WRITING
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 crowd’ as it was for embarrassing myself in English class because of it. We were supposed to have written a composition on it and, because I hadn’t actually read it, I read the first two chapters and the last chapter and wrote an essay that totally missed the mark. To feel alone amidst the madding crowd can be a painful lace to be. And, for large portions of my life, that is how I have felt. Alone, sometimes lonely, amongst people, even with people who are supposed to be my people. This goes as far back as I can remember, to the photograph of me, in the middle of...
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 memories of watching the fight with my father. I has heartbroken because, even at that young age, I could see that Ali was at the end of his career. I read a copy of an early biography of his as a young teenager and, by then, had watched a lot of his earlier fights. His poster was prominent on my bedroom wall, alongside Bob Marley, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah and Bruce Lee. With hindsight, what I connected with was their ability to live for a cause and be their true selves, regardless of the circumstances or consequences. These were men who had principles that superseded anything...
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 documenting our lives incessantly with photographs. If you want to see how far we have come, try explaining what photography looked like in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s to a child who has grown up with cameras on just about any device. There was the process of buying a film that could take either 12 or 24 photos, and the delicate act of putting it into the camera without exposing the film and therefore ruining the first couple of photos taken or wasting an entire roll because you didn’t put it in right. Pointing with your eye looking through the small window, framing your image and...
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 sad case for many of us, a lack of work. Amidst all of the home and digital schooling facilities and resources came to the fore. In my search to find a way to support my children, I came across the site Twinkl, which provides educational resources for both teachers and learners, all created by teachers. I registered immediately and printed out some stuff for my daughter, in particular, who had to navigate Grade 3 from home. With my children’s school having developed a very good teaching system using Microsoft Teams, I have been fortunate in that my ‘home schooling’ workload has reduced drastically but I still, occasionally, tap into Twinkl for...
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 Level 3 on the near horizon. The painful reality is that, in this time, businesses have downsized, laid off staff or shutdown completely. For the entrepreneur, it has been even more drastic considering that so many of us depend on our businesses for our livelihood. The collapse of a business, therefore has an even more direct impact on us as business owners and as human beings. This, we cannot change. Viktor Frankl, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning wrote “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” Now is the time to break...
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. Having worked across the media and in content for the last fifteen or so years, I try to stay relatively up to date with the evolution of the sector overall. I no longer separate so-called traditional from digital media. The ecosystem consists of all platforms and mediums, in my mind, at least. With the time I spend reading, researching, exploring the discussions around media evolution in the last decade plus working primarily in South African media, the challenge continues to be that the primary conversation is from a Western, especially American, perspective. The reality has always been that, while we can draw insights from international media,...
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 would be in 2019, he would have probably said “an incredible Chief Marketing Officer at one of the big telecommunications companies. I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur because I didn’t think I had the risk appetite or the emotional capability to run so many people’s lives and have to worry about them every month.” For Chauke, that was the pinnacle yet, instead, we are sitting in the offices of the currently, Johannesburg-based, DNA Brand Architects, the company he founded just over six years ago, looking back over his 37 years on this third rock from the sun, as he reflects on the journey he has taken to reach this point and the...
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 been hankering for the opportunity to ride the bike. So you can imagine my excitement when I received the invite to attend the media ride in the Western Cape. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUGzfP6VNKI&list=PLfg_42h2pxJaceWGl4yEg-AgLsyNFl4sE&index=16 If there is one thing the Western Cape has it is beautiful roads for riding. Home base for the trip was the Lanzerac Wine Estate in Stellenbosch. The afternoon we arrived, we rode out over Franschhoek Hills, which is a route I have always wanted to ride. The bike was nimble, easy to ride and handled the windy roads with aplomb. It is close to the ground and the pegs scrap the tar with the...
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 fascinating trip down memory lane. The things that I considered ‘tweet-worthy’, the ideas that I have had, the moments I have lived through. It occurred to me that, in being active on social media, we are essentially documenting our lives. This can be positive or negative, depending on what we put out regularly. And it is damn near impossible to take it back, which is evident in how, for example, people’s tweets can come back and properly bite them in the ass. The epitome of this is Donald Trump. For everything he says and does, or doesn’t do, there is a tweet of him accusing Barack Obama of that very thing. “Those unable to catalog the past are...
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 … as Andre 3000 sings in Hey Ya!, “shake it like a Polaroid picture.” Quick sidebar. It seems the song actually helped revitalise Polaroid Corporation’s business and they sponsored some Outkast parties where they distributed cameras, though they did warn that shaking the picture would probably damage it. Photo by eniko kis on by Unsplash We took pictures to capture moments which we would relive sitting around a photo album, where the photos were, in today’s speak, curated. With the advent of the smartphone camera, and increased storage, this idea that the best camera is the one in your pocket is bandied around quite a bit and, yes, this has...
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 school, when you study a broad range of subjects, and need to pass all of them to make it out of those classrooms and, if that is in your destiny, into the lecture rooms of tertiary. Years ago, I heard Marcus Buckingham speak at an event for one of my former employers and the proverbial penny dropped. The gist of Buckingham’s talk and the focus of his work can probably be summed up in: “Invest in your strengths. You will grow the most in areas where you are already strong.” On his site, he explains that a strength is “not something that you’re good at, just like a weakness isn’t something that you’re bad at. A strength is an...
A day riding the Triumph Tiger 900s
In this social distancing times, the back of a motorcycle is probably the best place to be. Recently, I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to go on a media ride with Triumph South Africa to experience the two new Tigers – the Tiger 900 GT Pro and the Tiger 900 Rally Pro. I must confess that, while I do enjoy the dirt a bit, I always thought that my first time on a Triumph would be a Bonneville or Thruxton. But, starting on the Tiger 900 GT Pro was not bad at all, especially on the windy back roads towards Maropeng and then Hartbeespoort. It comes with five driving modes, namely Rain, Road, Sport, Rider and Off-Road, while the Rally Pro has the additional Off-Road Pro. Throttle response, ABS and traction control settings are adjusted for each mode. Credit: Joe Fleming / Bonafide Moto Co. Before pulling off from Triumph’s Sandton dealership, we were taken through the full-colour 7” TFT instruments. Being a relatively new rider – it’s been five years – I came to motorcycles at...
The entrepreneurship life can be a hustle
In a recent Q&A with health entrepreneur, doctor and founder of Proactive Heath Solutions, Dr Fundile Nyati, I asked the following question, “would you say entrepreneurship attracts people prone to struggling with mental illness or does it cause it?” Dr Nyati had just given a talk on “The Importance of Holistic Health as A Key Success Factor for COVID19 Pandemic Disruption Survival” at a virtual event for The Innovation Hub and one of the things he spoke on was how entrepreneurs can be prone to depression, anxiety and the like. Having grown up in an entrepreneur’s household and having started, worked in and shut down multiple small businesses, I was curious about this entrepreneurship “chicken or egg” question, as in which comes first. Dr Nyati’s response was that, paraphrased, entrepreneurship brings with it unknowns, pressures and challenges that can cause and aggravate mood disorders. With everything that is going on in the world today, and the increased challenges facing...
The curse of so-called original ideas
As Nas said, in his track No Idea’s Original, “No idea’s original, there’s nothin’ new under the sun, It’s never what you do, but how it’s done.” He was not the first to say it and he won’t be the last. Yet….it is often hard for us to accept that ideas are a dime a dozen. Personally, I am sitting with multiple notebooks from over 15 years with idea after idea. I have folders in the cloud with proposals for countless concepts. There was a time when I used to beat myself up when I saw an idea that I had thought of previously being implemented. A lot of what-ifs. The two things I have since learned and come to terms with. If you don’t do anything about it, then, as the expression goes, it is simply pie in the sky. And, you don’t have to follow through on every idea that you have. There are some ideas that are potentially brilliant that I will never follow through on. There are business concepts that are potentially lucrative that I will never get around to doing. And that’s alright. We...
Having different views can be constructive
I have always been fascinated by how you can have, say, five people hear or see the same thing, and each have a very different view of what is going on. That is what makes us human, I guess, and, sometimes, that is what helps us progress. I’ve been watching the documentary series about Monty Python on Netflix called Monty Python’s Almost The Truth. Something that stood out for me was, after John Cleese left, the balance of power shifted. When he was still part of the Python’s, there were often differing views between him and Terry Jones and, with the process of finding consensus amongst all of them, between these two points, meant the work was always better. We are seeing this play in the world today to the extreme. But it isn’t two different views but millions of different views. And too many of us seem to take pride in being contrarian. It can all be very tiresome. Arguing that racism doesn’t still have an impact on the world. Arguing about whether to wear masks or not when we are...
Finding your daily ritual in work + life
Mason Currey's book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work gives great insight into the routines of a range of artists, writers, musicians, etc. In the introduction, Currey recounts how he came to putting this book together - while working on deadline for an article for an architecture magazine that he worked for. "...I started searching the Internet for information about other writers’ working schedules. These were easy to find, and highly entertaining. It occurred to me that someone should collect these anecdotes in one place—hence the Daily Routines blog I launched that very afternoon...Mason Currey, Daily Rituals (pp. 15-16). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition I recently picked the book up to read, again, because I am struggling to find a routine when it comes to my writing. As a 'working' writer, I always have things to get down, from corporate writing for clients, this blog, poetry, essays and columns for other platforms, and possibly, a book. In between all of this,...
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