Kendall Ananyi on Turning 40
Kendall Ananyi
I turned 40 last week and took time off to celebrate with my family at Disneyland “happiest place on earth” and took a look back at my last 4 decades.
Early on, my parents realized I was a precocious child and took a bold decision to allow me skip 2 grades and progress to boarding school from Primary 4 at age 9.
I adjusted in the 1st year of secondary school and by the 2nd year was top of my class. I pushed myself through out and decided that I was ready for university by SS2 (Grade 11), wrote all the exams and gained another year giving me a cumulative 3 year head start over my peers. I finished as Best Student at my secondary school and went on to the University of Benin to study Electrical & Electronics Engineering
I was a Chevron undergraduate scholarship holder and after graduation (during my NYSC at PwC) wrote GRE … got a perfect quantitative score, 790/800 Analytics score and got a University of Victoria, Canada graduate scholarship to study for a Research Masters in Computer Engineering.
My research work during my Masters is cited by 4 US Patents and I’m the 1st author of an IEEE journal alongside my Professor.
In my final week of grad school I wrote a thesis on Wifi which I am executing as an entrepreneur in Tizeti.
I am fortunate and blessed to be one of the few people in the world to work in 2 AAA rated companies (ExxonMobil and Microsoft) and got lucky as an Angel investor in some of the top startups in the continent (Paystack, Kudabank etc) .
Happy to have the support of my wife, family, friends, teachers, mentors, team, partners, investors through each transition from school to work to every employer or change of career or each new Angel investment or big decisions as CEO.
Here’s hoping I continue to build on the foundation from the last 4 decades to be more impactful, achieve better work-life balance and live a healthier lifestyle in the next decade.
P.S. Don’t be too laser focused on your life goals and wait till you are 40 to visit Disneyland 😀😀.