WRITING
Embracing Non-Linear Paths: Building a Life, Not Just a Career
While the world has changed a great deal, we seem to be struggling to find new ways of living. The typical path from birth feels linear - kindergarten, primary school, high school, university, job, career, live life when we retire. Over the last 30 or so years of my working life, I have bounced between multiple, often unrelated industries, with writing at the core. Writing stemmed less from my studies and more because it is something that I enjoy doing occasionally, and then I put the work into the craft. It doesn’t hurt that I'm relatively decent at it, from articles and poetry (for a while) to proposals and reports. It also helps that I am naturally curious about all kinds of things which holds me in good stead when writing for business, in particular. Lately, I have been contemplating the difference between building a career and building a life. I left my last full-time job in 2014 because my children were young and I wasn’t present in my family’s lives due to heavy demands on my...
The Endless Cycle of Signing Up and Forgetting: My Experience with Digital Platforms
I like the Internet. I like wandering down random rabbit holes in service of curiousity. I like how it exposes me to ideas and experiences that are far removed from me. I also like exploring the multitude of platforms, and their respective apps (or vica versa). While social media has become less my thing, I still have the habit of signing up for random things, just to see how they work. I was one of those who downloaded what felt like every app and then never used it afterwards. I still have apps on my phones that I haven’t opened in two years and yet I still can’t bring myself to delete them. Yes, I am one of those who carries two smartphones – one Android and one iOS - with the exact same apps on each. Writing this, I took a break to go through my phones and found Mentorist, Flipboard, Later, Moment, Rhymers Block, Make Time, Quora, One Football, and a couple of fitness apps. I honestly have no idea when I last opened any of them. And my email inboxes are chock-a-block with emails...
Tech Writing in the Age of Speed: How to Catch Up and Stay Relevant
In another lifetime, I was a tech writer. I obsessively followed what was happening, attended countless launches in South Africa and around the world, and wrote about technology and innovation on my blog (for example, this very old review of the Samsung i8910) and in magazines. When I joined Destiny Man magazine as the editor in 2010, I had to start cutting back on writing specifically on tech because of the demands on my time. Plus, I was writing more across the board. After a few issues, the magazine hired someone else to write the technology pages. And, gradually, I stopped receiving invitations to launches and the like. It felt like the ‘heady’ days of technological innovation and everything was new. Every mobile phone that came out took a step forward. The iPad, which began the ‘tablet wars,' launched in 2010. Music and video streaming platforms, ride-hailing apps, social media like Instagram were birthed. Twitter came into its own. Everywhere one looked, something shiny and new...
Navigating the Social Media Limbo: Where Do We Go From Here?
Recently, I realised that Twitter has been my go-to social network for over a decade, but I rarely go on it now. When I do, I remember why I started to pull back from it when Elon Musk bought it, although the signs were already there - I wrote about it during lockdown in The Twitter Abyss. Social media doesn’t have the same hold on me it had previously, especially when it felt necessary for promotion/marketing and building awareness around my work. Nowadays, my posts' reach and/or engagement doesn’t feel as significant as it used to. A part of me feels we are at an inflection point where social media isn’t what it used to be, but what comes next is still unknown. It feels like a state of limbo. I spend hours trying to figure out how to approach promoting my book, my podcast, and where to share my thoughts. Plus, whether there is a place for my random opinions. Perhaps I should embrace this next stage of my life, in a bubble, clueless about what’s what and who’s who, outside of my...
Working on the OPPO Find N2 Flip launch
There was a time when I used to write on technology for my site and various publications. One of the early blog posts I ever did on my site when I got my domain was on Nokia's music store, a very long time ago. When I was submerged in that world, I had the opportunity to attend many a tech launch, particularly for smartphones, even getting to travel to launches and tech experiences internationally. I got to visit CES in Las Vegas, tour the Google offices in San Francisco, go dogsledding and to see the northern lights in Sweden, and attend a smartphone launch in Paris, amongst others. After a while, the launches blend into each other as the tech companies try to find ways of entertaining and exciting beyond the actual technology on display. Flashing lights, loud music, dancers … I have seen it all… Recently, I had the opportunity to both work on and experience the South African launch of OPPO’s Find N2 Flip and it was a breath of fresh air. And I am not saying that because I was a...
Some of the books I read in 2022
Every year, I promise myself that I will get this right and then the year comes and goes. Having been on Goodreads since 2012, I always set myself Reading Challenge for the year. In my first three years, I didn’t meet that challenge, for example, only reading 10 of the 50 I had set in 2012 and 24 of the targeted 30 in 2014. 2019, 2020 and 2021 were good years, having read 43/35 books, 59/50 and 55/55 respectively. For this reason, I was quite ambitious in 2022, with the intention of reading at least 60 books and, I must say, I started the year really well but faded quite a bit in the last few months, primarily due to more writing work – which isn’t a bad thing. I read 49. The promise to self? To write more about the books that I have read during the course of the year with one of those ‘best 10 books I read this year’ or something similar to close off the year. In the interests of not letting another year pass me by, here are some of the books I read in 2022. This was the year I...
For the love of music
This is the first draft of an essay published in Listen To Your Footsteps. I did make some edits for the final version. I have loved music for as long as I can remember. My father had a record (vinyl) collection that he regularly added to on his travels around the world. I now own that collection and there are few things that give me as much joy as listening to the soundtrack of my childhood. It was a rule that every Sunday morning, I wash the cars. As revenge, I would pull the speakers from the hifi as close to the door as I could and blast my selected artist or genre so I could hear it outside. It would take me 10 – 15 minutes to decide what I was going to listen to. Some days it was Bob Marley, others it was jazz – Duke Ellington, Count Basie and the like – or soul music, like Brothers Johnson, The Platters, The Temptations, etc. My father also used to collect Readers Digest record packs, like Rock of the 50s & 60s or Jazz from the 20s to the 70s. In between that, there was...
Music writing is not easy
I wrote this for a print magazine but it was rejected and I wrote something else for them so figured why not share it here. Writing a column is a funny old thing. In the days when print was the be-all and end-all, being asked to write a column was akin to being given the holy grail. Or at least a map of sorts, a la Da Vinci code. Print space was and continues to be at a premium. And, while I have been fortunate enough to scribble many a column over the years, being asked to write this one has had me at sixes and sevens. The ‘column-writing muscle’ hasn’t been exercised in a minute. After an afternoon spent wracking my brain for a topic, I, with some shame, turned to Twitter. A friend – she said I can call her Giselle - responded with “Beyonce is dropping, Kojo, we would like an article on her influence through the years.” [Sidenote: I have never understood tweets being published as news. In my defence, this publishing of a tweet is about context.] Anyway, Giselle is part of the...
Media, content, streaming and the like
Recently, I had an interesting back and forth with a friend who is media owner, debating the merits of the different revenue models available to us, including subscriptions, paywalls and the like. In my mind, the main challenge with all of this is that the data and information we have on these is primarily from the US, which is a very different market. I still contend that an American media consumer is more included to pay for content that an African consumer, regardless of the country, including South Africa. This is partly due to priority and means. I reckon, on the list of things many of us need to handle on a daily basis, paying for content isn’t that high, especially considering there is much that we can access for free. I have, on occasion, paid to listen to a podcast, namely the Midnight Miracle Podcast with Dave Chappelle, Yasiin Bey and Talib Kweli, but when I was done with the season, there was nothing else compelling enough on the podcast network for me to keep paying....
Why I watch the Tour de France every year
Recently I tweeted something about the Tour de France, having just finished watching highlights of the day’s stage and a friend responded, with “Still with the #TourdeFrance. Requesting the original thread about how you fell in love with it.” In my early days on Twitter, I did a series of tweets – before threads were threads – on why I watch the Tour de France every year. It is the only cycling race I follow religiously. When I was writing my book Listen To Your Footsteps, I wrote a short essay on the same topic, but it didn’t make the final edit; it didn’t feel like it fit. But, in response to the tweet, I thought I would share it here: Photo by Tom Sam on Unsplash After my leg operation and finishing June exams in my third year of university, I went home for a month-long holiday. I was still on crutches with a partially healed 30 centimetre cut in my leg. For the first three weeks of my holiday, I was homebound, stuck in the house while everyone else in the family went about their...
What would happen if your website disappeared?
I started my website in 2009 and, albeit erratically, have shared writing and thoughts on a wide range of topics on it since then. There was my ‘tech journo’ phase when I was plugged into that world and wrote posts on launches, new gadgets, innovations, etc. In fact, one of my first posts was on Nokia, when it was still dominating the market. There’s been my extended music phase where I have written about artists, albums and everything in between, including attempting to create regular features like Digital Crates, where I share musicians and albums I ‘discover’ and Life Soundtrack, where I write about songs and albums that form part of my life’s soundtrack. I have also shared random thoughts on whatever catches my fancy, my journey through different spaces, like motorcycles, parenting experiences, and articles that I have written for other platforms. There are also pages sharing background on the different things that occupy my time, including my book and my podcast. The other day,...
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 edges, the things that didn’t quite fit in, to the point where you can tell it at the drop of a hat. When I started performing poetry, I had to learn the craft of standing on a stage in front of people, would, generally, get increasingly tipsy as the night went on. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, open mics were notorious for running longer than they should have. Poetry is great, but, after the third hour, it all starts to blur. I had to learn mic control, rhythm, tempo and even tone to keep the audience engaged. By the time you have both memorised and performed a...
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 some of them here. This is something I wrote in 2020, having spent most of 2019 exploring the idea of productivity and using the time I work efficiently to create more time for other aspects of life. I probably went through at least 8 books and listened to countless episodes of In truth, I am over ‘hustling’ or being on the ‘grind’. The demands on our attention seem to be increasing exponentially, with the lines between work, family and ourselves blurring. There was a time when we talked about technology as separate from us. Now it’s intricately woven into all aspects of our lives, and in some instances it is our life. But it can also be...
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 corporate and media platforms on the importance of owning your platform – in other words a website that you pay for - and using social media as a way of amplifying your stories. Social media has become pervasive in ways that we initially couldn’t imagine. And the conversation today, following all the drama around, for example, Facebook, how we are manipulated by their algorithms, the inadequacies of their approach to fact-checking and how misinformation is rife. There’s the story of Cambridge Analytica and there is how misinformation has spread around COVID-19. There is the toxicity of Twitter and how anyone can make any type of allegation and it...
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 were only available via landline phone – if you had one – or if someone actually visited you. In the car, you had the radio or your thoughts. In a queue, you had something to read, if you remembered to bring something, your thoughts and/or random conversations with strangers in the line. There was even a time when we listed our hobbies on our CVs to show that there was more to us than the work we had done. And many of us actually had hobbies – defined as ‘an activity or interest pursued outside of one’s regular occupation and engaged in primarily for pleasure - even...
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 in my head and been told I think too much. I have always felt, in some instances, we don’t think enough and what children should be taught is how to think. So many things in the world seem to happen because zero thought has been put into a situation and the consequences of this lack of thought create conflict, on different scales. But I have also come to recognise that to live primarily in one’s head is not conducive to, well, living in harmony with others. It can be a crutch, this retreat into one’s self. It leaves very little room for anything else, especially when you define yourself as solely your mind. Learning that I am not my mind has...
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