Rapelang Rabana said she remembers sitting in geography class when she was 14, and wondering: "What the hell are you doing and what is this life thing about?"
A successful entrepreneur, Rabana was part of the founding team of a start-up called Yeigo in 2006, which developed some of the world's earliest mobile VOIP applications. In 2013, she founded online education start-up Rekindle Learning, and has also been included in the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders Class of 2017.
Rabana, who was born in Botswana, said she was lucky to have been raised in a family where "everyone did everything".
"Everyone cooked, cleaned and did maths and science."
Her mother graduated as an electrical engineer as the only woman in her class, and was also her role model.
After four "brutal" years, Rabana graduated from UCT in 2005 with a bachelor's degree in business science, with a specialty in computer science.
Two years later, she was part of the team that launched Yeigo, and was amazed that, in retrospect, they had "Googled their way to success".
"We taught ourselves everything we needed to know about how to build the software and how to run a business online. You can become an expert in anything."
Success and value are no longer about having qualities that no one else has, she noted, but rather "about knowing who you are, what you have, and working with that to your advantage".
She said harnessing her internal resources to gain greater self-awareness has been key to what she has been able to achieve.
Matrix moment
Growing up, she had the sense the world was designed by people who knew better than her - such as her parents and teachers - and all she had to do was stay within that structure and "be a good person and do what you're told".
It was then she began to have a sneaking suspicion it wasn't going to work out like that for her, leading to her own "Matrix moment".
Rabana was referring to a scene in the film, The Matrix, in which the main character Neo is offered a choice between two pills: choosing the red leads to greater self-awareness, while the blue maintains the status quo.
Rabana said she "chose the red pill early on, without really knowing it", and her decision to become an entrepreneur had come from the liberating realisation that "absolutely everyone - even her parents - were winging it all the time, or that everyone was taking their first shot at life".
Greater self-awareness, and living with more intentionality, said Rabana, enables more authenticity. "It's the thing that enables you to see deeper into a problem or a challenge and unearth new insights and create competitive business advantage.
Rabana, who was sharing her experiences at a Brainstorm and BCX function this week - on 'female leaders as a disruptive force in business' - at the Saxon Hotel, in Johannesburg, concluded with a challenge to attendees: "Now you have a choice. You can pretend you didn't understand a word I said, and close off any questions you have about your journey and what you're here to do, or you can take the red pill and go along that journey of self-discovery and really question what your contribution is going to be."
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