as is the norm.
I
was introduced to a certain lady in particular who really had me down right
envious. I am human so I won’t pretend that what I saw and got to know didn’t
affect me. She was my age mate yet she was already driving, need not mention
that her phone was top of the range and well she was from one of the ‘crème Del
a crème’ neighborhoods.
That
is when it hit me;she already had what I wanted to have by 26 God willing! Well
you can only imagine the kind of pressure I felt as at that point, it was the
ultimate wake up call. I couldn’t surely do the same things they did and expect
to get to where they were.
It
would be so much easier to turn this around and make it a flowery motivational
speech. Say things like ‘Stop being mediocre! Want more! Do more! Be more!’
things we see and read all the time. I suppose it wouldn’t be very original of
me now would it?
It’s
not all gloom and doom because we have a great deal of real life instances of
people rising to power from humble backgrounds. The one message I wish to pass
across is that it was not just sheer luck but they actually had to work hard,
real hard. So in short, let’s not just
envy the ‘set for life’ crew and actually work towards making our own lifelong
dreams real life realities! In that order!
