Not Taught

LESSONS LEARNT FROM MAKING MISTAKES AND WATCHING OTHERS

C.S CHIWANZA

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First Published 2018 Š C.S Chiwanza 2018

Publisher: C.S Chiwanza Cover Design & Typesetting: Baynham Goredema Set in 12pt on 13.5 pt Adobe Garamond Pro

Content Preface

7

Acknowledgements

9

Lesson 1:

Build relationships

10

Lesson 2:

We get what we negotiate

13

Lesson 3:

Around people speak more, shout less

16

Lesson 4:

Whatever time you wake up, do your best

18

Lesson 5:

Geniuses are made, not born

20

Lesson 6:

Be the person who is willing to learn it all, not the one who knows it all

22

Lesson 7:

Don’t take ‘No’ as rejection, take is as an offer

25

Lesson 8:

Make mistakes

28

Lesson 9:

Give

31

Lesson 10: Be generous Lesson 11:

Go into the world, and ask for help

34 36

Lesson 12: Pay attention

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Lesson 13: It’s really not what you say, it’s how you say it

42

Lesson 14: If you are explaining, you are in trouble, not in control

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Lesson 15: Beware the seduction of responsibility bias

50

Lesson 16: Embrace the Columbo Effect

52

Lesson 17: Some people have time, others have watches

55

Lesson 18: The value of consistency

57

Lesson 19: Know when to walk away

60

Lesson 20: Be thankful, count your blessings

63

Lesson 21: You are good enough just the way you are

66

Lesson 22: Don’t let your pause turn into a full stop

69

Lesson 23: Leave the finite game, play the infinite game

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Lesson 24: Who’s got your back?

75

Lesson 25: Find the why, see the vision

78

Lesson 26: Respect the process

81

Lesson 27: It’s never too late

84

Lesson 28: Each one teach one

87

Lesson 29: Own your mistakes, take responsibility

89

Lesson 30: Motivation

92

Lesson 31: Loyalty

95

Lesson 32: Rethink, reset, rebuild

97

Last Lesson: Everything is changing

100

For Aristotle, Archimedes and Artemis

Preface

G

rowing up in my neighbourhood it wasn’t odd to see a bunch of kids acting up martial arts moves. Echoes of ‘Hiya! Hiya!’ and other fighting sounds filled the air accompanied by flailing arms almost on a daily basis. It normally happened after everyone got tired of playing soccer, and for those not so good at the sport, after they got tired of waiting to be picked to play.

The inspiration to all this was Bruce Lee. It was the early 90s, we knew of Chuck Norris and his fatal roundhouse kick, we were getting acquainted with Jean Claude Van Damme, Rambo was shooting all bad guys. They were still no match to the man who had passed away in 1973, and his last movie had been introduced to the world in 1978.

Aside from his great acting, Bruce Lee is also famous for having created his own fighting style. He moved away from traditional martial arts styles and founded Jeet Kune Do “The way of the intercepting fist”. Lee referred to his style as “nonclassical KungFu”.

The mantra: ‘Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own.’ was the principle behind his Jeet Kune Do. He studied various martial arts ways and philosophies, and from all of them he developed his own style and philosophy.

Lee stated his concept does not add more and more things on top of each other to form a system, but rather selects the best thereof.

This is the same principle I am adopting as I write this book. In my life, as young as I am, I have learnt a lot of stuff through making mistakes, through solicited and unsolicited advice, through watching others, through eavesdropping... And herein I share some of the lessons I have learnt.

This list is by no means a list of the best lessons ever written, it is just a list of some of the things I have learnt and consider to be of importance in life. It is like Bruce Lee’s style of martial arts. Lee’s style is not the best ever, neither is it a composition of the best parts of all martial arts styles out there. That said, the style served him well, and it does serve some other martial artists well too.

Acknowledgements This little project would not have been possible were it not for the relationships I have with a number of people. My wife, Tatenda endured the periods of creativity when she felt shut out of my world each time I pursued an idea. I want to write a proper book, and I doubt she will accept that. Baynham Goredema came through and did the most important part of this creation, I only put my thoughts down, and he created the book. Vitalis Guvava had the misfortune of being my sounding board for many of the ideas that I share here. Rabbison Shumba, thank you for being there. Last but not least, Mike Mupotaringa, you were there at the inception of the idea and we threw around a few ideas. I found my feet on this one because of the ideas we shared.

My biggest thank you goes to my kids, they are the reason why I write now.

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LESSON 01

Build relationships “If I can see further than everyone else, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants.”

L

et me tell you the story of two funerals. Before I do that let me explain something briefly: funerals are of great importance where I come from. The number of people at your funeral are a reflection of what kind of individual you were when you were alive.

Unlike weddings and other celebratory events where gate crushers are common, it is quite uncommon to have people falling over each other to attend a funeral of someone they did not like or hold in high regard.

Now, to the story of two funerals: one is that of my grandfather. He died barely six years after I had come to know him. I hadn’t spent much time with him. Over the six or so years that I had known him, I had visited him no more than ten times and had spent no longer than three weeks on each visit. It is fair to say, I really didn’t know him that well. Not as much as my siblings or other relatives.

When he died, it felt like the entire population of the Midlands province had descended upon the homestead. There was literally no place to walk in the yard.

The fields surrounding the home were crawling with people. Lots of people who had other commitments to fulfill put everything down to come and pay their respects to him. He was well respected. He had great relationships with a lot of the people. He was a ‘people’s man’.

Several years later when I stayed at our rural home, one of our neighbours’ daughter passed away. It is standard practice that the male mourners did the grave digging. Most villagers don’t have funeral policies, and anyway, community 10

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members bury each other. Under normal circumstances, the gathered men do little work because there will be so many people to shoulder the burden of grave digging. At that unfortunate funeral there were only about five of us. Everyone else, the other men, from our village didn’t bother to attend the funeral. The women were only those from very close by. The deceased wasn’t well liked in the village. She didn’t have any solid relationships with other people.

Her parents were the same.

You see, if people respect and have relationships with your parents, they find it difficult not to honour your parents by coming through to mourn their loss with them. And console them.

Why did I choose to start a book on the lessons that I learnt along the path of life and a chapter titled relationships with death and funerals? Because in the period between birth and death, all we have are our relationships with those around us.

During our lifetime, our relationships are what will determine who has our back; who is going to help us get ahead; who is going to come through for us during our darkest moments; who is going to celebrate our victories with us ( because success isn’t worth it when we have no one to celebrate and share with). And even more importantly, they determine who is going to help those we leave behind.

Time and time again we hear and read stories of ‘self-made’ men and women who rose against adversity to lead extremely successful lives. We love these stories. Why? Because they give hope to the underdogs. They give hope to those at the bottom rung that they can also make it. Most of them leave out one thing though: the relationships that helped them.

Yes they worked hard, extremely hard, and deserved to rise to the top. Yet we know that in this world, passion, hard work, commitment and everything else, minus having the right relationships in place is just not enough.

Margaret Wheatley put it best when she said: “Relationships are all there is.

Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone.”

I think it is fair to say that we all know of at least one person with great talent, dedication and passion for what they did who was just never ‘lucky’ enough 11

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to catch a break. What held them back was not an issue of luck, it was an issue of connectivity.

Networking guru Keith Ferrazzi put it best when he said that the poor aren’t necessarily poor because they lack the drive or the ability to succeed. They are in that position because they are in “isolation from the kind of people that could help you make more of yourself.”

Now, while it is all good and great to build upward relationships, ‘strategic’ relationships, it is important to remember to nurture and not poison the relationships one has with the people that surround you at the ‘bottom’. They are just as important to your success as the ones at the top.

Another important note: there is a difference between manipulating people into helping you succeed, and building relationships with people who can help you succeed.

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LESSON 02

We get what we negotiate

I

grew up a quiet child. Reserved. From the time when I was old enough to understand the world around me, I began to believe in a world where people got what they deserved. If they worked hard enough, they would get due recognition for their efforts and get rewards that adequately compensate them. Or at least try to.

Boy was I in for a rude awakening! It took me a while to learn and fully understand that in this life, you really do not get what you deserve, instead you get what you negotiate. One situation that stands out in my mind is the case of a former classmate of mine who got expelled after being caught drunk and passed out close the girls’ boarding section.

Joseph was a brilliant student. Never got into trouble. He just decided once to join the boys, and that was his undoing.

At that same school, boys got caught drunk almost every weekend. There is one guy, whom I will never forget who was expelled for repeatedly being caught drunk, smoking weed and a few other misdemeanours. Prior to this expulsion Terrence had been caught numerous times, and he had always pleaded his case before the principal, promising to turn away from his bad ways.

Instead of accepting his expulsion and going home, he stuck around the school for long enough for the principal to notice him and call him over to give him another last warning.

Had Joseph pleaded his case properly, negotiated well, he would never have been expelled.

In his book Outliers writer Malcolm Gladwell compared the paths of 13

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J. Robert Oppenheimer and Chris Langan, two geniuses who had contrasting success in their lives. One tried to poison one if his lecturers and was sent to see a psychiatrist. The other had a situation where he had to drop out of university because his mother had missed the submission date for his scholarship papers, and a second time, he failed to convince university authorities to adjust his class schedule from early morning to mid-morning because he was transport problems beyond his control.

One went on to head the Manhattan Project and oversaw the creation of nuclear bombs in the USA, the other went on to live his life working odd jobs in construction and a large part of it as a bouncer at night clubs.

If life was about each getting what we deserve, Oppenheimer would have been expelled from Cambridge after he tried to poison Patrick Blackett, and with the way those top institutions are connected, he would have been blacklisted and would never have been accepted at another institution of that stature. That is not what happened to him. Add to that the fact that Oppenheimer though very intelligent, he had serious limitations in the lab and has been described as being somewhat clumsy.

His great achievements are well documented. Achievements that would never have been possible if his academic career had been cut short. His life would have resembled that of Chris Langan, a mathematical prodigy who was solving extremely complex problems as a teen. Langan’s IQ is 195 (that’s thirty percent higher than Albert Einstein’s). Langan learned to speak when he was only six months old, and his prodigious intelligence continued to make itself known throughout his childhood and adolescence. He passed his SATs with a perfect score, despite taking a nap during the exam. As an adult, he speaks about complex ideas so fluently, so confidently, with no hesitation, that his intelligence is evident as soon as he utters even a few sentences.

He’s made money by being invited onto game shows, interviewed for magazines, and even been the subject of a feature length documentary. Besides that, he has no other claim to fame despite his academic prowess.

Why is this so? Langan did not have ‘street smarts’ or practical intelligence, or people skills. He failed to negotiate the best deal for himself twice, at two different institutions of higher learning despite being intellectually superior to his peers.

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These stories are not peculiar, if anything, they surround our everyday lives. We see people who appear to be undeserving of certain ‘favour’ talk their way into into better positions than those who are seemingly more deserving. We all know people who seem to get more second chances than the rest of us, and others who just can never get a second chance after the first mistake. Even though they wanted one.

It is unquestionable that we are always negotiating. We negotiate bedtimes with our kids; we negotiate salary increments; we negotiate prices of goods and services; we negotiate the right to spend time with others. Our lives centre on how well we negotiate.

It’s only that others negotiate better than others, and they do so because they understand their fellow humans better than others. You see, negotiation is the art of influencing your counterpart(s) to see things from your perspective, agreeing that that perspective is valid and cooperating with you in strengthening it.

Negotiating agreements is not about competing or winning; it is about securing the best value. That said, while everything is negotiable, it doesn’t mean that everything has to be negotiated.

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LESSON 03

Around people speak more, shout less

H

ow often has raising your voice towards someone delivered the results you wanted? Truthfully. My mother was a passionate person, just like my maternal grandmother, and it’s no wonder that they had a tendency to shout when they got frustrated or felt like we were deliberately going out of our way to break the rules we were supposed to live by.

All that shouting only managed to cower us into momentary silence and fear, and I for one didn’t hear what was being said. Today as back then, I cannot remember anything that was said in those moments when she shouted at me. Or when anyone else shouted at me whether recently or during childhood.

I do remember the things she said to me when she actually sat me down and had a conversation with me about her concerns. Each time she did that, I left the conversation with a different mindset. This holds true for all interactions I have had in my life: when there is shouting, nothing is communicated.

That said, it’s not easy to just ‘stop shouting’ in our everyday experiences.

There are things we do without thinking. Have you ever looked at how people without umbrellas in the rain? Well, they tend to straighten up only after they have decided that they are too wet to be bothered into seeking refuge. Otherwise they adopt a hunched posture, walk or run in a manner that almost suggests that they are trying to duck between the rain drops.

Of course this does nothing to prevent us from getting wet. It is just how we are wired.

If we walk out without any intention of getting wet, the rain is a threat that has to be avoided, and we try to do by any means necessary. It is the same reaction as the one we act out when we enter a smelly place, we turn our noses away from the perceived source of the smell. Of course this does nothing because the entire area is smelly, and we still suffer the odour.

These reactions come from the part of our brains called the limbic brain. This part 16

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controls our instinctive reactions to situations around us.

Similarly, when we are engaged in conversation we tend to raise our voices when we feel as if the other party didn’t understand us. When someone else disagrees, instead of attempting to elaborate our perspective, instead of asking the other party why they hold a different view, we raise our voice in the hope that maybe if they heard us, they just might understand us. This is just a useful as speaking very slowly in English to someone who has never heard an English word before.

We have seen this a lot in movies, and yes, it does happen in real life.

Back to the shouting. If you are like me or most people I know, when someone starts shouting their point/perspective to me I feel under attack, and we feel under attack we do what we can to defend ourselves. So we either shout back or try to escape the attack by blocking out whatever the other person is directing towards us. We zone out, so to speak.

What all this means is that the intended recipient is no longer receiving the message we want to send across. The lines of communication are broken down.

A shouting match is often described as ‘a conversation between two schizophrenics’.

(Disclaimer: not by me, of course. I just borrow this kind of language to lend substance to my writing).

Allow me to explain: when you feel as if the other party is not listening to you, your primary focus is centred on making sure that they hear you. So, as you are speaking, your mind is focused on your argument, and when you are not speaking you are again also focused on other points that support your argument.

And what do you suppose your counterpart is doing when you are in this state? Right you are! Your counterpart is also busy thinking about points to their argument when you are shouting your argument.

So in essence, you have four voices all talking to no one in particular because no one is listening to them.

Remember, people hold a certain perspective not because they want to spite you, they do so because of the information they have. So their inability to appreciate the validity of your perspective might be due to inadequate information.

Or... Or you might be the one with the inadequate information. And the best way out of this stalemate is to pause then ask questions that will allow you to understand why the other party doesn’t appreciate your view.

So next time you feel hot under the collar, and you feel as if the other party is listening to you, pause and start listening to them.

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LESSON 04

Whatever time you wake up, do your best

M

y father did not believe that a man should still be sleeping after 5am. His trademark question if he walked into your bedroom after 5am and found you still asleep was: “Did you win the lottery?”

It is a question I got asked quite a number of times. It was almost a given that if no one woke me up I would be still sleeping at 6 am. And to my father that meant I was lazy. I didn’t understand, I was and still am that guy who sleeps in unless I have to wake up early to fulfill commitments.

My father and I come from two different worlds.

On one hand, my father was raised by farming parents who lived in a hot semi arid place. His parents were early risers. They rose early to work in the fields before the sun was blazing hot. The sooner they woke up, the more time they had to work in their fields before the heat made it next to impossible. Then they would retire for the day, and they would focus their attention to other duties that needed to be taken care of.

In our village there was a a whispered sentiment that suggested that living with my grandparents was no different to being an indentured slave, because one was constantly working.

The farming season, between cultivation and harvesting, ran from 1st October to 1st June. The first rains normally came in October, and it was prudent for them to arrive with your field ready for cultivation. Most people from our village waited until October 1st to be back in work mode. And they only planted just enough to see them through the year till the next season.

Not with my grandparents. When the rest took things easy between June and October, for my grandparents it was almost as if that was their busiest period.

During then tons and tons of firewood was collected, to prevent a situation where 18

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the need for firewood would interfere with the work that needed to be done in the fields when the time came. Ant hills were dismantled so they could be used as fertiliser, natural compost was collected from the mountains and brought to the fields. And cattle manure was excavated from the kraal and used to fertilise the fields.

When most people planted and maintained just enough crops to give them a harvest that would see them through the year, my grandparents ploughed and planted on every inch of their land. This increased the yield. As a result, the harvest would last for years and years.

My grandparents used the surplus to pay for any labour they hired and sold some for cash. Their farming was self sustainable, they sold their harvest to afford other requirements that needed money and could not be traded on the basis of barter.

So it is no surprise that their home was one of those where hunger and desperation were things they were aware of because other people spoke about them.

It is from this culture that my father comes from. He wakes up early in the morning and works through the day. I have heard similar stories of kids who would wake up early, go to the fields for a bit then come back to prepare for school.

I, on the other hand, come from a different culture. I never had to wake up early to perform tasks or duties. School started at 7 am in summer and 8 am in winter.

As I grew older, because I could not wake up early in the morning, I found more time to do what I needed later in the day. My father and others of his generation believe in ‘early to bed, early to rise’; I was the opposite, I am a ‘late to bed late to rise’ kind of man.

There is no better one between the two.

The question has ceased to be how early you rise, or how late you go to bed, it is now rather: how much do you accomplish during the hours that you are awake.

There are people who are early risers who spend all that time doing absolutely nothing productive, as much as there are late sleepers who spend the night hours squabbling on social media.

More people focus on the number of hours one spends sleeping, and as result, many do not sleep enough. So their bodies are not well rested, their minds are less lucid, and as a result they do not perform at their best.

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LESSON 05

Geniuses are made, not born

F

act: as a youngster I had a stammer. It wasn’t as sever as that of some of the people I have met in my life, people like this guy named Blessward I knew briefly. My vocabulary is still lacking for me to be able to describe on paper how severe Blessward’s stammer was. He was one of those people who would stomp their leg to get words out.

My stammer was mild. It has almost disappeared over time. Now take that stammer, and couple it with serious self awareness and shyness. I was the kid that never got picked for plays or poetry displays at school. Out at the playground I was one of the kids who followed what other kids said. No one heard my voice.

Do you know those guys who will speak when people are gathered and everyone will just carry on as if no one had said something? I was one of those kids.

This information takes people by surprise when I share it, because those who have known me since 2010 know me as a spoken word artist/poet who has electrified stages big and small. I have heard it said that I have a commanding voice. Some have said I have presence. All these attributes are often considered inborn.

I learnt then. I developed them. What is considered natural talent, I learnt and developed because I had developed a passion for performance.

Maybe I am not the best example, so consider David Beckham, one of the greatest sportsmen to wear a Manchester United shirt. At some point, everyone wanted to be able to ‘bend it like Beckham’. That is his enduring legacy, his abilities with ball placement in open play, free-kicks and other dead ball situations.

After all, David Beckham was never renowned for his dribbling.

When we were growing up, street talk had it that David Beckham was never an exceptionally gifted soccer player. People often pointed to his dribbling limitations as testament to this. They said that Beckham became a star due to sheer determination and endless hours of practise. Urban legend had it that the man 20

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spent hours upon hours working on his placement and dead ball skills.

Well, natural talent or not, Mr David Beckham was indeed a genius at what he did, and did put in a lot of work into his playing skills. In fact, what Beckham did is no different from what any other top performer in any field does or did in their prime: practise, practise, practise and more practise. It is simple, the more you practise, the better you become.

Bruce Lee once said... Ok, I know what you must be thinking right now: another Bruce Lee quote already! And you are probably wondering if you are stuck with a Bruce Lee fanatic. Well, I do admire Bruce Lee and his accomplishments, and I find some of his quotes to be useful in life. I will also not deny the fact that Bruce Lee was a larger than life figure to people from my generation. His movies inspired many a youngster to try out martial arts, if not in their backyard, then in their bedroom (if they came from families that could afford such luxuries, yes having your own bedroom was a luxury. Many boys and girls from my time grew up sleeping in the kitchen and the living room that doubled as the dining room).

Bruce Lee said: “I do not fear the man who has learned ten thousand kicks once, I fear the man who has learnt a single kick ten thousand times.�

The man who has practised ten thousand kicks once will more often than not fail to strike the same place twice, and is more likely to miss the target altogether. On the other hand, you can bet your last dollar that the man who has practised the same kick ten thousand times will hit the same spot more often then not. Again and again he will produce not only desired results, but exceptional ones.

You see, genius is not the ability to do something amazing every once in a while.

Genius is doing the same amazing thing eight out of ten times, nine out of ten times, and in more rare cases, ten out of ten times. Given enough chances, everyone will do something amazing at least once, however it is only those who have honed their abilities who will do so at almost every turn.

Geniuses are made through practice and application.

I am not discounting that some people are born with the ability to do certain things, I just do not have enough letters of the alphabet after my name and a string of degrees to do so. I am only saying that I have seen people with inborn ability who do not practise and also do not apply themselves performing at lower than average standard. While I have also seen those supposedly born without the ability performing at genius level because they practise more often and apply themselves at execution.

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LESSON 06

Be the person who is willing to learn it all, not the one who knows it all

I

have a relative, my grandmother’s younger brother, my granduncle, who knows pretty much everything about everything. Once he starts talking there’s is no stopping him, and if you are not nodding your head in agreement of murmuring yeses as he speaks, then you will not be able to add your opinion.

He has a very low tolerance for opposing opinions. In fact, he takes dissenting voices as personal attacks: if you do not agree with him, then you are against him.

The world is that simple for him. He knows it all, and the rest of you will do as he says if you want to show that you respect him.

Take what happened around 2006/2007. I was spending the year at our rural home as I regrouped and figured out my next step. Under normal circumstances, the planting of maize seed began with the first October rains. That is when the farming season of each year began. So that year, we had some rains, the supposed first rains in the second week of October. My grandmother wanted to plant immediately after those rains.

I had my reservations. I had been following the weather reports for a while, and my little knowledge on climate change and all that came in handy. Meteorologists were saying the ‘real’ rains ideal for planting were due to come late November, which meant that planting immediately would mean wasting seed.

Under normal circumstances my grandmother would not have listened to me, she would have taken it as an attempt to avoid work.

My saving grace was my aunt who called her that evening to check up on her. She advised her against planting immediately.

Now, my granduncle has this annoying habit of ‘checking up on you’ just so that 22

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he can brag about what he is about to do. He came through to tell us that this year he was putting all of his available land under maize seed, because he had supposedly met with a miller from the nearest town who would buy all his surplus maize for a very very good price. My advice to him fell on deaf ears.

“Look young man,” he bellowed, “this is how we have always done things. Now you want to come with your book theory and fake knowledge and try to change us? Plus I know the real planting rain when I see it, all my life I have studied these rains, and what we had today is the real planting rains, not some funny thing like that.”

Nothing I could say could sway him. Nothing my grandmother could say could sway him either. He knew best, and he wasn’t even curious to hear about this change in the nature of seasons we were blabbering about.

Long story short, his plants were scorched. The next rains only came during the first week of December.

The modern world no longer asks what you already know, it is asking how quickly you can adapt and change with it. The natural world is changing as fast as the technical world, and one needs to be able to unlearn what they learnt previously.

Think about this, tech companies that were not in existence 13 years are defining the way the world operates; the internet is now the oil of the 21st century; skills that are in demand now are not the same skills in demand today. A person trained in telecoms in the 1990s will not be able to operate telecoms right now, they need to unlearn what they learnt and learn how to operate today’s systems.

Think about this for a second: in the 1990s and before, there were people who made money as typewriter repairmen. Yep, they made a living by repairing typewriters. The machines are now obsolete, and those who weren’t willing to learn how to repair PCs became ‘obsolete’ with them.

Best selling author Margie Warrell said it best when she said: “In 1992 Bill Clinton declared that if you just ‘work hard and play by the rules’ you’ll get ahead, have a good life and pave the way for your kids to have an even better one. It’s a nice sentiment that resonates with many people. Unfortunately, it’s no longer true. In 1992 the internet was only beginning to emerge, few people used email and students were still using encyclopedias to research assignments.

It was a world in which technology had yet to revolutionize business; a world where working remotely was still a rarity and many people stayed in jobs for life.

“Much has changed since then, including the rules for getting ahead. To succeed 23

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today you must be in a constant state of adaptation – continually unlearning old ‘rules’ and relearning new ones. That requires continually questioning assumptions about how things work, challenging old paradigms, and ‘relearning’ what is now relevant in your job, your industry, your career and your life.

“Learning agility is the name of the game. Where the rules are changing fast, your ability to be agile in letting go of old rules and learning new ones is increasingly important. Learning agility is the key to unlocking your change proficiency and succeeding in an uncertain, unpredictable and constantly evolving environment, both personally and professionally.”

One of the first things one is taught in negotiation class is: don’t let what you know be an obstacle to learning more. Instead what you know, must be a springboard that allows you to learn more.

Let’s go back to my granduncle, because of this attitude of his, I avoid him as much as possible. Don’t get me wrong, I like to be in the company of people who are more well informed than I am, that is the only way I get to learn more. And while it is possible for someone to be well versed in a number of subjects, it also quite impossible for someone to know everything about everything.

And like everyone else, I also do like to be listened to when I have something to say.

To my granduncle, it doesn’t matter whether you are an expert in the field you are discussing, if he fails to use facts he will bully you into submitting to his ‘superior knowledge’.

Generally people are averse to people who are like my granduncle.

This close minded approach to life not only alienates you from people, but it also prevents you from broadening your perspectives. You stop growing the moment you feel as if you know all there is to know about something. You stop seeking out more information, you discard more knowledge. If anything, you begin to spend more time seeking confirmation to your biases than actually knowing more.

Unsurprisingly, people enjoy the company of people who are curious to hear the opinions of others, they love to share what they know with such people. And the more knowledge people share with you, the more you learn and grow. Not only are people willing and ready to share what they know with curious people, they are also more than ready to listen to what they say.

People will listen and share information with people who also listen and share information with them.

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LESSON 07

Don’t take ‘No’ as rejection, take is as an offer

M

y daughter is one of the greatest negotiators I know, and she doesn’t even know it. Every Saturday, I try to sleep for as long as possible. If I can add an additional five minutes, or ten minutes sleeping time, I try to get it. My daughter makes it almost I impossible.

When she wakes up, she takes it upon herself to wake me up by demanding that I attend to her various needs that include cartoons, cereal and playing games.

Each demand she comes with is met with a ‘No’. My responses do not deter her.

She stands firm, and repeats her demand again and again and again. Each time my answer changes slightly from ‘No’, to ‘go away’, to ‘I want to rest’... Eventually I give in.

She wears me down. Most importantly, she doesn’t take ‘No’ as rejection.

This child-like attitude is what is required in the adult world.

Great negotiators teach that we are constantly negotiating through life. Masters in the world of sales teach that we are always selling as we go through life. They are all right, we are constantly trying to customise our surroundings to suit our requirements, and we do this by influencing the people around us to accept and collaborate with our perspective.

In a perfect world, we would influence everyone to see things our way. However, that is just not possible because we have different perspectives formed by different experiences and the extent of our knowledge. And above all, we do not know everything.

While we are aware of these things, it is still quite interesting to note that we still find it hard to deal with people saying no to our suggestions, ideas, products...

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We often take it hard. Let’s face it, when you really believe in a certain idea or product, it is not at all easy to take in if someone else rejects it. It is almost like a judgement on our character, on our choices.

With this in mind, I have learnt one thing, not to take a no as a rejection of me or my idea or my product. Rather, take it as an offer. Mostly when others do not agree with your perspective, it is because they either do not have the same information you have or they do not see the information that you have from the same angle as you do.

Therefore, as most negotiators are taught: when someone tells you ‘no’, take it as an offer to find out why they said ‘no’. Ask questions that allow you to understand why. And it is from there that you learn how to proceed. Maybe they said ‘no’ because they just do not understand your perspective, and if you lead them through it, they might change their mind. Or maybe they say ‘no’ because they have information that could be useful to you, information that will stop you from making a mistake.

Negotiation experts such as Chris Voss and Jim Camp encourage people to actively seek out a ‘No’ response from their counterparts. Why? Because all discussions actually start at no.

You see, yes is such an easy response. Much of the time people give noncommittal yeses just to get rid of someone or to simply end the conversation. In our lives people pursue our intention with the sole purpose of ‘getting to yes’, that’s why it is so easy for people to absent mindedly say yes while their attentions are elsewhere. Think of the telemarketers who are always calling randomly trying to sell insurance, from the get go they are trying to corner you into saying as many yeses as possible. One day, after I had begun working on this project, I encountered a young man with all the good intentions for my soul to go to heaven, however he had the worst execution of his plan to invite me to his church. He was driving hard for the yes that he did not even allow me to say any other word. So I said as many yeses as I could while I searched for the first opportunity to escape.

I don’t need to tell you that I have never visited his church or even considered the idea. In fact, I left him with an imaginary phone number. That’s how we treat people who drive for yeses from us.

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Whereas the moment your counterpart says no, it is a sign that they are actually thinking about what you said. They are engaged.

It is always useful to remember this: because people are never pressured into saying no, for them to say no is a reaffirmation of autonomy. And we all know he much people value their autonomy. Saying ‘No’ helps people feel safe, secure, emotionally comfortable and in control of their decisions.

Also remember, among other things, ‘No’ also means: - I’m not yet ready to agree - you are making me uncomfortable - I do not understand - I need more information Thus it is always to follow up a ‘No’ with a situation based question such as ‘what about this doesn’t work for you?’ or ‘what would you need to make this work?’ or ‘it seems there is something here that bothers you.’

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LESSON 08

Make mistakes

G

o forth into the world and make mistakes. Said no parent ever! Parents exhort their kids to go out there and become successful, and make as few mistakes as possible while they are at it. If they could have their way, they would make no mistakes at all.

You see, mistakes mean failure, and failure brings shame.

This mindset is not written in the stars, it’s not wired in our genes. It is in the way they were raised, and this is also how their parents were raised. So they raise their kids in the same way. They teach their kids to approach life the same way an O’level student is taught mathematics: there is only one answer to this particular problem, and there is only one way to arrive at that answer. Deviating from the prescribed formula will give you the wrong answer.

We are raised to respect structure. We are taught to conform.

In school we were taught to give answers, not to ask questions. School prepared us to give answers. Confession: in school I was considered somewhat intelligent, teachers liked me. This was because I was one of those learners whose hand is ready to go up whenever the teacher asked a question. I did my work diligently, well, if we overlook my poor attitude towards mathematics. That said, I cannot remember one time when I asked my teachers a question.

Not only myself, the other kids I was in the same classes with included. The teachers would often ask: “any questions?” before moving on to the next topic or section. We took it for what it was, a rhetorical question. It was meant to say: “we are done with this part, now we are moving on.”

At home we were taught not to speak unless spoken to, not to ask useless 28

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questions... In most low income households children are meant to be seen, and not heard. We were conditioned to be silent in the company of grown ups. And we did what we were told, no questions asked.

Both at home and at school, asking questions could be taken as disrespect towards those in superior positions or questioning their wisdom. We were required to know how to do something, not why we do something. Or if it is necessary to do it at all.

This alone is enough to kill innovation. Because innovation is born from asking questions. Innovation is born from speaking one’s mind, sharing ideas. It is born from not following the tried and tested formula. Innovation is born from operating outside of the prescribed structure.

Most importantly, innovation is made from making mistakes.

We need to reconsider our attitude towards mistakes, instead of looking at them as signals of failure, we need to look at them as identifying the wrong method of achieving what we are trying to do.

We are raised under immense pressure to excel in school with its ever-pressing emphasis on test scores which can rob learners of the enjoyment from the process of learning. This takes away the fun from learning, and instead of actually acquiring knowledge that can benefit us, instead of equipping ourselves with the ability and confidence to acquire more knowledge, i.e, by asking questions and making mistakes, we become comfortable with passing exams. So, once the basics are covered, many people tend to stick with what they know and avoid situations or challenges where they may mess up or be forced to learn something new, thus creating a safe, secure and comfortable (and confining) world for themselves.

Here, they do their best to mould the changes going on around them—in people, events and the general environment—to fit with their current ‘mental maps.’

They may say they’re open to change, but actually do their best to avoid it. For a while, that strategy can work fairly well. What it doesn’t do is prepare them to adapt to a future that may well require an entirely new set of maps.

Look at it this way: for AB de Villiers to perfect his audacious cricket shots, he needs to practise them over and over again until he gets the perfect angle to hold the bat when executing the shot. To know the perfect angle he needs to try out as many angles as humanly possible. How many mistakes is that? For David 29

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Beckham to perfect his dead ball skills, he needed to find the perfect way to kick the ball. He could be on target from any spot on the field, and that took an infinite number of bad balls for him to get it right. For “slay queens� it is in taking fifty selfies before finding the perfect one, and that chosen one will be filtered a few more times before it is considered just perfect. Then, and only then, does it get uploaded onto social media.

Mistakes is how we know the right way to do things. It is a process of elimination.

Remember, mistakes are like difficult passages of life : they are only meaningful if we learn from them.

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LESSON 09

Give “What’s the point of knowledge if you can’t use it to help or benefit someone else? After all, you should be willing to do something that takes you five minutes or less for anybody” Growing up, there was always a relative living in our home, and sometimes there was more than one. During weekends when she was not working her colleagues would always come over and spend time at our place. She was that kind of person.

She was what psychologists like to call a giver. She gave to her family, gave to her extended family, gave to her community. And like all givers, she got burnt - a lot.

Especially by those to whom she gave most to. For example, she had this young brother of hers, Isaiah, he would pitch up - it was before cellphones, and we didn’t have a landline telephone at our home. I doubt he bothered to know her work phone number. Anyway, it was unnecessary.

It was a different time. People didn’t visit relatives by appointment.

Uncle Isaiah would stay for a few weeks, sometimes months, then he would vanish. Whatever cash my mother had in the house would tag along with him, and maybe a small appliance which could fit in his bag would also go with him.

This is a guy my mother put through school. And this is how he repaid her, again and again and again, because mother was always forgiving and ready to give him another chance. Isaiah is an example of her attitude towards people: she gave what she she could regardless of whether they will ever give anything back to her.

In our home there was a joke which she often laughed at: we go through tough 31

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times alone, and we go through good times with a lot of people around us.

While it pained me to watch, the betrayals did not deter her. She really believed that she had what she had because she gave. She took everything in stride.

Watching all this made me into a sort of a ‘matcher’. A matcher is a person who operates on a system of reciprocity. When they give, they expect an exchange: you give, I give. I give, you give. Pro quid quo.

It’s a great system, almost foolproof: you help the people who help you and give to people from whom you expect something in return. It’s transactional. It’s great, no one or at least fewer people are in a position to take advantage of you or your good nature.

It’s great for as long as you are in a position to reciprocate, for as long as you have something to trade. This is not always, so this means that there are moments when you forego helping some people because you do not think they are able to help you back. Or you forego asking help from some people because you do not see how you can ever help them. So your circle remains very small I will not talk about the third group, the ‘takers’. Their name says it all.

I tried to operate as a ‘matcher’. It worked out very well for a while. I have to tell you though, keeping score of people you have helped and those who have helped you is kind of tiresome. It’s no way to go through life. Especially if like me, you reach a point in life where people whom you least expected to help you, go out of their way to help you - and their help proves to be the thing that saves you. And they do not expect you to reciprocate.

I have to tell you, it feels very good to make a difference in someone’s life. No matter how small. My mother’s motivations now make sense to me.

I know this sounds somewhat out there, so I really hope you will not dismiss it without giving it serious consideration: when we give without expecting anything in return, our lives become richer.

Always remember: you do not know who will help you at some point in the future, and you do not know who will help someone close to you in the future.

So it is better to create ‘good karma’ by adding value to someone’s life, instead of trading value.

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Now, there is something that needs to be said of giving. You see, it is important to remember that we must give as much as we can, most times more than we receive from others. The other important thing is that we must only give as much as our well-being, livelihood can sustain. Whether you give money, time or what it is that you give, be mindful. With the exception of love, that is, because love is the only gift that grows as much as we give. The more love we give, the more love we get.

I have met and seen people who who think that they can give as much time as possible and it would not affect them in any way, so much so that they are always ready to drop everything to be of service to others who need them. Others are ready to give the last of their food or money to those in need, while they hold on to the hope that tomorrow will be better. This selfless mode if giving is known as pathological altruism. It is a very dangerous.

While giving need not be selfish - that is giving with the direct intention to manipulate the receiver or those watching into performing acts of favour towards the giver -, it must also not be selfless. We need to take care of others as much as we take care of ourselves, otherwise the purpose of giving is lost.

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LESSON 10

Be generous

W

hy do soldiers risk their lives in the heat of battle to save their platoonmates/squadron-mates/battalion-mates, even if they are probably not friends back at camp? Or maybe even if they do not know each other at all? I can tell you this: it is not because they love their countries so much.

Don’t get me wrong, they love their countries very much, they will do all they can to defend it. That said it is important to state that they do so because they know that in the exact same situation, if their roles were to be reversed, the other party would do the exact same thing. Maybe the opportunity will never present itself for the other party to repay them, and yet they are not worried about that.

Maybe they will never see them again.

It’s trust. They trust the other person because they share the same values.

Between 2005 and 2007/8 I was a gold panner, and makorokoza, as gold panners ‘Between 2005 and 2007/8 I was a gold panner, or mukorokoza (plural: makorokoza) as gold panners were known in those parts where I operated. The Chimanimani mountains became a very attractive goldmine for panners from all over the country, and when the diamond rush began, over 90% of us joined the stampede for the precious metal.

Panners had a unique camaraderie. The diamond fields of Marange were often generous, and they were also unforgivingly stingy. One panner could come into the fields on a Monday and strike a fortune by the next Monday, while another panner went for two months or more without striking it lucky. So it is no surprise that on the highway roads that led to Marange, one often spotted dejected teams of panners trying to trek their way to their homes on foot after months of bad luck. A lot of them would have traveled over 100/150/200 kilometers to try their luck.

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What often happened is that the panners who would have struck it rich would go out of their way to help the dejected lot find their way home. Back to the diamond fields, it wasn’t uncommon to see strangers buying each other food for weeks simply because the other party was failing to get anything from the fields, despite the fact that they tried their luck over and over again. In the ‘normal’ world, away from the gold and diamond mines, panners easily identified each other and were drawn to each other, and were more likely to drink together even if they were never to see each other again.

Panners did things for each other, helped each other not in anticipation of reciprocation of those good deed, but because they knew that in the exact same situation, the other party would do the exact same thing, or more.

This is how we are wired as humans. It is easy for us to help people with whom we identify with, after all, we are social animals. We search for similarities in each other and act as one with those we identify with. Two South Africans who spot each other in Norway will immediately feel a bond towards each other and will come to each other’s aid when needed. Hell, they will identify each other as brothers or sisters! That is despite the fact that one might have been born and raised in Umtata in the Eastern Cape, while the other would have come from Mahikeng, North West.

They identify with each other.

You see, generosity is especially easy when it is towards people you identify with in one way or the other. Now, Malcolm S. Forbes said something very interesting that has stuck in my mind. He said: “you can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.”

This is the mark of true generosity, helping someone whom you are certain they can do nothing for you. Helping someone just because you can help them, not because you trust that in the same situation they would do the same for you.

You are probably thinking: why should I do that? Well, I could go on and list a few reasons why, however, I think it is safe to state one that will really hit home: it will make you feel good. Trust me on this, I know. Try it sometime, just perform a random act of kindness and check out how it will make you feel.

Well, I might also add that it inspires those around you to do the same. Now imagine the result of people randomly helping random strangers: the world becomes a better place!

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LESSON 11

Go into the world, and ask for help

T

here is something I really enjoy about public transport in South Africa, as you board the taxis, one is expected to greet the other passengers. Of course no one will force you to do so, it is just a common courtesy. That is what people who live in a close-knit community do, they greet each other when they meet or pass each other.

Small gestures like that go a long way in making us feel as if we are not alone.

Which is something that is very easy these days, which is odd because one would expect that when people have more ways - faster and more efficient ways - of keeping in touch, people would feel closer regardless of distance. Never in the history of mankind has man ever felt so alone, so isolated, as in the age of social media.

For example, I had a friend once, Abigail. Like most of my current contacts we met online. On Facebook, to be more precise. She had over 2000 friends, was popular in her circles and was a member of a number of online groups - on Whatsapp and Facebook and whatever other platforms I had no knowledge of.

According to her posts she lived a full, well rounded life. So when she committed suicide in 2017 it came as something of a shock to most people.

It was, however not so much a shock to me. I knew that she was depressed. She had been for a long time. When I consulted our Whatsapp chats, I noted that Abigail didn’t feel lonely - she had tons of friends, acquaintances, colleagues, lovers - she felt alone. She felt desolate. She felt so alone she couldn’t bring herself to ask for help from anyone out of all her hoards of people whom she associated with on and offline.

Abigail isn’t the only one to go this way. Lots of young men and women are ending their lives in this way, because they feel alone.

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You see, it is very easy to give, contrary to what some people think. Giving comes naturally to everyone, though some prefer to suppress that part of themselves.

The difficult thing is asking for help, because when you ask for help you expose your vulnerability. The world gets to see you in a powerless state. And this is not something we are comfortable with.

As a result, we choose to ask for help from no one or a very select few.

We enhance our public image by helping those around us, by doing the best we can, and never by asking for help. Asking for help is perceived as a weakness. The idea that interdependence is a weakness, while independence is a sign of strength is now very much prevalent. This goes against the idea of community, the Shona have a proverb that does exposes his much we need each other: chara chimwe hachitswanyi inda (a single finger isn’t able to crush lice).

And then also there is also the fear of being misunderstood, this is why we choose to seek for help only from those whom we absolutely trust.

What I have learnt in life is that it is rarely those whom we consider close who often come through to help us in our time of need. It is those casual acquaintances, the so-called ‘weak ties’.

In the 70s, 1973 to be more precise, before sociology was a ‘fashionable’ area of study and before guys like me were writing little books based on what they read married with what they saw and experienced, sociologist Mark Granovetter in his groundbreaking study, Notes on weak ties. The study tested the common assumption that our ‘strong ties’, that is the people with whom we have strong bonds, the ones we really trust, are the ones from whom we get our most help or not. What he discovered was that though we get a lot of help from our ‘strong ties’, we are more likely to get significant assistance from ‘weak ties’.

The thing that prevents us from going over to them whenever we need help is the psychological barrier created by a lack of mutual trust, however, once we get past that barrier and ask for their assistance, we come away from the situation better off than we were.

Think about it for a moment, you will agree that you have often get the most significant help from your ‘weak ties’, from casual acquaintances.

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I would be remiss if I only mentioned ‘strong ties’ and ‘weak ties’ and did not mention ‘dormant ties’. You know those old friends with whom you have lost contact? As we get older we have more and more ‘dormant ties’.

I remember my uncle telling me, I was a youngster then, that by the time I reach 35 I will have stopped actively communicating with most of my friends, and probably won’t even be in touch with my best friend. Not because we would have betrayed each other or anything that sinister, only just because as our priorities change, as our responsibilities multiply, we won’t have a lot of time to invest in keeping contact.

It turned out to be very true. We have a lot of ‘dormant ties’. And unlike ‘weak ties’, they do not come with the psychological barrier of lack of mutual trust. We already know each other, we know what to to expect, trust is really not an issue.

And if we reach out to them in our time of need, chances are that they will help.

Why did I bring this forward? To show that we have more people willing to come to our aid if we just ask. All we need to do is reach out to them.

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LESSON 12

Pay attention

D

id you know that there was a study into how often people lie to each other in a conversation? Best believe it’s true! I have forgotten the psychologist responsible for the study. That doesn’t mean I forgot his findings, though. I never forgot them because of my keen interest in humans and how they behave towards each other.

OK, so the study concluded that in a ten minute conversation, people are more likely to tell 2.92 inaccuracies. Put in the language I am more used to, people lie about three times during a ten minute conversation. That is an alarming statistic.

Hold on, I know what you are thinking. I do not mean to say that all people lie at that rate. Obviously some lie at a higher rate, and others at a lower rate. This is just the average.

Still on lying, a separate group wanted to know who lies more men or women. As expected men say women lie more... This reminds me of a Facebook post I once saw that posed the idea that while men were more often caught cheating on their spouses, it did not mean that women did not cheat. In fact, women cheat more, they just do not get caught because they are very careful at hiding their extra marital affairs. This line of thought would make women better liars.

It is a line of thought that is dominant in the society that raised me.

Women also say that men lie more.

That said, the study I am talking about found out that men and women both lie at the same rate. The difference is in why they lie. According to the study men are more likely to lie to make themselves look good, while women are more likely lie to make the other party look good.

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What all this means is that in our interactions with other people we should pay more attention to just the words they say to us.

Tell me, how often have you ever walked away from a conversation feeling good because it looks like you were on the same page? Your counterpart said all the right things, and yet your agreement never actually goes beyond that verbal part.

There is no action to back the words.

It has happened to me a lot of times.

What happened? Well, the answer is simple: we listened. We did not pay attention. We listened to their voice because they were saying what we wanted to hear.

They were confirming our biases. We did not pay attention to the tone of voice.

We did pay attention to the words selected. We did not pay attention to the nonverbal clues. Because had we paid attention, we wouldn’t have walked away from that conversation feeling good.

One of the reasons why we do not pay attention so well, or shall I say the top reason why we do not pay attention well enough is because we spend so much time in our heads. Our thoughts pretty much centre on ourselves, so much so that we mostly see what we would like to see and hear what we would like to hear instead of what others are really saying.

Most of the time when we try to actually pay attention we focus on the face.

Popular culture has taught us that the face is the most honest part of the person’s body. Now, if this were true would we have phrases such as ‘poker face’? Let’s be honest, most of the time when we are lied to, the faces of the liars do not betray the fact that they are not being truthful. They literally lie to our faces.

Top investigators who have become something of masters in reading body language, (mind you this is not an exact science, that said they are on point over 90% of the time because their findings are from years and years of actual human interaction and investigation as opposed to closed door research) say that the feet are the most honest part of the human body. They give subtle clues on how the other is feeling.

They do caution against focusing attention on the feet alone, because the feet are part of a bigger body. So it would be worthwhile to pay attention to the whole body and pick out the subtle clues being transmitted.

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Trust me, it’s not as difficult as it sounds. Especially if you understand what prompts the human body to react to the world.

Dude called Joe Navarro wrote a book titled What every Body is saying. It goes a long way in demystifying these things. Why must anyone read it? Because human communication is 7% verbal and 93% nonverbal. (I have no idea how these guys measure these things) 7% verbal, 38% tone of voice and 55% body language.

So, if we paid attention to all 3 aspects of communication, then we would be at less risk of being deceived or assuming the wrong results from our meetings with others. Unless your counterpart is some sort of Jedi master or some such other type of being, then any incongruency between what the three modes are telling you should alert you that something is amiss.

I will not be as presumptive as to say that when you pick up the lack of congruence in the words, tone and body language then your counterpart is deliberately lying to you or is in an active drive to deceive you. Sometimes it is just maybe they are uncomfortable about something and are unsure about how to raise the issue.

So it will be worth your while to nudge your counterpart towards revealing to you their true intentions or their worries by asking open ended questions that allow them to speak their mind more.

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LESSON 13

It’s really not what you say, it’s how you say it

O

ne of the most important things I learnt during my years as a professional spoken word artist/poet was that: “It is not what you say, it is how you say it.” Let’s face it, poets, musicians and other artists are not creating any new messages, they are just packaging it differently. Protests artists are still agitating people to rise against their ‘oppressors’; anarchists/anti-establishmentarians are still fighting ‘the system’; love song singers are still urging lovers to gaze into each other’s eyes.

Same idea, different execution.

How you say something, how you present an idea will determine how people react to that something/idea. Maya Angelou put it perfectly when she said: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Think about it for a second, there are people who make you get your guard up when you see them coming your way, or whose text messages you dread because you generally expect bad news, or antagonistic attitudes from them. We react this way because over a period of time, their communications are just that, negative.

As a result we associate negativity with them. On the other hand there are people who makes us want to get closer to them, we want to spend time talking to them.

These people even when they disagree with our opinions, they do so in a way that doesn’t make us feel inferior or slighted.

You know, there is a paper that looks into memory retention. A gentleman called Hermann Ebbinghaus studied how long it takes us to forget words said to us, his findings are very interesting to say the least, and they are now classified as The Ebbinghaus Curve.

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The forgetting curve/Ebbinghaus Curve supports one of the seven kinds of memory failures: transience, which is the process of forgetting that occurs with the passage of time.

This is kind of academic isn’t it? Well, let’s make it as simple as possible, and not simpler by just stating what Mr Ebbinghaus discovered: within 20 minutes people will forget 60% of what you tell them, they will forget 75% within 24 hours and up to 95% within 31 days, of which 5% of what they will recall will be inaccurate.

That said, do you know what they will not forget? How you made them feel.

Do you know, recently I was reading about George Meyer, an American writer whom I assume not a lot of people from my side of the world know, and I am sure they do know his work. He was a writer with the animation: The Simpsons.

Meyer was a well respected writer, and the people he worked with all said one particular thing that stood out: even when he rejected ideas from his co-writers - whether junior or senior - he did it in a way that made the writers feel appreciated, and left them with the desire to do better. He had a nurturing attitude. He could tell someone that their joke is dumb and they would not feel as if he had said they are dumb.

In fact, that is all it takes: a nurturing attitude. You see, a nurturing attitude creates psychological safety among people, and when there there is psychological safety people are free to express their thoughts and emotions without fear for reprimand or ridicule. It’s an atmosphere that encourages communication.

Ultimately, psychological safety engenders positivity.

And people are drawn to positivity.

One easy way I learnt to do this is by abandoning the word ‘But’. You see the word ‘but’ has the same effect to a conversation as beginning a conversation with ‘I don’t mean to offend you...’ or with ‘with a due respect...’ or ‘with ‘I do not mean to disrespect you...’

These phrases and the word ‘but’ negate any positive words that would have been said before them. They just make all the positive stuff irrelevant. ‘But’ flattens energy and excitement. When you hear ‘but’ and those other phrases, you feel not only denied, but also patronized. It doesn’t really matter what comes next.

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After ‘BUT’, all you feel is that what came first was insincere.

On the other hand, if you say ‘Yes and...’ the listener will feel that you have actually paid attention to them, acknowledged their opinion and are responding with good intentions. And when you say ‘Yes and...’ your line of thought moves from mere rejection to something more collaborative, and as a result you have a more positive exchange.

Try it sometime, when someone says something that you would normally respond to with ‘Yes but...’, don’t respond immediately. Pause. Fight the knee-jerk reaction. Then respond with a statement that either begins with ‘Yes and...’ or that carries ‘Yes and...’ within. You will find that the conversation will take a whole new direction.

The more you practise what I term constructive communication the more people will gravitate towards you, and the better your life will be.

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LESSON 14

If you are explaining, you are in trouble, not in control

D

id you know that when you present an individual with a choice between two products, they are more likely to buy the cheapest one? And, when you add a third item, let’s say that is more expensive than the other two, they will buy the one in the middle?

Also, have you ever noticed that if an object (let’s say cutlery, or a mobile phone) feels light in your hands the first instinct you have of it is that it is cheap? And when you see a product displaying a low price, lower than that of the competition the first thing that comes to your mind is that it must either be faulty or too good to be true? Why is it so cheap, right?

These are examples of how our brains respond to things.

You are probably wondering why I am sharing this stuff on how the mind reacts to things. Well, if you stick with me through this one, you will understand soon enough. And the other question in your mind would probably be: what does Chris even know about how the mind works, dude doesn’t have an alphabet after his name to prove that he studied these things, so why should I pay attention?

Well, just humour me for a bit. I am sure you will find this handy. Look, if I were Jordan Belfort, the guy on whose life story the movie Wolf of Wall Street starring Leonardo DiCaprio was based on, I would ask you to sign a document that makes you promise not to use what I am about to share with you to manipulate people. Only promise to apply it responsibly. Why? Because it is one of the few Jedi mind tricks of influencing people.

It has been said, that to influence someone’s mind you have to know where it is. This means you have to be able to step out of your zone of thinking, to enter into the zone of your counterpart. You need to be able to take their perspective.

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Now, when you are able to take their perspective, you become aware of possible objections they might come up with in relation to what you are trying to influence them towards. And when you know or are aware of their possible objections what do you do? Prepare the best answer to counter their objections when they raise them? I don’t think so.

Let me share with you a story: one time I had to go to meet with a prospective client who was interested in purchasing body worn cameras. They were relatively new to the South African market. With this in mind, I prepared as best as I could to persuade the prospective client to buy from us. I studied the unit until I could tell you about it in my sleep. I was ready for any questions that would be presented to me.

So when I stood before the panel, I wasted no time in delivering the best presentation for my product. I was going very well, or I thought I was, so much so that when the company’s operations director, a self confessed tech lover, started raising concerns over certain features, I was ready with well thought out responses. I went into great detail explaining the pros against the cons raised by the big Afrikaner who sat before me.

Long story short, I left with no commitment of purchase from the company.

Neither did they get in touch with us afterwards.

What went wrong? I let my prospects field objections.

Leon Festinger, a prominent social psychologist, developed the theory of cognitive dissonance (also known as the consistency theory), which suggests that inconsistency between one’s beliefs and behaviors will cause an undesirable psychological tension. The only way to reduce this undesirable psychological tension is for the person to change his or her beliefs to fit his or her actual behavior. So if you do something (behavior) and you’re not in full agreement with it, you then have to modify your thinking (belief ) to fit the behavior (i.e., to reduce the psychological tension) so that you remain in or attain a state of consistency.

Now, it gets more interesting if I present to you the results of an experiment that was conducted by Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard. I need to borrow heavily on the teachings of Victor Antonio for this part, he cites this study in his Sales Influence teachings(and if you ever run into him tell him how grateful I am), so here we go: 46

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Deutsch and Gerard wanted to know to what degree it was possible to get people to change their mind after being shown that their judgment was erroneous. They also wanted to know under what conditions people would be more reluctant or willing to change their mind if they were shown that their judgment was proven to be incorrect. Simply put: 1) Would people change their minds if they were proven to be wrong?

2) Under what conditions would people be more willing or reluctant to admit their error in judgment?

Deutsch and Gerard came up with a simple to test to get to these answers. They set up an experiment with college students and broke them up into three groups.

The three groups were then shown a set of lines and asked to estimate the lengths of the lines and record their answers.

The first group was asked to privately, in their own minds, estimate the lengths of the lines. The second group was asked to record their answers on a ‘magic slate.’ A writing pad with a carbon base and a clear plastic sheet laid over it whereby using a pointed object you can write on it and upon lifting the plastic sheet, everything is erased. The third group was asked to jot down their estimates on a piece of paper, sign it at the bottom and then hand it in. All three groups had to commit to their answers but in a way that ranged from private (think of the answer) to semi-private (write answer on magic slate than lift to erase) to public (write down answers, sign and hand in).

What Deutsch and Gerard wanted to know is which of the three groups when presented with answers unlike their own would be willing to change their minds and accept the new answers. What they found was interesting. The first group, who privately held the answers in their minds, was willing to accept their answers as being incorrect. The second group, whose answers were semi-private, being written and then erased with the magic slate, was somewhat reluctant to change their minds. But by far the group most resistant to changing their minds was the group who had jotted down their answers, signed the results and submitted the answers to the experimenter.

Deutsch and Gerard’s experiment showed that the more public a behavior is, the more likely the person is unwilling to change his or her mind in order to appear consistent. Those who were not required to write but only think of their answers 47

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demonstrated more malleability in changing their minds because there was no actual public act performed (i.e., writing it and submitting it) as opposed to the other two groups who were required to show some form of public commitment.

Stepping back from the experiment, the consistency theory is about alignment or congruency between what you believe and what you do. If you publicly state your answers and someone shows you answers to the contrary, your immediate reaction is to defend your answers. Why? Your belief system (i.e., estimate length of lines) is now under a direct assault. Therefore, your thinking, your ability to comprehend or your judgment is in question. In order to reduce that tension, that anxiety surrounding your judgment, your immediate response is to reject anything to the contrary and insist that you are correct.

At the other extreme we have the first group in the study, who didn’t have to write down the answers. For them it’s easier to attribute their wrong answers to simple errors in judgment and not think much of changing their mind since only they themselves know they were wrong.

So, by allowing my audience to voice their objections I was shooting myself in the foot. I let them voice their concerns, and suddenly I had given them the power, or shall I say a reason to not commit to buying my body worn cameras. If I was to make a sale, I needed the approval of the operations director, and that is the man whom I had let express grave reservations. So now that he had uttered them out loud, there was no way I was going to convince him otherwise.

If the other members of the panel hadn’t thought of these objections, now they had them in mind. One of their own had just raised them, and there was no way they were going to just brush them aside.

Several months later, after we gotten in touch with them letting them know that we had a new model of the body worn camera, I was invited back to give a presentation. This time I was now wiser. The moment I stepped into the boardroom I did what Chris Voss calls an ‘accusation audit’, I attacked one by one all the top possible objections I knew would be raised.

“Since my last visit here, we were invited to do demos of our products for a number of companies in your industry. They had the same concerns as you did.

You raised the issue of multiple buttons on the unit. Now, if I can demonstrate how crucial they are in terms of prolonging battery life, which I am sure is a top 48

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priority for you, and go on to show you that they shouldn’t be a hindrance, will you be able to overlook them?�

And guess who was among the first people to express interest? Yes, Danie the operations director.

One by one I raised the possible objections and overcame them. The new unit only had one feature that was different from its predecessor. Long story short, two days later they made an order.

So, to influence someone, you need to lower their resistance and the best way to do this is to identify their possible objections and highlight them before hand.

Address the elephant in the room before they have a chance to raise it. People appreciate that, and they become more malleable.

I promise you, lead with an accusation audit and the results will really impress you.

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LESSON 15

Beware the seduction of responsibility bias

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hen I got married, my best man sat us down (my wife and I) and told us that the moment we stop respecting one other is the exact moment we should file for divorce. Otherwise we would cause each other untold pain. He ought to know, he was divorced from his first wife.

It is advice I find very useful and relevant. I live by it, not only in my marriage, also in my other interactions with people: if my respect runs low I back away, because I know I would be liable to saying terrible things, disrespectful things to the next person. That is not how I want people to think of me, as a disrespectful individual. I would rather keep my negative feelings towards others to myself, rather than acting on them.

Another thing I would have really liked for someone to enlighten me on just before I stepped into the world of marriage would have been for me to be wary of the beast called responsibility bias. Normally, in my culture, it is the responsibility of my uncles to teach me about how to conduct myself in marriage, however with the way the world is nowadays, these uncles know next to nothing about how a good man conducts himself in marriage. And of course, they have no idea how to give advice.

Anyway, responsibility bias is not only visible in marriage. Bands/musical groups are known to be very susceptible to it. If anything, musical acts provide the most visible example, I have no idea why I didn’t lead with that example. Many bands/ musical acts collapse because one or two members of the group see themselves as more talented than the rest, and as a result they think that they are contributing to the overall success of the band much more than everyone else.

If anything, this has been a major feature of the music industry: band/group rises 50

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to success, one or two members feel a bit of responsibility bias, they leave the group and their first solo projects does well, and after that their drift into obscurity. It is only once in a while that breakaway solo acts achieve success over a long period. You know your Robbie Williamses and Justin Timberlakes.

One famous quote that describes this was by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, who said that “Even when people are well-intentioned, they tend to overvalue their own contribution and undervalue those of others”.

Defined simply, Responsibility Bias is the natural tendency of each of a team member to exaggerate his/her own contribution (say in achieving a certain target) relative to the contribution of other team members.

How often have you heard someone complain that they are doing all the work while the other party is just coasting along? I will not deny the fact that it does happen quite a lot that one party will pull all the weight while others enjoy the fruits of the toil. That said, we must also be mindful is the fact that this is not always the case when two or more people are working together, be it in marriage, business or any other sector that requires teamwork.

Right now if we were to ask you and your partner what percentage of work each contributes, we will find that you will both more likely score yourselves higher than you are actually contributing and your total score will be over 100%. Ideally, in a perfect situation, our combined efforts must add to a 100%.

Now I remember why I chose to lead with marriage. It is phrases that I often hear being said by men: “I take care of her and she does nothing.” Or what women say: “I take care of him, and all he does is show how ungrateful he is.”

Thing is, once people become engrossed in responsibility bias, resentment starts to build. They start yearning or looking for teams, groups, partners who are able to give as much as they give.

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LESSON 16

Embrace the Columbo Effect

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rowing up I was a bit of a quiet boy. Spent a lot of time in front of the telly, well that is after my mother had purchased one, and our first TV set was purchased when I was 10. It was a small, 14 inch silver Giant TV set. Before then, I only watched TV at the homes of neighbours. A whole lot of us would swarm into a neighbour’s home and sit on the floor to watch wrestling or some other popular TV show.

Whatever happened to the company that made those TV sets? Kids these days will never know the trouble of watching a TV that has no remote control, and in my part of the world, watching a single TV channel. These kids will never know the struggle of trying to watch a tennis match on a black and white TV set that had ‘showers’.

Anyway, I was a shy kid and I had a stammer. I loved soccer, like any kid in my neighbourhood, and it is rather unfortunate that my great love for the sport didn’t match my abilities. Truth is I wasn’t hopeless, I was a decent player, useful in the field. What made the last to be picked was my demeanor. I didn’t look ‘confident’ enough, my voice was a bit soft - I mean I didn’t sound assertive.

So when my mother finally purchased a TV set, I was drawn to it more and more than I was drawn to go and play with the other boys. And on TV I discovered heroes, men I wanted to grow up to be like. The American idea of the ‘real deal’: cocky, confident, loud hero type. You know, the kind if guy with presence and walked with a straight back.

I wanted to be like them. Because being like them meant that I would be able to influence people more. No one listens to someone who is ordinary, and has imperfections?

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It never really worked out. I was never that type of person. I did manage to become what Daniel Pink calls an Ambivert. Something between an extrovert and an introvert. For a long time I didn’t really appreciate that quality, until I realised it was the best thing I could be. Ever! I learnt to approach people, to strike up conversations, to be approachable, and I learnt to be comfortable with other qualities, the qualities that made me an introvert.

So, I stopped trying to be the perfect guy, the alpha male. And with that, people found it easy to be in my company. I made them feel ok. A quality I have since learnt to be of great importance in the pursuit of healthy relationships with others.

Jim Camp, the negotiator, begins the second chapter of his book Start with NO with a reference to the character of Columbo from the TV series of the same name, played by Peter Falk. Columbo was a homicide detective in Los Angeles, Columbo wore the raggedy trench coat, drove the beat-up old Peugeot, told heartwarming stories about his wife and his dog.

He had the habit of forgetting to ask a key question in every interview and interrogation. He’d have to ring the doorbell again, apologize, and ask that final question. He always presented himself to his adversaries as a little less competent than they were, a little less perfect—or, usually, a lot less perfect. He could get people to talk to him because he made them feel superior and therefore comfortable. In the lingo made famous by the book I’m okay, You’re okay, he seduced them into feeling okay.

This goes against the grain in terms of what mainstream media purports to be the image of an influential human being. Assertive, authoritative, very confident, always displaying your superior knowledge depth - these are the behaviors we are conditioned to aspire for. We are taught to shun what Adam Grant calls powerless communication, and aspire for powerful speech.

When we adopt powerless communication we do not attempt to hide our human side, our shortcomings, we do not try to dominate our counterparts, which is what powerful speech does. You see, people are autonomous beings. They have ideas and opinions which they hold true. And they do not like to be dominated...

Well except maybe during certain sexual acts.

Let me put it this way: how do we feel in the presence of people whom we think 53

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of as better than us be it culturally, socially, or intellectually? We feel unokay and can become defensive, or aggressive, or resentful, or a lot of other emotions.

Conversation becomes difficult, questions seem full of risk, we fear we will look silly or even stupid.

These are the emotions which people who use powerful speech and have dominating personalities inspire.

On the other hand, when we are in the company of people with whom we feel are our equals or beneath us, we feel comfortable. Conversation comes easily and questions seem to have no risk. We feel okay.

Now tell me, who do you think you have a better chance in influencing: the person you make to feel inferior or the person whom you make feel to be either an equal or slightly above you?

Think about it.

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LESSON 17

Some people have time, others have watches

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hen I was a teen girls didn’t accept a guy’s proposal of love or to date on the first day. Not on the second either, or the fourth or fifth or in a week.

You see, it didn’t a good picture for a young woman to jump at the prospect of dating a guy. Generally they asked for ‘time to think about it’.

The reason why they requested this ‘thinking period’ was because if they agreed too easily, they could be labelled immoral, and that is putting it lightly, stronger and more brutal terms were used. The other reason why young women requested ‘time to think about it’, was to make sure the guy was serious, and not only after a short fling.

So you can imagine how long it took the young couple to sleep together...

It was the duty of the guy to constantly check on the progress of the thinking about it process, and if he stopped checking on the progress, the young woman could and would take it as a sign that he had given up. Which would then be translated to say that he wasn’t serious at all. And that would mean that he fell down the consideration order. A young woman often had multiple suitors.

You see, the young woman had time.

Another scenario: When I was in my mid 20s I developed an strong interest in social sciences. This was something I seemed to enjoy reading on, and the material was easily accessible. Studying the subject could have given me the break I needed in my life. The only problem was that I lived in a very small town that was too far from the nearest institutions of higher learning. Well, that was one problem. The other one was funding: I had no means to finance an education at such a high level. That said, funding could be mobilised IF I managed to demonstrate to some of my older and more successful friends that I was serious about doing this. About bettering myself.

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The only way I could do that would be for me to enrol in high school again, and start from the bottom. Study social sciences at high school level, and pass convincingly. The only thing that stopped me from carrying through with this plan was that I looked at my years, looked at the time it would take me to complete the first step, and I felt as if I just didn’t have enough time. I felt too old to be going back to high school, and all for a plan that was nothing more than an idea.

I looked at my peers, they were settling in into their careers, a few were getting married. My clock told me that I was out of time.

Shall I share a third example? Well, why not. Japanese negotiators are well known to take advantage of deadlines during negotiations. Apparently, the moment you land in Japan, one of the first things they ask you is when you are due to fly back to your home country. That way they know that your deadline to make a deal is which day.

These wily men and women then spend the next few days playing the host of the century, during which period nothing is negotiated. They stall the negotiation until the last possible minute, just before you are due to leave and they rush you into signing a deal that really benefits them.

You see, they are aware of one thing: it’s easy to manipulate a negotiator who is watching the clock, who is working on a deadline, than it is to manipulate someone with all the time in the world. Deadline pressure is known to hurry people in all fields, and the only ones immune to this pressure are the people who ‘have all the time in the world’ to complete whatever task they are undertaking.

Ironically, it is often people working as if they have all the time in the world who complete their projects sooner and more effectively. With fewer mistakes. When people are rushed, they are prone to making an innumerable number of mistakes.

Recently I was reading an article about the war in Afghanistan, and a certain passage has been stuck in my mind ever since: “After Taliban commander had assessed the massive firepower the West had assembled in Afghanistan, and even as he saw his own forces lose battle after battle, he remained unmoved. “You have the watches,” the Taliban commander apparently told Hillier (Rick Hillier is Canada’s former Chief of the Defence Staff), “but we have the time.” It haunted Hillier. The Taliban were prepared to wait out the West and take the losses. It was prophetic. Canada’s military is long gone from the battle field while the Taliban have reasserted control over large swaths of the country.

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LESSON 18

The value of consistency

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grew up in a closed community. My mother was a prison officer, and the system in Zimbabwe was set up in such a way that the government had built prison complexes for the accommodation of the officers. They didn’t live in ‘open society’. It was highly uncommon to find prison officers who lived ‘off site’ or outside of the prison complexes. As a result, it was no surprise that most children of prison officers just found employment in the prison service, and they married kids of other prison officers.

The complexes had schools, shops and healthcare facilities.

So when I was transfered to a new school in my last year of primary education I was a fish out of water. I didn’t know how to interact with kids of civilians. And, I was suddenly exposed to new disciplines I had never encountered. Just as I was getting used to my new surroundings, the year was over and I had to go to a different boarding school to kickoff my secondary education.

It was at my secondary school that I had my first encounter with a chess set. Yep. True story. I had never seen a chess set before that moment.

I do not remember how I managed to find myself in the room where the chess club met (the club met and practised in the Biology laboratory, because chess was the baby of the school’s biology head of department), I just know that from the moment I saw that chequered board and those pieces I was hooked. In hindsight, I think I was shocked that this club had so few people.

So for the next two months of the first term, I attended the chess club’s practice sessions once a week without failure. Each week we had 2 hours of club time, and in those two hours our chess master taught us theory for about an hour and asked us to implement what he had taught us in matches during the next hour.

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The next week we were taught new things, and we were asked to implement last what we had been taught before and the new material.

That is how we learnt.

In the second and third term we consistently did what we did in the first term.

We had two hours of chess each week, that’s all.

Those two hours a week produced phenomenal results in the next year when we started going for tournament with other schools. Our team was phenomenal.

We even reached the national tournaments are breezing through district and provincial competitions. I was playing like, or even better than most people who had started to play years earlier.

When I left the school after my third year, I looked like a candidate for great things, well maybe not great great like Kasparov (however, with adequate funding who knows), maybe great enough to cause our national champions headaches and maybe defeat them. That was not to be. After I left the school I no longer had consistent access to the game or to materials, and as a result I started to lose the edge, my abilities deteriorated.

For 3 years I had consistently worked on my chess for 2 hours each week and the results were showing, and when I broke the consistency, the results also showed.

It is just like trying to build your body, exercise. The first day you go to the gym for a 30 minute workout, you will not see the results. However, keep going to the gym once or twice a week for 30 minute workouts for the next year, and you will definitely see the results.

The flip side of this also holds true, if after three years of consistently working out for 30 minutes a day two days a week, you suddenly stop that regime, you will not see the effects immediately. Just wait for 2 or 3 weeks, and the results will start to become obvious.

On the other hand, try working out intensively once a month for 4 hours and see if you will reap the same results as the individual who works out twice a week for 30 minutes each time. Simon Sinek outlined it best when he gave a talk on leadership at Inside Quest. Part of his transcribed speech in which he used he nature of love, reminding us that it’s consistency in the little things that matters most, reads as follows: 58

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“She didn’t fall in love with you because you remembered her birthday and brought her flowers on Valentine’s Day. She fell in love with you, because when you woke up in the morning, you said, ‘Good morning’ to her before you checked your phone. She fell in love with you, because when you went to the fridge to get yourself a drink, you got her one without even asking. She fell in love with you, because when you had an amazing day at work and she came home and she had a terrible day at work, you didn’t say, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. But let me tell you about my day.’ You sat and listened to her awful day and you didn’t say a thing about your amazing day.

“This is why she fell in love with you. I can’t tell you exactly what day. It was no particular thing you did. It was the accumulation of all of those little things that she woke up one day as if she pressed a button, she goes, ‘I love him.’ The same with the relationship. It’s not about the events. It’s not about intensity. It’s about consistency.”

Speaking of love, the same can be said for divorce. Husbands or wives do not just wake up one day and decide they are divorcing their partner for no reason at all. It takes a good number of small things that accumulate over time that drive people apart. You see, when a partner does something that angers or displeases the other, they are bound to be forgiven. However if they repeat that action consistently, then forgiveness will not come so easily.

You know, motivational speakers and writers all speak of certain things, certain attitudes that will help one in their life, and most readers/listeners will put into practise the stuff they read on for the duration of the period they were reading those books. Five weeks later they are no longer consistently following that self-help advice, and so the lessons, advice from the book become worthless. And guess what? They accuse the writers of selling pies in the sky.

Well, maybe some do, sell pies in the sky, that is. That said, the only way to know is if one consistently practices what they are taught. It’s not about doing things once in a while, one needs to achieve consistency before they can start looking at the results.

So, the question is not how many books you have read, or how many actions you have almost attempted. It is how many you have managed to do consistently.

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LESSON 19

Know when to walk away

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o you know that if an individual makes a bad investment, the higher the value of his/her investment (be it money, time, emotions), the higher the likelihood that they will invest more and more and more into that bad investment.

Irrational? Yes, and that is because we as humans are very irrational.

Consider this extremely common scenario: in my life I have had a number of female friends, at the time of writing I still had a few, and I hope to still have some after I finish this little project. Over the years I have noticed was the more they invested into a dysfunctional relationship, the more unwilling they were to believe that they were grabbing the short end of the stick.

Take this situation for example: a good friend of my wife and I believed that she had finally found her Mr Right. After many years of dating men who largely used her for her money - not that she was rich, she just had a decent job that paid a decent salary - she met a guy we shall call Joe. I am very sorry to all the Joes out there for using your name, I couldn’t think of another one quick enough.

So, for months on end Jenny went on and on about what such a great guy Joe was. In a couple of weeks her social media was flooded with pictures of their outings and other love indicators. Every time we met Jenny positively told us that Joe was the real deal, and he was so charming everyone who met him just liked him. He supposedly had that effect on people.

I took her word for it.

Then they came to visit at our home. I swear if he had just held his tongue and said as little as possible, then by the time they left, I would have pegged him for a 60

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sincere man. Well, Joe is the time of man who has a talent for speaking a whole lot of words without actually saying anything of value. He went on and on and on, so much that I asked myself: “Is he purposefully trying to avoid actual conversation because he is afraid of what he might let slip?”

At that moment the red flag for me was not in what he said, it was in what he was avoiding. Whenever I managed to get a word in edgewise he ducked and avoided questions.

I remember at one point, later on that day, as Joe was feeling more comfortable and apparently sufficiently imbibed, he let slip that he had a good mind to get himself a girlfriend/lover from my suburb because he liked the area so much!

Well, Survivor contestants know one thing: loose lips sink ships.

Long story short, when my wife told Jenny to cut her loses and walk away from the relationship after she complained about how he abused her money, was unwilling to find a job at all, how he was controlling and a few other issues, Jenny refused to take that advice. Why? Because she had invested so much into this relationship in such a little time, that she couldn’t just walk away. She was sure there was something to be salvaged.

Hey, she had even started fertility treatment as part of a plan to conceive with Joe. Huge emotional investment. Huge financial investment.

I have heard learned people call this behavior: escalation of commitment to a losing course of action. Overally there are about 3 factors that push us to behave in ways that ‘escalate our commitment to a losing course of action’.

1) Anticipated regret: we are afraid that maybe we will kick ourselves for not trying to make things work just one more time. You know like how an entrepreneur will not give up on a loss making business that is draining them financially and emotionally because they somehow believe that there is a big break around the corner?

2) Project completion: we believe that if we keep investing then maybe we will reach the goal of this project, and maybe after that point we will be able to reap the rewards of all the investment we poured into this.

3) ego threat: we tell ourselves, if I do not keep investing in this, I will look like a fool. Thus in response to ego threat, people will invest more and more hoping to turn the project around into a success and prove to everyone around them 61

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- and themselves - that they were right all along! That they saw the big picture that nobody else saw.

Ego threat defines Jenny’s situation perfectly. She felt that I must think lowly of her because in a day I had noticed that something about Joe was off, and that we noticed all the red flags immediately. Given her poor record with finding good men, she would look like a dumb individual who never learnt and kept on falling for the same type of men who used her over and over again until something better came around. So she believed that if long enough, he would commit to her, and we would be proven wrong.

While all this is irrational to the person looking from a distance, it does seem rational to the individual doing it. You see, by escalating commitment the decision maker keeps the prospect of failure hidden. In the case of Jenny, failure is a breakup and the ensuing heartbreak. So for as long as she is still with Joe, then she is still yet to fail, so she is still right.

I would like to insert a disclaimer here: this behavior is not a women thing. It’s also not a relationship thing. I used Jenny because for a while her situation has been bothering me. I am trying to find the best way to steer her into seeing what Joe is all about. Look, I am a guy who knows other guys, and I can smell this kind of scam from a mile away.

Another easy example of this kind of behavior is seen in gambling. Who do you think is prone to keep gambling, the guy who just bet R10 and lost or the guy who has bet R500 and lost? Obviously it is the R500 guy. The more he loses the more he will try to ‘beat the system’.

In his song The Gambler, Kenny Rogers he sets out what can possibly said to be the best life advice. In the chorus he says: You have to know when to hold ‘em/ Know when to fold ‘em/Know when to walk away/And know when to run... In another part of the chorus he also says: Every gambler knows/The secret to survivin’/ Is knowing what to throw away/And knowing what to keep/’Cause every hand is a winner/And every hand is a loser...

One thing that most people who escalate commitment to a lost course of action do not consider is that we are not judged by the mistakes we make, instead we are judged for the decision we make after making that mistake. Do we take remedial action or do we compound the effects other mistake. This is also what determines how we do in life.

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LESSON 20

Be thankful, count your blessings

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t was when I began my Form 1, the equivalent of Grade 8 in South Africa, that I first came to know a very famous quote: “I cried because I had no shoes, then I met a man who had no feet.”

This quote has a number of variations and has been attributed to a number of people from Mahatma Gandhi to Helen Keller. Likewise it has different meanings for a lot of people. For me, the core message of this quote is that things only look very bad if we look at things from where we compare ourselves to others in a better position than us. However if open our eyes and looked around us, we are bound to see that there are probably other people who view your situation as better, and wish for it.

Easier said than done.

You see, as humans we have these things called cognitive biases, and we see the world through them, not as the world really is. We see the world through the frame of our desires. For example, a few years ago a friend of mine mentioned in a conversation that he really wanted to buy a VW Golf VI. Days later he made a very innocent remark that ever since he really decided that the Golf VI was the car he really wanted, it was now the only car he saw on the roads.

It was as if someone had just rolled out Golf VIs onto the roads to torment him.

Sound familiar?

OK, consider this: if a spouse is convinced, despite not having any evidence that their wife/husband/partner is cheating, they are bound to see almost all of their spouse’s actions as pointing in that direction. Innocent things will suddenly point to cheating.

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These things happen because our subconscious mind acts in the same way the internet works. It cherry picks information from everything that surrounds us, according to what we are convinced of, or our beliefs and puts that at the forefront of our perception.

Consider this: when you enter a search word into Google, the results you get are often based on your previous searches, and web activity. In a nutshell, they are customized for you. So, if you are a fan of say the EFF, your search results will mainly be articles that support EFF, some from sites and blogs you have previously visited and others from related sites and blogs. Your Facebook and Twitter will yield similar results, why? Of course because we tend to follow and befriend online personalities with whom we share the same ideas and beliefs with.

And when these social media sites suggest more people for you to follow and befriend, they do so based on whom you follow, who follows you and the content of your posts. Now, guess what will be the content of the sponsored adverts that will come onto your newsfeed? Well, it will be stuff based on your location, your associations, your posts and related stuff.

Have you ever heard of something called the social-feedback loop? I came across it in Tali Sharot’s book Influential Mind, and from then onwards I saw it almost everywhere! Well the concept of the social-feedback loop works something life this: you discover a great new product, let’s say an app. And you decide to share information about that app on your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social networking sites because you want people in your circle to also enjoy the benefits of this amazing new app.

Over the next few weeks you will hear people in your connections, both online and offline talking about this new app. Suddenly everyone has heard it and they are just buzzing about the app. This happens because when we share an idea, recommendation or something like that with a large group of people, some of them will share that same piece of information with others. And because social connections are intertwined, the information will loop back to you.

Think of back in the day before the internet, for those who were born into the internet age: yes, there was a time when people didn’t have internet, and it is not too long ago. Anyway, back then, someone could come up with a joke, maybe about a well known figure. They would share that joke with their friends or 64

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colleagues, and in a few weeks or couple of months, that joke would find its way back to the originator, being retold by someone else who has no idea who came up with the joke anyway.

Now, let’s loop back to the quote: “I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.” You see, when you set your sights on getting a new pair of shoes, or emulate people with shoes because you have none, what will happen is that you are bound to notice more the people with shoes around you. And if you set your eyes on a particular type of shoes, you will suddenly begin to notice people with that particular type of shoes, and naturally, your desire or urgency to get them will be amplified.

This is good. Very good. That said, it also limits our ability to appreciate what we have in the moment. There is a saying: you will never know how far you have come if all you do is go. Meaning, you will never know what you have, or appreciate what you have if all you focus on is on getting more of what you want.

I am in no way suggesting that we should stop aspiring for more and more, I am only saying that in our quest to get more things that make our lives more comfortable, we must also take a moment to look around us and appreciate what we have. You see, if we cannot appreciate what we have, we will never be able to appreciate whatever we get later, because appreciation is a habit. And like all habits, it needs to be developed. Consistently.

I have a cousin who is forever complaining. He always manages to find something to complain about in every situation, I think is called pessimism bias or something of that nature. This is a habit he has developed over time, and the sad thing is that he doesn’t realise it. Now, in the same way that one can develop such a terrible habit, one can also develop a gratitude bias of sorts. You see, if you look for a reason to be thankful, you will find it. And the more you look for reasons to be thankful, the more reasons that will expose themselves you.

And you know what? People are more inclined to help people who show gratitude. Sincere gratitude. And they are more inclined to shy away from mourners.

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LESSON 21

You are good enough just the way you are

A

s a teenager my ultimate dream was to be cool. To be cool in the eyes of my peers: my friends, and my ‘haters’. If there are any teens who have no desire to be cool, I have just haven’t seen or heard of them.

Like any other normal teen I followed trends and tried to go along with them as enthusiastically as any teen. I remember when I was thirteen or so, I was learning at a boarding school, and at that school, all the cool school boys wore studs on their left ear on Saturday. Midweek was a no no. I also need to mention that back home this sort of coolness was always portrayed on TV: top male music stars wore earrings. So naturally, I got my left ear pierced too while I was still at school.

My mother being old school, did not react well at the sight of me prancing around with a stud in one ear. The moment she noticed the earring, my mother pounced on me like a bat out of hell, and almost tore my ear as she tried to yank the offending the offending article off my ear. My mother never explained herself to me why she found it detestable. Well, most parent from my mother’s generation never explained themselves, they gave orders and expected them to be followed.

What she didn’t understand was my motivation. I wanted to be cool. You know when I was wearing that earring I felt really cool! I wanted to get a tattoo because the cool guys had tattoos. I also wanted to sport the same hairstyles as the cool guys.

Teenagers are impressionable, and as a result they are more susceptible to what psychologists call the bandwagon effect. (They have a name for everything, don’t they? Well, I guess it is useful to name things you know for differentiation purposes and all other important reasons).

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You know, one time I was asked by a friend: “If there is a part of your body you could change, what would it be?” I told said that it had to be my lips. I felt that they were too thick, compared to the lips of the stars I emulated. And I bet if I had money to carry out a plastic surgery procedure, I would have had it.

I am not the only kid who grew up this way. Told repeatedly by television and magazines (that was before the internet), that there was something wrong with my genes, something wrong with me because I did not look like someone else. I know I cannot give you exact statistics, however, do you know that the number of teens under 18 who manage to talk their parents into signing consent forms for them to undergo plastic surgery balloons each year? Worldwide millions of youths go under the knife so that they can look like their idols.

For decades chubby kids have been blamed for overeating and called obese so much that a lot of them have gone on to develop eating problems from bulimia to anorexia. One time my wife shared with me a story from her childhood. When she was in Grade 2 kids who did not understand that she was not overweight, she was only just a chubby child because of her jeans called her names. They bullied her to tears because of her weight.

It just happened that when she got home and told her mother, her mother told her: “ My child, there is nothing wrong with you. You are not overweight. Do you know who has a weight problem? It is all those very skinny kids, they all have kwashiorkor. They are malnourished.”

The next day she went back to school and told the skinny kids that they have kwashiorkor. It was a small victory. There are not many of them. A lot of other chubby kids are left to resort to taking pills that suppress hunger, and some of them are told that smoking cigarettes will suppress hunger so they become smokers in order to avoid eating.

Need I go on and speak about the skin lightening creams? If you are dark you are ugly and you are only beautiful if you are light skinned? Should I also get into that? I do not think so, after all, this is one of the most common things we see in black communities, people using skin lightening creams. Some of which go on to cause irreversible skin damage.

Teens are repeatedly told five words: “You are not good enough!”

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The onslaught doesn’t stop with teens, in addition to skin lightening creams, surgery and all the other things teens use to alter their image, adults are given extra options: botox, creams that makes facial lines disappear and tightens skin.

Suddenly it is no longer okay to age gracefully, we are told there are ways to stop the again process and look forever young. Age is now something to be shunned.

Even if it means taking botox shots that will take away the ability for your face to be expressive.

Just like teenagers, adults are constantly told: “You are not good enough!”

Men and women are going under the knife in order to look good: beautiful, handsome. All the while no one is telling them: if you want to be really beautiful, develop a great attitude. Be an individual of good character. No one is telling them pretty doesn’t always mean nice and beautiful doesn’t mean a happy life.

After all, there is no way you can find happiness if you cannot appreciate yourself, your being. Happiness isn’t something we find outside of ourselves, rather it is something we find deep within us and share with the world around us.

No one is telling us that muscles do not mean strength of character. No one is telling people that after you apply the creams that vanish the lines from your face, and the skin lightening creams; after you pay loads of money for cosmetic surgery; after you do all you can to alter your physical appearance, you still won’t make it very far in life if you have a terrible character.

No one is telling kids that you are beautiful the way you are, because you look the way you are because of your genes, and there is no way you must and should look like that popstar because you do not share the same genes. And because of that: “You are good enough!”

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LESSON 22

Don’t let your pause turn into a full stop

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onfession: in all the years I lived in Chimanimani I never went up the famous Chimanimani Mountain Range just to enjoy its beauty. For years and years along with other Chimanimani residents, we watched tourists come from other parts of the country and the rest of the world to enjoy the beauty of the range. We just couldn’t be bothered, we didn’t appreciate the great beauty of nature in our backyard.

Now I will make an even more embarrassing admission: the first time - and all the other times that followed - I climbed the majestic mountain range, I was on my way to gold panning.

Now, because we were going up the mountains to perform illegal activities, we couldn’t use the more ‘scenic’ and hiker. Those routes were manned by national park rangers who were always on the lookout for gold panners. Look, our activities were in no way environmentally friendly. Anyone who has ever seen gold panners in action knows this. So to avoid law enforcement, we had to create alternative routes, and these alternative routes were much more dangerous. I think this is where the gold panning fields got their name from: Musanditeera.

Translated Musanditeera is supposed to be a message to one’s parents and relatives not to follow the panner once they embark on the journey. Even if the parents/ relatives were to hear that misfortune had befallen one of their own, they were not supposed to follow the adventurer who had gone in search of his fortune.

For you to get an idea of how dangerous the trail was, here is a bit of info: around 2004/5 over one hundred and twenty gold panners perished in one weekend after a storm hit the mountains. One hundred and twenty was the number of recovered bodies, a lot more were never found.

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One particularly treacherous trail was the part we called ‘razorwire’. The ‘razor wire’ climb had a foothold just wide enough to accommodate a single pair of feet.

Slip, and you would fall down a bottomless cliff to a certain death It has been years since I last went up the Chimanimani mountains, and if my memory serves me right, to reach the top took no less than six or seven hours of climbing. This means that it was not practical to climb the mountain in one go, particularly with the fact that the ‘razorwire’ was close to the home stretch.

Pacing yourself was very important. One was advised to rest midway through the climb. The mountains range has so many caves one is spoilt for choice when it comes to resting points.

And then the view! It doesn’t matter which cave you chose to rest in, they all had amazing views of Chimanimani. A sea of green punctuated by an estate here and there, then little dots that represented houses. Then the roads snaking through the landscape beneath you. It looked like a painting.

The combination of fatigue and the beautiful view before you was enough to seduce one into resting for longer than necessary. And you know what happens when you do that? You lose momentum, and when that happens you begin to have doubts - especially with the spectre of the ‘razorwire’ looming before you. So, one spent only as much time as necessary resting, and not a minute longer, and spent as little time as possible enjoying the view. It was an unnecessary distraction.

And anyway, the view at the top was even much better.

Whenever we want to inspire people to go after their dreams we tell them: the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. That is also what we have been told. We are constantly being told to have the courage to take that first step. And what has been the result? Well, the result has been that the cemetery of unfulfilled dreams is not littered with graves of ideas that were never acted upon. No. The cemetery of unfulfilled dreams is littered with tombstones of unfinished projects.

You see, taking the first step is easy. It is simple. In fact, most people, if not everyone, approach their goal with great enthusiasm. That believe that they are now doing something they have been putting off for so long. Their enthusiasm is so great all around them catch on the excitement. Then one day they decide to 70

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take a moment to take a breather, and that breather becomes the abandonment of the project.

If you think I am lying ask anyone who fancies themselves to be a writer. He or she doesn’t have a finished product not because they never started one.

No. On the contrary, they always take the first of the thousand steps, and then at some point they decide to rest for a little while. As they rest they take a moment to enjoy the view. Then they rest for a little too long, and they lose momentum. Next thing they have doubts. Before you know it, the project has been abandoned.

The greatest struggle is not starting. The greatest struggle is continuing after one has started.

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LESSON 23

Leave the finite game, play the infinite game

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y grandmother’s greatest regret was her blindness. In her view, that was the greatest tragedy to befall her in her lifetime. Well, if I am to be really truthful, the second greatest tragedy. The first one was the death of her husband, my grandfather.

Her blindness came as a result of multiple factors, the most prominent being old age and a protracted battle against diabetes. Her battle against the chronic illness had began in the early 1960s. So for over 40 years her body was pumped senseless with pills and other medications to combat diabetes, and high blood pressure.

Now, the primary reason why my grandmother deeply regretted her blindness was because it put her at a great disadvantage when it game to her competition against her young brother, my granduncle Blazio. I do not know for how long this competition had been running, family stories have shown me that my grandfather appeared to be uninterested in the whole thing. His lack of interest did not deter Blazio from coming over to show off anything he considered to be a great accomplishment.

I confess, some of his perceived great accomplishments are very bizarre - they are so weird I am not willing to share them with the world.

Anyway, each rainy season, the battle was as to who had put the larger piece of land under crop, who had ploughed more land that is available to them. So there was a situation whereby, as soon as the first rains arrived, Blazio would proudly pay us a visit and pretend to be checking on his sister’s wellbeing, meanwhile he is waiting for the first opportune moment to share with us how tired he and his family were because they had ploughed 95% of their land.

I didn’t like this little competition. Not because I thought it counterproductive.

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I didn’t like it because it took away from me vital hours which I could spend socialising at the township. You see, grandmother would never have it that Blazio and his family could beat us on acreage under crop. What that meant was: longer hours in the fields, and by the close of day, I would be so spent I had energy for only three things: bath, eat and sleep.

My grandmother’s goal was to out-plough and out-plant Blazio. It was not to out-harvest him. So, if one were to come up with a way to maximise the harvest per acre, that would have gone unheeded. I am not sure what her vision was. This is what focussing on what our counterparts are doing, your goal is not centred on improving output or increasing efficiency.

My grandmother’s actions are not demented acts of an aged woman whose mind has been ravaged by years of taking pills and fighting multiple illnesses. No. They are the average behaviors of people. Most of us are motivated by outperforming the next guy, and not becoming better at what we do. I remember that in school, there was always that one guy or girl who hogged the number 1 spot, so he became our target. Our goal became ‘how to outperform’ that student, and not to become better students.

You see young men and women looking at what car the other person drives, and they make it their mission to get a better one. They look at what shoes, what clothes, what home furnishings the other one has, and the goal is then centred on how to go one up better, and not necessarily how to become a better individual.

Simon Sinek tells a very interesting story in one of his talks. He mentioned that he has given talks at summits for both Microsoft and Apple. What stood out for him is that at the Microsoft summits, around 70% of executives spent about 70% of their time talking about how to get ahead of Apple. Meanwhile, at the Apple summits, 100% of the executives spent 100% of their time on how to help teachers and how to help students learn.

There are no guesses on guessing which one was bound to get frustrated.

Sinek goes on to speak about how after Microsoft gave him their Zune, which was a portable media player. So, he says, one day he is in a taxi with an Apple executive, whom he decided to goad into a response. Sinek says he took out the Zune, and started going on and on about all its wonderful features, and he just happened to mention that the Zune was better than the iPod touch.

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The response, of the Apple executive? He just said: “I have no doubt that it is better.”

You see the difference? Clearly Microsoft behaved like most of us: focused on the accomplishments of the other parties. It’s a finite game. Whereas Apple was focused not on outperforming Microsoft, they were focused on improving their products. Growth. Which is playing an infinite game. There are no limits as long as you are constantly working to be better.

Imagine if my grandmother stopped asking me if what Blazio was saying about the acreage he is utilising in a given year was true, and she instead asked what our harvest was per acre and how we can improve on that? I have to admit, matching Blazio acre for acre in terms of crop did ensure good harvests, which meant that we would go through the year with adequate supplies and enough surplus to do whatever we liked.

That said, focusing on improving harvest per acre would have greatly improved the harvest, which would have meant more surplus. Another thing, imagine if Blazio had woken up dead or no longer able to plough his land, what then would have been my grandmother’s motivation? Or what if one year Blazio decided to plough only a quarter of his land, because he wants the rest to lie fallow and regenerate, meanwhile he has enough stockpiled away to feed him through the next year?

You see the various limitations of the finite game?

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L ESS O N 24

Who’s got your back?

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n June 2018 Soweto residents went on a rampage destroying and looting whatever they could find in foreign spaza shops. Also known as tuckshops in other parts of southern Africa. They accused the owners of these establishments of selling counterfeit food products. The looting was done under the guise of collecting all counterfeit food items so that they could destroy them as they posed a health hazard to the public.

Most of us had seen this coming for a few months, in fact I thought it had taken too long to happen. You see, from November/December the previous year, messages had been circulating on WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and other social networking platforms that were meant to agitate the community members to ‘take action’.

Agent provocateurs went onto the internet and hunted for images that showed people from India, or Pakistan involved in home industries and claimed this was in South Africa, and they ‘spaza shop’ owners were busy making fake and extremely harmful products. They announced fictitious deaths of people who had consumed these harmful foodstuffs.

Now, let’s take a step back and look at the people behind these messages. Well, they are a few sections of society that can be held culpable, the chief being that of the group of black South African tuckshop (spaza shop) owners.

Black spaza shop owners are struggling to keep up with these business operating foreign nationals. Not because they are actually creating fake food stuffs, instead, because they are selling the same foodstuffs as the black business operators at a lower price. This price difference is what sets them apart from their competition.

Well, maybe not only the price because they are also very nice people, warm and 75

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courteous. However, it is important to note that the price does tip the table in their favour.

And how do they manage this? Well, despite the fact that in Joburg there are hundreds or more of these spaza shops littered in residential areas, and all operated by different individuals who choose what to do with their profits, they operate as one entity. They buy from manufacturers as one unit. They pool their resources together, and buy as a wholesale entity.

Guess who does the transporting? It is their transport operating kinsmen. So, besides the manufacturers and the consumers, these guys keep everything in-house, and you know what this means right? Well, it means they are interdependent on each other. Their success is intertwined, which makes them committed to each other’s success.

So it is no surprise that after the looting and destruction, these guys only take a few days to be back up on their feet, shops fully stocked.

In contrast, the black tuckshop owner stands alone. Yes they have their associations which will issue statements and offer moral support, meanwhile they cannot help them to get back on their feet. These associations can support them, what they can not do is help them stay on their feet. If anything, they actually want subscriptions and other payments from their members.

This is the difference. These guys have each other’s backs.

Simply put, at an individual level, you need people who are committed to your success for you to actually be a success. We have supporters, they are great, they make us feel loved and appreciated. That said, supporters cannot do much to ensure our success. They are cheerleaders, and it ends there.

American businessman and networking guru wrote in his book Never Eat Alone an observation he had made early on in life. As a young boy he caddied for the rich people from his community, the same people from whom he got help to move up in life. Ferrazzi says as he carried their golf bags across golf links, he saw how how “the people who had reached professional heights unknown to my father and mother helped each other. They found one another jobs, they invested time and money in one another’s ideas, and they made sure their kids got help getting into the best schools, got the right internships, and ultimately got the best jobs.”

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These people, because they were close knit, they were committed to each other’s success, so they went out of their way to see to it that their families and friends succeeded. They supported each other’s businesses.

He goes on to say: “poverty, I realized, wasn’t only a lack of financial resources; it was isolation from the kind of people that could help you make more of yourself.”

So, his do we connect ourselves with those who can help us make more of ourselves? How do we get to be ‘members of the club’? Well, we are living in the age of connectivity, where mentors are becoming more and more accessible as opposed to the time of Ferrazzi’s boyhood, or my childhood. The only barrier between us and our mentors is our ability to communicate constructively with them, and demonstrate our willingness to learn and grow.

You see, the moment you sincerely ask for advice from a mentor, and they decide to help you, they would have just committed themselves to your success.

However, it doesn’t only take mentors to build you up, as important as they are to our growth and success. This is because the relationship between mentor and mentee is primarily that of teacher and apprentice. The mentor shares his/her knowledge, contacts and wisdom with the eager student, and while the student does at times help the mentor back, everything is tilted in the favour of the student learning and the mentor teaching.

What we need in addition to mentors are more peer to peer engagements. Thus it matters who we have in our inner circle.

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LESSON 25

Find the why, see the vision

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ld Samson started his company with just one bus. The details are a bit hazy how he managed to buy that first bus, however, it is widely speculated that he got a bank loan. That said, his company grew over the years. It didn’t grow to be large enough to compete with the big guns of the transport industry, however, it made it possible for him to give his children a decent education and build himself a very comfortable home.

You see, his buses plied the routes the bigger companies were unwilling to take.

The buses went deep into the rural areas. You know those areas which were serviced by only one bus? That’s where Old Sam’s buses went.

Old Samson was a role model. A hero for black kids. He was an active community member, always trying to give back to the community that raised him. Every once in a while he helped the local school with transportation whenever they were going to sports meetings and other school trips. He even sponsored the local soccer team which never really went far in their sporting pursuit. About fifteen or so years ago there arose talk of Old Samson acquiring earthmoving transport, his business empire was poised for growth.

Well, the talk of the earthmoving business remained just that, talk. You see, Old Sam passed away after he was involved in a car accident. The idea for the earthmoving business was not the only thing that died with Old Sam. His death also heralded the demise of his transportation business. His eldest son, who took over the business, sold the good buses and kept the older ones which no one wanted to buy anyway.

The remaining buses spent more time in the workshop being attended to by mechanics than they did on the road. The business which had taken Old Sam a few decades to build crumbled in less than five years.

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The story of Old Sam is a very familiar one in African societies. Countless of Old Sams build their little empires only for their offspring to tear them down in the blink of an eye. Most times community members will come up with bizzarre explanations as to why the businesses fold soon after the death of the men/ women who built them. One common explanation is that the proprietor was using multi/juju, black magic.

You see, this is one thing most black people prefer to do when they do not understand why certain things are happening - they attribute it to the spiritual. That said, could there be a different, more logical answer? I think so.

Firstly, no one just starts a business just because. It takes two things for a business to stand: a goal and a vision. At inception, the goal might be to make enough money to cover household bills, put food on the table and clothes on people’s backs. Once that has been achieved, the goal might shift to upgrade lifestyle and such other needs...

As one goal is realised, another is created. Meanwhile, these goals are kept alive by a vision. Most business people live in pursuit if their vision and die before realising it. It could be the creation of better communities, or building a company that will secure the futures of generations to come, or it could be to eradicate poverty.

We live in pursuit of our visions, and die trying. As Simon Sinek said: “The difference between vision and a goal is the finish line. A goal is 26.2 miles. You can simply count the metrics and know when you’ve completed your goal. A vision is having a crystal clear sense of what the finish line looks like, but no idea of how far away it is.”

We have a clear image of our vision.

Now, let’s go back to Old Sam. It doesn’t matter whether Old Sam sent his kids to business school, or whether he showed his son all the ins and outs of the business, however, for as long as the son doesn’t see the vision then he will never be able to carry on as effectively. It is vital for those that inherit the business to see the vision of the creator for the survival of the entity.

I have heard it said that people who have a vision of why they are doing something are most likely to be successful, and those who do not are most likely 79

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to give up before completion. Think of the person who goes to run a marathon without clear purpose of why they are doing it. I can bet you my last cent that that person will not complete the marathon. They will drop out of the race at some point. Meanwhile, a person who enters the marathon with a vision will complete the race. They will probably not be the fastest and they will probably make a few stops along the way, maybe they will also walk some parts of the route, it doesn’t matter, they will finish the race.

Think of a man called Xolani Luvuno. Luvuno did something amazing in 2018, he became the first amputee to complete the annual Comrades Marathon before the cut off time of 6pm. He finished just before 4:30. Each year, thousands of men and women enter the marathon, and a lot of them fail to finish the 90 km race. Xolani Luvuno a former drug addict, who lost his leg to bone cancer, entered the race because he had a vision, a vision which he managed to share with the marathon organisers who allowed him to start the course five hours before the rest of the runners.

Luvuno’s achievement is a great one, and as a result he managed to inspired a lot more people. He says running turned his life around, and it is fair to imagine that since the Comrades Marathon 2018 was not his first marathon since he started turning his life around, it is definitely not going to be his last. Luvuno has a vision that concerns his running, completing Comrades was a goal.

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LESSON 26

Respect the process

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hen my mother was around five or six years of age she left her mother’s home to go and live with her aunt and uncle. From the day she set foot in her aunt and uncle’s home, she knew that she bad to earn every morsel of food that she ate. Her aunt saw to it that she wasn’t going to simply enjoy the fruits of her husband’s labour.

Maybe I think I have to explain that her uncle was the one who was related to her mother. And it is possible that her aunt did not take it very well that she was foistered upon her to care for. I should also state that her aunt did not have any kids of her own.

Back to the story: when my mother started school she washed the dirty plates and pots before she left, and washed the dirty pots and plates that had accumulated in her absence. As she grew older her duties increased. First, before school she would wake up and clean up, while preparing whatever food she would have before she left for school, and without fail she carried boiled maize for lunch. (Mother’s uncle worked in the city and was never around, that said, he made sure his wife had all she needed - money, food, anything.) And during the planting season, she first went to do a bit of work in the fields before anything else, and often had a go in the fields after school, however briefly.

Despite all those domestic responsibilities, my mother still managed to do well at school. She did so well that when she completed her O’levels she met with an offer to study journalism abroad, which she had to decline because she decided to go straight to finding employment so that she could help raise her siblings.

This is a story I know very well, because my mother told it over and over and over again. That story was never complete if she did not talk about how her aunt 81

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always fried her sausages at least three times a week - she loved her sausage very much, and her husband knew it. He knew it so much that when he came home every Friday night, he came with lots. So, she would always prepare her sausages and ask my mother to prepare covo vegetables, or pumpkin leaves, or some other type of vegetable, because she could not eat sausages.

My mother did not have allergies to sausages. My aunt just told her that sausages were taken from her uncle’s manhood, and only his wife was allowed to eat. So, in her naive mind, only married women were qualified to consume sausage.

My mother told that story whenever she was convinced that I really didn’t appreciate the good things that she made available because I had had it easy. All my life she had done her best to make sure that I did not have to have it as tough as she had. She tried to give me all the things she had never had access to. Because she had gone the extra mile to shield me from hardship, she felt she had robbed me of the drive to earn success, to be driven enough to face all obstacles with determination. She felt I needed to build grit.

My mother is no different from many other parents and leaders out there who believe that we, our generation, needs to earn our success, not have it handed to us. Well, they are going to have a hard time in convincing this generation that they need to work for things, earn things, struggle for things. You know why? Because they are dealing with a generation that hasn’t had to earn things.

They are dealing with a generation that stands at the foot of the mountain and decides that they want to reach the summit, however they are unwilling to climb that mountain.

They would rather stage a ‘grand entrance’ by parachuting onto the summit, or land onto the summit via a helicopter. And someone else will have to figure out ‘how’ and where to get the helicopter, the parachutes and everything to guarantee their desired wish.

I know it sounds harsh, however, what can you expect from a generation that immediately wants to lead companies the moment they graduate from college?

What do you expect from ‘entrepreneurs’ who want their companies to be posting millions in revenue just after a year of operation? What can you expect from a generation that swipes right for a relationship and runs for the hills at the first uncomfortable incident?

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This is a generation that hasn’t had to earn anything in life, and now we expect them to earn their success? Come on, these are kids we gave awards to after they came last. We nullified the efforts of those who excelled by handing out participation awards to everyone else. So who needs to do well if everyone is going to just get an award for being there? Some teachers just let so kids ‘pass’ because they are afraid if the parents with too high an opinion of their children’s abilities.

True story: recently I went to my son’s prize giving event held by their school. I told him the same thing most kids I grew up with were told: ‘there is going to be a prize for best attendance, a prize for most behaved, a prize for most behaved, a prize for neatest and maybe a prize for least noise maker. All these prizes mean nothing to me. All those things are expected of you. They should be your default setting. The only prizes we will celebrate are for academic excellence, because they prove that you earned them.’

Now, at that event, the school gave as much attendance, neatness and some such other award to students, if not more than awards for academic achievement. How did this happen? I found out that after the awards event from the previous year, certain parents with kids who had not excelled academically felt that their kids had been ‘discriminated against’ and their egos had been hurt by not receiving any recognition! The parents had made a lot of noise about it on the school’s Facebook page, that the authorities decided to create all these other pointless awards.

What message does that send to the kids? We are taking the value of hard work from them, and so when we ask them to earn their success as adults they are going to look at us with blank stares. They do not understand what we want them to do.

You see, now my mother’s story makes sense to me. She didn’t tell me the story because she wanted me to know that she had a mean aunt, instead she wanted me to realise that she had focus on a particular goal, and no struggle could deter her from it. That is the process. Facing obstacles and overcoming them. Growing a day at a time. Earning what she had despite her past. My struggles were definitely going to different from hers, and surely they were not going to be much worse.

So I had no reason not to achieve what I wanted to achieve. I had no reason not to earn my success.

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LESSON 27

It’s never too late

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n the months leading to my June O’level examinations I joined a study group.

The group was mainly comprised of ‘veterans’, people who had sat for exams multiple times over the year, as they tried to reach that 5 O’level passes requirement before they took their next academic step. In that group only two people had never sat for exams before, a woman called Mrs Simango (I never got to learn her first name) and I. Mrs Simango was past forty. (Disclaimer: I never actually saw her ID papers to be certain of her age, however, through paying attention to the stories she told over the months we studied together, one could add two and two together and reach four). Mrs Simango had grown up on a farm, her father was a tractor driver and her mother was a largely stay-at-home mother and a seasonal labourer, normally called to duty in the period between planting and harvesting.

Mrs Simango grew up at a time when if it had happened that her brother had proved himself to be academically gifted and needed to pursue his education at more renowned school, like a Mission boarding high school, then she would have been required to abandon her studies and find work on the farm to help increase revenue streams in order to ensure he got quality education. That however, was not the reason why Mrs Simango did not pursue her studies past Form 2, known as the Junior Certificate (JC) back then. Thing is she fell pregnant, and that was that, she became a housewife.

Fortunately for her, her husband did have a decent career at the farm, rising to be Workshop Manager. He had been an apprentice mechanic when he had impregnated her.

And now after over twenty years as a housewife, Mrs Simango decided that it was 84

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time to pursue that education. While most of the members of the study group were veterans, we were all still very young compared to Mrs Simango, she was the mother figure of the group.

It eventually came as no surprise when Mrs Simango passed two of the five subjects she sat for in June that year. In November she added another single pass, and next June she completed her tally of five. A few years later when we moved away from that town to another part of the country, Mrs Simango was studying bookkeeping. That’s what she wanted to be, a bookkeeper.

How many times have you heard the phrase: ‘I am too old to be persuing this...’ or ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks...’? These phrases and others like them define our attitude towards age and pursuing our dreams. We believe that past a certain age, it is just too late to be going after our dreams. It’s just ‘not practical’.

Meanwhile people like Mrs Simango seem to either not know these phrases, or they just refused to be limited by their past and will boldly set out in pursuit of their dreams, or die trying. They simply refuse to be back seat passengers on their journey of life, they decide to take the wheel and make the decision of the destination.

There are a number of reasons why people often opt not to pursue their dreams, among them the excuse that we have way too much to do in order to fend for our families, which leaves us little or no time to actually pursue our dreams. Well, yes we are busy, however, is it not that we would have become too comfortable with our present circumstances that we are afraid to upset our lives to pursue a dream?

Sometimes it is just plain laziness.

The biggest deterent to us pursuing our dreams, however, has nothing to do with all the other excuses we give. It is self doubt. You see, in our heads we constantly repeat society’s prejudices against us as individuals, against our heritage, against our abilities; and we echo the failures in our personal history. With all these bits of information, and more, we create an invisible story that shapes our conscious decisions. We tell ourselves that we are unable to attain those dreams, thus it is better not to attempt the journey.

You know, besides the story of my one time study mate, Mrs Simango, I also particularly like the story of a woman named Susan Boyle. Susan Boyle was able to silence those inner monologues that plague so many of us, and she decided to 85

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rewrite the invisible story in her head from one of self doubt to one of self belief, against all odds.

In her forty seven years, Boyle participated in a number of singing events in her desire to attain her dream: to be a professional singer, and to also be successful as Elaine Paige.” Boyle who had often been bullied as a child, was mocked at a lot of these singing events for her looks instead of being judged over her ability to sing.

In 2008 Susan Boyle entered talent competition Britain’s Got Talent, and repeated her ambition to the judges and studio audience: she wanted to be a professional singer as successful as Elaine Page. Anyone who watched that episode will remember how the majority of the audience reacted: some parts of the audience started rolling their eyes in disbelief of the kind of ambition she had, while some felt disgusted on her level of confidence. After all, Boyle did not have the looks, and she was forty seven!

Boyle was aware of the doubt in the auditorium, however, she chose to ignore it and went on to sing her winning piece “I Dreamed a Dream”. As soon as she hits the first note, all of their doubts turned into awe. When she finished her song, she received a standing ovation from the audience and all three judges.

Susan Boyle went on to win the competition that year, and her album I Dreamed A Dream was at one point the top selling album OF ALL TIME!!

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LESSON 28

Each one teach one

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t is never the right time, is it? Well, for most of us anyway. So we spend a lot of our time waiting for the right time. For example, back in the day when I was a spoken word artist/poet, I had a few people come to me and ask for my help in developing their careers as spoken word artists/poets. So were my peers and others were just starting out, or were thinking of starting out.

While the request to mentor them always flattered me, I just did not feel as if I was able to help them. I felt that I still had so much to learn, that I did not think I had anything worthwhile to offer someone else. I looked at my achievements, and did not feel as if they were much. I looked at the platforms I had performed on and felt as if they were not big enough, I had peers who had done international platforms whom I felt were in a better position to mentor them.

So I always declined the offer, and offered instead to direct them towards people whom I thought were better equipped.

When doing this, I thought I was helping, and however did not pause to think that had they thought whomever I was directing them to could help, then they could have gone straight there. I was making the same mistakes some people make when getting presents for others after listening to them speak of the presents they would like. People often disregard the presents people actually want, and try to get them ‘something they weren’t anticipating’. Naturally, if they had wanted that, they would have put it down as something they wanted and mentioned it.

Thing is, for as long as we are alive, we will always never know it all. We will never know everything there is to know about a particular subject, let alone know everything about everything. That said, we are always in a position if knowing 87

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slightly more than someone else, and we will never know who that someone else is until we offer to share what we know. You do not need to have reached the summit of your field to be in a position to help others develop their skills in that particular field.

Consider this: during slavery, Africans were denied education, including learning to read. Many if not most enslaved people were kept in a state of ignorance about anything beyond their immediate circumstances which were under control of owners, the law makers and authorities. When an enslaved person learned or was taught to read, it became his duty to teach someone else, spawning the phrase “Each one teach one�.

These slaves did not know all there was to know about whatever it was they had learnt, yet they still shared it with others around them. It is a situation like that of a starving group of people, amongst whom one finds half a loaf of bread. He could a) eat the whole half loaf alone and get more energy to go and try to find a loaf or two or more in order to be able to feed the entire lot. Or b) share whatever he has found with his compatriots, because that is all there is at the moment, and no one is sure when the next windfall will be upon them.

Something has to be said about how easy it is for one to get through to their peers. The terms of reference are often the same, as opposed to someone high up at the summit trying to reach down to the individual on the ground. Their optics are way too different at this point, so much that it is very easy for wrong assumptions to be made. Accessibility also becomes a conscientious issue.

Hey, it is easier to extend a hand to pull someone else up than it is to drop a ladder or climbing rope.

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LESSON 29

Own your mistakes, take responsibility

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rowing up there were kids we just did not mess around with. You know those kids who could pack a mean punch? And then there were those that were rumoured to be able to ambush you when you least expected it, you know those who could nurse a grudge while they waited for the right moment. We will not leave out the ones with older brothers famous for brawling, the type that swore that they were not afraid of your father and would beat everyone in your household. Most of them really went on and on when they were drunk.

The worst ones, though, were the ones with the mothers who chose to fight on their behalf. Those mothers believed that their kids were the salt of the earth and did no wrong, at all. I knew one kid like that, Struggle. Yes, his actual name was Struggle, and please do not ask me how his parents decided on such an interesting name.

Anyway, according to his parents, Struggle could do no wrong. Because he had the best parents any child could hope for. So when he did well at school, his parents took the credit, because they taught him great stuff at home. On the other hand, if he did not do well at school, it was the teachers who were at fault, after all, we all know that these teachers do not really know anything about teaching, don’t we? They are just in it for the money. So it was no great surprise to hear Struggle’s parents blame the national examination board after Struggle failed his high school exams. They were of the notion that he had failed because Struggle’s papers had not been handled well, or something of that nature.

They were comfortable with taking the glory and praise when their son did well, and they were quick to deflect the blame when he did poorly.

A famous story is told of Oliver Wendell Holmes Snr, who was a physician.

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Mr Holmes was the father of a famous American chief justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jnr. The story states that, soon after the introduction of hospitals for childbirth in the West, there broke out an epidemic called puerpural fever also called childbed fever or postpartum infections. At the time, hospitals consistently reported death rates between 20% to 25% of all women giving birth, punctuated by intermittent epidemics with up to 100% fatalities of women giving birth in childbirth wards.

In the 1800s Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that women giving birth at home had a much lower incidence of childbed fever than those giving birth in the doctor’s maternity ward. Oliver Wendell Holmes Snr made the same findings, and published a paper in 1843 that said puerperal fever was frequently carried from patient to patient by physicians and nurses; he suggested that clean clothing and avoidance of autopsies by those aiding birth would prevent the spread of puerperal fever.

You see, what was happening was that doctors and nurses who were performing autopsies on the bodies of women were the same doctors who were helping pregnant women deliver babies. These doctors were not washing or sanitising their hands between these two duties. As was to be expected, Holmes and his findings were violently ridiculed by their peers and other doctors of the period.

This epidemic thrived for about 30 years, and there was nothing to be done because doctors simply would not heed Holmes’ advice.

The doctors were the problem, and they just could not accept that fact.

Then there is the story of Innocent, who ironically, is always innocent as his name suggests. Innocent recently got divorced because of the various problems in his marriage which had all been created by his then wife. The woman was so destructive of their marriage so much that she drove him to sleep with other women.

There is a single thread that binds all three stories together, well, let’s say two threads: they are both true and they feature people who were unwilling to take responsibility as much as they were willing to take the glory when things were going down the drain. This is not too different from how many of us react when we do wrong, we try to ‘explain things’, or deflect responsibility. When things we cannot deflect responsibility we try to justify by stating all our good intentions that drove us to that mistake.

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One thing needs to be said for taking evasive action when confronted with failures and mistakes, most of those who do it do it as a self-preservation move.

They do not want to lose face. This however does have the opposite effect on the people on the receiving end, as they interpret it as an attempt at deception. Think of the famous statement by former U. S president Bill Clinton in 1998 when he said these famous words as he was ending his speech: “...I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” The lie just almost ended his career as the leader of the USA. Clinton’s lie was an attempt at self preservation. He felt that admitting his faults would destroy his career. I think the other universally respected figure to fall into this trap was Tiger Woods. And when his lie was exposed, Tiger just about lost everything: his marriage, endorsements...you name it. He has never fully recovered from that scandal.

The thing with people is that they really do not like being deceived. They are more willing and open to forgiving sincere, heartfelt apologies and taking of responsibility than they are willing to do so if one leads with a lie instead of the truth. Taking responsibility shows a willingness to accountability, and who doesn’t like someone who is willing to hold themselves accountable and is also willing to be held accountable by others?

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LESSON 30

Motivation

S

everal years ago I was visiting with a friend of mine when I witnessed a conversation that was to lead me to a realisation a few years later. My friend was at home with his son and his nephew, one Saturday afternoon. The boys were between eight and ten years of age at the time. They were alternating between the toys strewn all over the floor and the cartoons on television.

Now, my friend is a an avid Arsenal football club supporter, and it being match day, he figured it was time to switch from cartoons to soccer. So he told the kids to pack up as it was now time to study. His son asked ‘Why’ and his nephew asked ‘What will I get for studying?’ It wasn’t many years later that it hit me, you know the way that apple hit Isaac Newton on the head when he made his realisation of gravity. Only that my realisation wasn’t on the same level as Newton’s.

It hit me that there are two types of people: 1) the ones who are motivated by understanding the reason why and 2) there are those motivated by incentives.

Similarly, there are two types of motivators: 1) those who motivate by sharing vision and purpose. Those who share the reason why. 2) those who use incentives to drive people into action.

Generally these two types of motivators are called manipulators and inspirational. Think of how politicians will promise something to the electorate in return for votes. Where I come from we have known politicians to buy alcohol for unemployed youths and offer them a few dollars/rands and ask them to cause public disruptions.

This has happened for years and years, however I would like to use one specific period to illustrate my point. In 2008 things reached the tipping point for former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe. Even his loyal supporters were now 92

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ready to vote for the alternative. During the election, rumour has it that Mugabe lost to then opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, however Mugabe would not accept the results of the poll. So, youths were recruited to go and live at ‘bases’, youths left their homes to (surprisingly) voluntarily to go and live at a single location from where they visited terror against well known opposition political figures in communities.

They were not getting paid any substantial amounts, just a few dollars and lots of alcohol and marijuana. Those were the incentives. The reason why didn’t matter.

You see if the reason why mattered, then one would be forced to look at the implications of their actions on the rest of the community. Thus it is no surprise that these youths destroyed property, severely beat up neighbours and community leaders (in some areas that I visited after the gruesome period in the runup to the presidential run off, I was told that these youths would cut your flesh or beat you until you had wounds, and would then apply the herbicide paraquat onto the wounds.

It was extreme torture.

And after the runoff those youths had to live in that same community with the same people they had terrorised. Now, if they had asked why and stopped looking at immediate gratification - (did I mention the excessive sexual activities they were involved in at their ‘bases’?)- then they would have asked ‘why’. And asking why asks you to put everything into perspective and find the best course of action.

Away from the horrendous activities which politicians manipulate people to do, think of how parents manipulate children into doing as they are told so that they can get special favours (for instance, a trip they have wanted since forever, candy...), or that they will avoid punishment if they comply. Think of how people use peer pressure, to influence others into doing something.

Think of how companies offer discounts, give special offers to ‘card holders’. It is all manipulation, and it works. It works very well, and very much. Until someone else comes and offers a better bargain. You see, manipulation is only good until a better offer comes along. I have seen youths who will march and disrupt things in support of a particular political outfit today, turn around and do the same for the other parties if they offer a little more in terms of incentives.

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Manipulations do not breed loyalty. In sales it is well known that if you motivate customers/clients to buy your product they will be good to you until your competition offers better deals. The guy who bases his relationship with a woman on what his money can buy her will lose that woman the moment that woman is approached by a guy with ‘stronger buying power’.

Manipulations are transactional.

On the other side of this is inspiration. Sharing the reason why. When we inspire others into action we let them take ownership of of the vision we are inspiring them towards. And when people take ownership of things, they do them much much better than when they are operating to get an incentive.

When I was reading Drive by Dan Pink I came across what I think is the best story to illustrate what inspiration can achieve. Did you know that Microsoft did at one time create an online encyclopedia called MSN Encarta? I had no idea. However, given their vast financial resources, I would have expected their encyclopedia to have outlasted wikipedia and even become everyone’s default online encyclopedia. Given that wikipedia is operated by volunteers. You see, the volunteers at wikipedia are driven by a single thing: to make information as accessible as possible to everyone. This is their why, and it is a very noble why.

And because of it they outdid the incentive driven Microsoft employees.

Behavioral psychologists and economists argue that humans are primarily driven by intrinsic motivations. This goes against what we were taught growing up, that we are driven by external motivations/rewards. You see, when we do something for ourselves we want to do it very well, so we do it to the best of our abilities. We do not do it with our eyes on the next project or on the physical reward. We start to play an infinite game. People who study to better themselves, to improve their grasp of certain things will do it better than people who do it to earn incentives.

In fact, those who are hunting incentives will look for shortcuts.

Don’t get me wrong, people still want to get paid and they still want to be recognised for what they do, that said, they would like to be paid and to get recognition when doing something they really feel is theirs, they want to be recognised for mastering and excelling at what they love. And this is achieved by addressing the reason why when motivating others.

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LESSON 31

Loyalty

A

couple of years or so after my mother’s death I had to move in with my father, after living with a few relatives beforehand. Well, not really move in with my father, but with his family as he was working about 250 kms away in Chiredzi. He lived there and visited every other weekend. One thing you have to know about my father is that during those days he enjoyed a good drink and he fancied himself to be ‘the mayor’ of Chimanimani despite the fact that he was living and working quite a distance away.

So each Friday night when he came home, his first stop was the local drinking spots where he would meet up with his buddies and share gossip on what had happened in his absence. If you have ever lived in a small community you will know that no secret is safe, and more people than necessary will know what color of sheets you have on your bed and how often you change them. In these communities lies have a way of subduing, or overrunning truth.

A few after months after I had moved in, my father came home breathing fire.

The fact that he had been drinking didn’t help matters much. He woke me, it was just after midnight, and he laid into me. He had heard from his sources that my sister was living a life of reckless abandon, and it was my fault that she was acting like that. He felt that if she was doing shameful things, she was bring shame to the family, and the responsibility fell on me as the eldest to restrain her and protect the family’s reputation.

I didn’t agree. You see, I did not feel as if I belonged to that family, so I felt no obligation to defend its honor or reputation. Since my arrival my clothes were still in my travelling bag, it felt as if I was just stopping over for a while before my journey continued. It felt as if I was at a halfway house. The heads of that home did not make me feel as if I was a part of it. Now, I had two answers I could have given my father: that what he had heard was a lie, or that I knew nothing about it. I chose the third option, I kept quiet. Which made him angrier.

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What my father was angry over and asking me to do was display loyalty to the family. However what he failed to appreciate was the fact that loyalty isn’t something you can display on order and shake it above your head. Loyalty is developed, cultured, however it’s not developed or cultured by the person you expect to display it. It is cultured by the person who expects to benefit from it.

It is like passion. Take this example: when most companies are advertising vacancies online or newspapers they always add: applicant must be passionate, driven, able to work with minimal supervision. And then the successful applicant is always told that the company considers everyone like a family. Well, it’s one thing to tell someone that they are now a part of the family and making them feel said they are a part of the family.

Thing is, if the company doesn’t provide the perfect, or right conditions, then the employee is going to feel less passionate, their drive will drop and they will not work much without supervision. By right conditions I do not mean they should molly coddle the employee and pander to their every whim. No. The right conditions are created by providing support for the employee, and created an environment with psychological safety.

In a psychologically safe environment people are willing to air their opinions because they know that though they might not get accepted, they will be listened to and valued. People are not afraid ask for help because they know that it will not be taken to mean that they are weak. They know that if they call out their colleague for a mistake, that will not be held or used against them. In a psychologically safe environment people are willing to be held accountable, because they know it is not being done maliciously.

Humans seek psychological safety in all their close relationships, and they are loyal to those that make them feel safe. A lot of times I see and hear people accuse others of lacking loyalty. Well, the thing is: they are loyal, just not to you. You see, an individual can have personal relationships with between 100 and 250 people. An average of 150, according to anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s study.

This figure is of the maximum active social relationships one can have, and does not include people known to the individual or with ceased personal relationships.

So the fact that someone is not loyal to you doesn’t mean that they lack loyalty, it just means that they are loyal to someone else or other people in their circle of acquaintances with whom they enjoy a closer relationship. And for them to be loyal to us we need to cultivate a suitable environment.

This cuts across all spheres: workplace, home, friends... We need the assurance of psychological safety.

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LESSON 32

Rethink, reset, rebuild

I

love Facebook. Unlike some people I know, I do not like it because it gives me a chance to look down upon the lives of those cool kids from high school whose lives are now far from cool, or those billed to be most likely to succeed who are now living average lives and hustling just like the ones who were considered lost causes. No, that’s not why I like Facebook. I love it because at some point it helped me make some money quite by accident really.

I created a Facebook blog Diaries of the Village Idiot Abroad just as a means to make people laugh, and in a short while I was getting paid for articles. I also love it because it’s easy to track long lost relatives and friends. So one time a few years ago I decided to embark on such a long-lost-friend-finding occassion. It had been years since I had been in contact with a dear old friend of mine, Eddie. It had been about three or four years since we last spoke.

I did find him, and we did get in touch. Eddie had changed. Granted I had changed too. Eddie and I struggled to find common ground and yet just three years previously we were inseparable. We saw the world through different lenses and it was hard to reconcile our different perspectives. So our conversation was awkward, and after a few attempts we both gave up.

Eddie hadn’t changed overnight. His changed was a daily experience. You see, each day we encounter new information, and the way we respond to that new information (or experiences) determines how we view the world as we move ahead. These changes are small, almost unnoticeable, really, and as Neymar Jnr says in his Gillette advert ‘man is remade daily’, or more appropriately ‘people are remade daily’. Each morning we wake up we are not the same people we were yesterday. We are constantly evolving to suit our environment.

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This is how humans have survived when other creatures have been becoming either extinct or endangered species. You see, humans by nature adapt to their environment, and the environment doesn’t change to suit the human. This is the reason why our human species survived where our other relatives like the Neanderthals and other human species perished.

For example, take a decent human being and place them in a bad environment, they will be compelled to do bad things in order to survive that environment.

Similarly take a bad person and put them into a good environment, they will adapt to it and live in a way that makes them thrive.

Think about companies and how they operate. All company executives say one thing: their primary concern is the happiness of the customer. This is all well and dandy. The question then is: what are they doing to make sure that their primary concern is happy and satisfied? Some will slave drive, micro manage their subordinates in order to make sure that they perform at a top level, while others will support their subordinates to make sure they are happy. There are no prizes for guessing which side actually manages to deliver in customer satisfaction: it is those who support their subordinates. You see, these ones create an environment with psychological safety, and that support will filter down to the client. A happy subordinate delivers a happy client.

On the flip side, a surly subordinate who is always looking over their shoulder operating in CYA (cover your ass) mode will not deliver a happy customer. Why? Because they are too busy worrying about their own skin to worry about pleasing the customer. Take that same person and put them in a different environment, they will deliver different results with a different attitude.

It’s about survival.

Back to our daily evolution, I have a contrast for my relationship with Eddie.

I have been in constant contact with another friend from the past. He has also changed, however what makes it easy to remain close is the fact that through the years we have been becoming accustomed to each other’s daily changes because there has been no gap in our communication. The changes are almost not visible because we have been busy adapting ourselves to accommodate them.

The US marines have the slogan: Improvise, adapt, overcome. This is the cornerstone of their training, because in war situations they are always going to 98

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enter situations that are foreign to them. So they are asked to consciously adapt themselves to the conditions, they are asked to consciously evolve, to make the decision to alter themselves to suit their situations. Now, this is much more difficult than the subtle, unconscious evolutions we undergo on a daily basis. So it’s easier said than done. Think of the time you made a conscious decision to make a lifestyle change. It was an insurmountable task. And yet if we are exposed to the right conditions, we will change to suit them, even though it will take a bit of time.

What makes these conscious driven changes/evolutions is that in our minds we have stories of ourselves, stories that we use to define who we are based on our past accomplishments and past failures. And we try by any means possible to remain that person in our heads, thus we resist change when we see it.

Change presents a danger to us, who we are and what we stand for. So we resist the change.

Here is a crazy thought: while we feel like this towards change, if we feel that our basic survival or continuation as a species we will immediately change to order.

This is why we fail most of the time when we decide to make a change, we do not see it as an urgent need to our survival. Talk to a guy who has ‘quit’ smoking a couple of times before and is still smoking. They have never been able to completely break the habit because somewhere in the back of their mind they do not think they are in immediate danger. Yes, maybe it will cause a health hazard at some point in the future, however for now, they are still safe. That hazard will be dealt with in the future when and if it does come.

The ability to reset ourselves, to reinvent ourselves has become a basic skill we need in the 21st century. Life is changing at lightning pace, and the ones who adapt as fast as the world have a higher chance of not only survival, they have a higher chance of achieving success. You see, we do not have the gift of time that our parents and grandparents had, and our kids have less time than we do.

So we need to constantly learn new things, we also need to constantly unlearn the things we learnt before. We need to constantly make the effort to evolve, to change, to grow beyond our current state, otherwise our environment will overrun us and we will be stuck in a world that we do not understand, and are unable to adapt to. Which will leave us in a precarious position.

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THE LAST LESSON

Everything is changing

R

ecently I was playing an old song by two chaps named Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz titled Deja vu. It took me back to the 90s. Back to the time when I had what I considered to be a very impressive cassette collection. I started collecting the cassettes in 1998, and I suppose some might have described the collection as eclectic. You know, unlike a lot of my friends and relatives who had their own collections which centred on a specific genre, I had the likes of Nas, Britney Spears, Nate Dogg, Alanis Morrissette and Soul Brothers sharing space.

By 2003 cassettes were becoming obsolete, and during that time technology was still getting warmed up. We hadn’t seen nothing’ yet!

15 years later 2003 looks like the dark ages, who can imagine a time before internet? Now, things we wondered if they were even remotely possible are a reality. No one questions the possibility of unmanned cashier tills in supermarkets, the question is now when they will be universally rolled out. The discussion is now centred around blockchains, cryptocurrencies, Artificial Intelligence.

Genetic engineering is no longer the stuff of futuristic movies and sci-fi novels, it is a reality, and with it more medical possibilities are being unlocked.

Now, as we boldly march into the future that is constantly evolving, one thing remains the same: people. The same people skills that applied millions of years ago, are the same skills that apply today and will apply tomorrow. Well, that is unless if humans lose their cognitive abilities one way or the other in the process of their march into the future. Besides that, humans will remain as they are, and it will take the same things to influence them and for them to influence us.

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In Not Taught C. S Chiwanza takes the reader on a journey into his childhood sharing experiences and observations in a very interesting way that engages the reader, and he manages to make them relevant to each idea. Or “lesson” as he calls them. There are incidences of humour that will make you laugh out loud. The conversational tone is really refreshing and whatever idea he is sharing doesn’t sound like a lecture. It’s a one-on-one chat.