WRITING
Do you read books promiscuously?
Austin Kleon’s blog is a go-to space for me. And not just for substance and creativity of his blog posts but how he creates and curates the blog itself. I must admit I have borrowed from how he runs both his blog and his newsletter in what I am doing with mine. He did write the book Steal Like An Artist so I don’t feel guilty about it. I tend to read his posts because of his email newsletter which comes out every Friday. I grew up a bit of a bookworm, reading regularly in between all the things that children do, including right through my teens. In my thirties, I realised that I didn’t read as much as I used to. I wrote a blog post on how I tackled that which was to read for 10 minutes a day, at a minimum. As a result, I have gone from one or two books a year to at least thirty books a year – my target for this year is fifty and I have read about twenty-five so far. I have found that, in being deliberate, I can read and still get in the other things I enjoy, like watching...
Learning how to say ‘no’.
It's always interesting how things will come into your space, repeatedly. Yesterday, I was listening to a Tim Ferriss podcast in which he was chatting to author Elizabeth Gilbert. One of the things they chatted about was saying 'no'. Not even two hours later, my son wanted a piece of my daughter's sandwich and her response was 'no'. He was now pressurising her to explain why she said 'no'. I jumped into the back and forth to tell him that she did not owe him an explanation, in the same way that he did not owe anyone an explanation, when he said 'no'. I was forced to learn this, painfully, when I worked for Destiny Man magazine. At some stage, I was getting no less than 20 emails a day that were event invites, requests for stories or opportunity to write for the magazine, amongst other things. There would be weeks where, if I went to every event I was invited to, I would probably spend the bulk of the week at events. I eventually created a system for myself. It was first-come,...
The stories we tell ourselves
“Who are we but the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and believe?”Scott Turow Life can be messy. It is by no means a linear trajectory with one thing after the other. Amidst the cacophony, we seek the meaning of it all. And we search for who we are. That identity, the self that we manifest is one that is influenced by many things - most external, some internal. The teacher that said you would never get physics. The father who told you that could do anything you put your mind to. The friend who accused you of wasting your privilege. Often, we internalise these things, and they become part of the stories we tell ourselves. At least they became part of my story, at some stage. The first principle is you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.Richard Feynman In John Kehoe's Mind Power programme, the Law of Connection states that 'our inner and outer worlds are connected.' "To change the external, you must change the internal. Most people forget this...
When you feel like an imposter
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary: The term 'imposter syndrome' can be traced to a 1978 article by the American psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, "The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention." Originally called imposter phenomenon, imposter syndrome, as it's usually called, is commonly understood as a false and sometimes crippling belief that one's successes are the product of luck or fraud rather than skill. While initially Clance and Imes looked at it from the perspective of women, it has come to be used to apply to all of us who have these feelings of doubt when it comes to our ability in various spheres of our lives, particularly in the work or professional spaces. https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_cox_what_is_imposter_syndrome_and_how_can_you_combat_it?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare Interestingly enough, there is also a school of thought that imposter syndrome is not a...
So you haven’t learned a new lockdown skill?
A few weeks ago, you were gung ho. You had a plan to maximise the time on lockdown. You were not going to waste it. You were going to learn how to bake, or speak a new language, or play a musical instrument, or something. This was going to be the most productive time in your life. Outside of work, this was the time to do all the things that you had procrastinated on. Now, close to two months in, the paints are still in the box, the online course people keep sending you daily reminders to come back for lessons, you haven't progressed beyond 'hello, how are you?' in Mandarin and, since the banana bread phase, the oven hasn't been used. In the first two weeks, you jumped on everything challenge and followed every IG Live. Today, you can't just seem to muster up the energy for anything. It's alright. We went into lockdown the way we seem to go into most things. We define success by money or things. Everything is about 'winning' and being 'better' than everyone else. Everything is...
Distraction, the ultimate productivity killer
Have you ever sat down with the intention of getting something done only to find, when you look back at the end of the work day, that you didn't anything productive? I remember working for a magazine and, the day I started contemplating quitting was when I realised that, in one day, the most productive I had been was having sent three emails. Why? Distraction. Every time I sat down to work on an article, the phone rang or an email came in or my cellphone beeped or something walked into my office. That was one of my lowest points. I have spent the last 6 years trying to deal with distraction. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But the starting point was removing all notifications from my phones. The only time my phone interrupts me is when it rings and, to be honest, it is increasingly on silent so even that doesn't interrupt. I have also started experimenting with the app Forest which is built around the Pomodoro Technique. Check this straightforward summary of Pomodoro on...
How to manage uncertainty with children
As parents, we have all had that moment when our child repeats something we said in the privacy of our homes in front of the person we said it about. Hopefully, when this happened, it didn’t create too awkward a situation. The simple reality is that our children learn about the world and life through our deeds and our words, though rarely the words we speak to them directly. Our values become their values. Our principles become their principles. This means that racism and sexism and all the other negative -isms are learned from us. No child is born automatically racist. And, when you see a child being racist, it is close to guaranteed that it was learned in the home. Now, here we are. Dealing with a global crisis of the scale that hasn’t been seen in perhaps 100 years. And this one is truly global in a way that is unprecedented. We also feel it so much more because of the proverbial ‘global village’ that we have created. From Wuhan to New York to Kigali to London to Accra to Nairobi...
Strategic business shutdown
The Covid-19 and the subsequent lockdowns are wreaking havoc on the world's economies. Watching the struggles that big business is having globally shows how fragile everything is. But, it pales in relation to the impact on small businesses, freelancers, artists, etc. Work life can be challenging enough with those us within those sectors. Both my wife and I work for ourselves and I grew up in an entrepreneurial household where, belts had to be tightened so regularly, it became the norm. To go from uncertainty with opportunity to complete uncertainty has been daunting, with clients shutting down all projects overnight. Not every business is going to survive this period. The hope is that the people within will be able to find alternatives or reposition themselves to ensure that life can still be lived. This is not guaranteed but we do need to stop looking backwards and start actively looking forwards with a fresh eye that takes into consideration the harsh realities. As the, very...
How successful are you? Really?
The Business Dictionary defines 'success' as follows: Achievement of an action within a specified period of time or within a specified parameter. Success can also mean completing an objective or reaching a goal. Success can be expanded to encompass an entire project or be restricted to a single component of a project or task. It can be achieved within the workplace, or in an individual's personal life. For example, if an individual's personal goal is to be accepted in a new career, success would occur after the individual has been officially accepted into his or her new place of employment. Colloquial term used to describe a person that has achieved his or her personal, financial or career goals. What stands out is the emphasis on the individual and yet many still measure success on the basis of the external, especially the perception of numbers. Recently, it was announced that Kanye West was a billionaire and, therefore, a model of accomplishment to be held up and revered. I have...
South African media faltering, random thoughts
The music industry was ground zero when it came to digital disruption but, over the last decade, has found a way to revive itself. Major labels have stakes in streaming services, like Spotify and, for a while, the 360-deal was all the rage. For independent labels, streaming, merchandising, publishing and licensing and performance ticket sales have been some of the main revenue streams. The media industry, in my opinion, was the next sector to find itself at serious crossroads. Internationally, there was the expansion into events, apps, websites and the like, in an attempt to diversify revenue. The evolution of the business model has been affected by a constantly shifting of the landscape. The reality is there has been a lot of trial and error, which continues to happen. Platforms like Digiday, Folio and even Monocle's The Stack (focused on magazines) have been documenting this extensively over the last decade. In South Africa, the added challenge relates to how stratified the country...
Conversations with your younger self
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 answering the question, people will often look at what they would change about their lives and their decisions at that stage. I, personally, have struggled with this it, in all its derivatives. My mother passed away when I was a year old. Who I am as a human being is the sum of my experiences, my father’s presence and my mother’s absence. If any of that changed, would I be the person I am today? A...
In Range, David Epstein makes a case for generalists
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 natural ability requires a huge investment of time in order to be made manifest. Unfortunately, sometimes complex ideas get oversimplified in translation. The Business Insider also expanded on this in an article titled Malcolm Gladwell Explains What Everyone Gets Wrong About His Famous '10,000 Hour Rule'. Why a focus on Malcolm Gladwell when writing about David Epstein's Range: How Generalists...
The Twitter Abyss
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 Michael Jackson died, I was glued to Twitter, getting updates from across the world. Even 'twoggle' was a thing where you would get speedy responses to questions on just about anything. I am not here to slam Twitter. It continues to be the one space where I am able to get a snapshot of what's happening in the news, globally. There was a time when I used to unfollow everyone on January 1st. I would...
Questlove in times of Covid-19
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 continues to run - Questlove from the Legendary Roots Crew hosted a spinoff called #QuestLoversRock. I caught the last 30 minutes of the first one and was hooked. Granted, I am a Questlove fan. In my last email newsletter, I did write briefly about him and share some interesting links. He has a particular way that he curates and thinks about music that is so engaging, at least for me. He is music fan...
Finding your rhythm working from home
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 long to create a guilt-free routine that works for me. I have scoured books on productivity and work to find tools and habits that work for me. These include: Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, and Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World;Greg McKeown’s Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less;Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How...
Attention, that’s what it’s all about
"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 talked about it as the 'Troll Generation'. Coming from a generation that grew up in what some consider the 'Golden Era of Hip Hop', from its birth in the late 1970s and evolution through the 1980s and 1990s, this clip was the 'penny that dropped'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUflvzxztLM For a long time, I railed - like many other 'old school heads' - at the lack of substance or depth to a lot of...
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