Book Extract: On the edge
This is the third in a series of extracts from my book Listen To Your Footsteps, a collection of reflections and essays on fatherhood, identity, loss, creativity, etc. I READ Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd when I was in high school and the title has always stuck with me, although it is probably as much for the idea of a ‘madding...
Book Extract: My heroes were on the walls
This is the second in a series of extracts from my book Listen To Your Footsteps, a collection of reflections and essays on fatherhood, identity, loss, creativity, etc WATCHING A documentary about Muhammad Ali, I was struck by how big an impact he had on me when I was a child. I was eight years old when he lost to Larry Holmes, and I have...
Book Extract: Photographs
This is the first in a series of extracts from my book Listen To Your Footsteps, a collection of reflections and essays on fatherhood, identity, loss, creativity, etc IN SOME quarters, as photography spreads across the world, photographs were feared because it was believed that they captured the spirit of the subject. We went from that to...
Book Extract: Trying to remember
This is the fourth in a series of extracts from my book Listen To Your Footsteps, a collection of reflections and essays on fatherhood, identity, loss, creativity, etc. Memory is a funny old thing. You tell a story so many times, you start to question how much of it actually happened. With each telling of the experience, you smooth out the...
How To Work Better
In my post Owning Your Platform, I wrote about how, having written and worked for a number of media outlets and brands, a lot of my writing has disappeared into the ether. Fortunately, I have multiple folders with versions of some of the things that I have written. In the interests of ensuring that they aren’t totally lost, I have started sharing...
Owning Your Platform
In October 2021, Facebook experienced an outage which also meant that Instagram and Whatsapp also went down. And everyone turned to Twitter to complain. In early February 2022, Twitter also experienced some problems with loading Tweets. When these outages happen, I am always reminded of discussions I have had, over the years, with various...
There are benefits to taking up hobbies
Some time, in the last 20 years, we became busy. It was around the time mobile phones started to fill the gaps in between everything else. Prior to this, we were simply connected to those around us physically and time seemed to move at a different pace. When you were in the office, or at home, you...
Book Extract: Escape
This is the fourth in a series of extracts from my book Listen To Your Footsteps, a collection of reflections and essays on fatherhood, identity, loss, creativity, etc. THE RUSSIAN author Fyodor Dostoevsky is quoted as having said, ‘To think too much is a disease.’ I have always wondered how one measures thinking too much. I have spent a lifetime...
Twinkl + Heritage
As with many other parents, the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, that continue to this day, brought with it serious concerns about my children’s education. Schools scrambled to find the best way to continue educating while parents tried to figure out how to both manage their children’s schooling and navigate work, or as has been the...
Step back back and return to basics
First published on I Am An Entrepreneur in 2020. I have been looking back over some of the things I wrote during lockdown to see if it is still relevant. It is now two months since the South African government instituted a lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and two weeks since the country was shifted to Level 4 lockdown, with...
Making money off newsletters and other content
While I am still trying to make sense of Clubhouse, I did end up in a room the other day where the topic of discussion was on how to monetise newsletters. What drew me to the room was Dan Runcie, whose work with his platform Trapital I have been following for a couple of years – including interviewing him when I had a radio show in 2018/19....
Sylvester Chauke: The reluctant entrepreneur
This was to have been published in Destiny Man magazine January/February 2019 issue. It was never published. A part of me wanted to rewrite it. Below is exactly how I wrote it then before final sub-editing. The plan is to share more of what I wrote in other spaces, on here. If, ten years ago, you had asked Sylvester Chauke where he thought he...
Riding the BMW Motorrad R 18
For the eventual reveal of BMW Motorrad’s new cruiser, the R18, BMW created “A Bavarian Soulstory” video series with a guy called Tommy Kerns as the guide through the journey of the bike, from inspiration and heritage to design and engineering. I watched the final online reveal, which took place in Cape Town, and, throughout the process, have...
You are the words you tweet
Recently, I downloaded my Twitter archive and have been going through twelve years’ worth of every tweet I have posted, drawing inspiration from the thoughts, ideas, experiences, etc expressed for my upcoming book, to be published in 2021 by Pan Macmillan South Africa. “Study the past if you would define the future.”Confucius It has been a...
How important are photographs today?
Remember the days when we used to take photographs with cameras that used film roll? You would take your pictures without knowing how they would turn out, take the film to a photography shop and then wait about two weeks to pick up your photos. The closest we got to immediate images was with an instant camera, of which Polaroid was the brand name...
Strengths versus weakness. Where’s your attention?
Perhaps the flaw is in how I interpreted it. Throughout school, the focus always seemed to be on my weaknesses. Subjects that we were good at were given minimal attention, while the ones we weren’t as strong on was where the focus was. To become balanced and progress, we were encouraged to improve our strengths. Perhaps that makes sense for...
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