Three Kingdoms from the East.

See the reading list on topics of interest in the podcast "In our time." Thumb nail sketches of powerful people is a work by a Greek tutor transmitted somewhere in there.

It's important to understand mappers and packers, and figure out where you are on that continuum. https://wiki.c2.com/?MappersVsPackers

Learn what capability based security is. Computer security is a solved problem, has been since the 1980s, but the solution hasn't been widely adopted yet.

Know that this is a time of immense abundance, we have access to things that even the King of France couldn't afford, like antibiotics and modern medicine, but don't try to keep up with the Joneses, that way lies ruin.