Conversations with your younger self

Apr 29, 2020 |

A common question in interviews is ‘what you would tell your 18, 20, 30, x year-old self?’ As we navigate the years, the hope is that we gain wisdom, learn things, evolve and progress from who we were to who we will become. With hindsight, it is easier to look back on the things we did, said and thought, and see a different way. On his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, Ferris often asks this question. I have been re-reading his book Tools of Titans which is a summary of interviews with over a hundred people. I was struck by the variety of answers, for those that were shared in the book. When...

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In Range, David Epstein makes a case for generalists

Apr 28, 2020 | ,

Malcolm Gladwell's '10,000 hour rule' as detailed in his 2008 book Outliers was, when it came out, a concept that many grasped onto in making sense of work and the world. The idea that putting in 10,000 hours brings us to mastery in our chosen field is nice, tidy and easy to buy into. In 2009, he was on Reddit answering questions and wrote: There is a lot of confusion about the 10,000 rule that I talk about in Outliers. It doesn't apply to sports. And practice isn't a SUFFICIENT condition for success. I could play chess for 100 years and I'll never be a grandmaster. The point is simply that...

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The Twitter Abyss

Apr 23, 2020 | ,

Keeping one's mind right in a world that feels like it is struggling to get a grip on reality often seems damn near impossible. And that is under supposedly normal conditions. Today, it feels even harder, especially on Twitter. I have a love-hate relationship with the platform that started in 2008. Or rather with how we interact with each other on the platform. In my first couple of years, I was on constantly to the point where it was creating rifts in my home. I was fascinated by how we would find out about events as they took place because people were tweeting from the ground. The night...

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Questlove in times of Covid-19

Apr 21, 2020 |

With all the content that is online - on the hour, every hour - I have been struggling to keep up, especially on Instagram. Since D-Nice launched his Homeschool at Club Quarantine on March 21st, there has been explosion of musical experiences online. With the time differences between the south of Africa and the US, I have missed most of these. I just don’t have the energy that some friends have to sit up until the early hours of the morning… which also means I missed the Teddy Riley versus Babyface fiasco. I just caught the memes. After the success of D-Nice's IG livestream party - which...

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Finding your rhythm working from home

Apr 15, 2020 |

There are those who have to brave traffic to go to work who have looked upon those who work from home with some envy. The idea of working from home, like most things, is a lot prettier, imagined, than it is in reality. Being able to sit in the ‘office’ in your pyjamas without the pressures of shower, get dressed and leave the house with a schedule can seem easier than it is. Working from home can be fulfilling but many are discovering that the grass is not always more comfortable on the other side. Writing on productivity I have been working from home off and on for years. It has taken as...

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Attention, that’s what it’s all about

Apr 14, 2020 |

"Attention is a resource—a person has only so much of it."Matthew Crawford Social media, over the last decade, has put 'attention' at the heart of everything we do. This is especially the case when you consider the sheer vastness of the digital noise that we create every day, including posts like this. Our value is often seen to be determined by numbers - followers, likes, comments, fans, pageviews, hits, etc. The birth and proliferation of the 'influencer' is a result of this. Attention has become a commodity In an interview with the legendary US radio host Angie Martinez, rapper J Cole...

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