#SundayMotivation

I read yesterday about the #PowerOfBlessings and felt it was #TooGoodNotToShare

Do you #BlessOrCurse?

When something goes wrong do you bless it or curse it?

Our natural reactions often lead us towards the negative, but that will only breed more negativity.

1/ there is this sense when you are young that your accomplishments need to be a list of things that seem impressive to others. A list of several items you did.

This isn't actually right, so here is another suggestion.

2/ I remember being 26 and writing about reading 52 books a year. I wrote blog posts about it. They got copied. It became "a thing." Now it's in Twitter bios. It looks impressive but it's insanely useless and I shouldn't have done it.

3/ what I should have known at that time is that only young idiots like myself, with no accomplishments, find list of tiny achievements impressive. Anyone who has actually done anything of substance doesn't gaf

4/ what is actually difficult, and worthwhile, instead is to do ONE single thing for a very, very long time. It's much harder and much rarer and results in outlier outcomes much more often.

Of course you can find this out too late if you are chasing the dragon of Ted talks etc

5/ if I had only worked on a startup for a year, I would've gotten nowhere, the same way that if you lift for 3 months, it achieves nothing. Everything good in life comes from perseverance, but at the beginning, you're just like "I need to be somebody!!!"

How Reading Helped My Career

 In 2013, a joint venture Israeli/South African company was looking to make a foray into Nigeria. They wanted to set up an outlet in Lagos after conducting their feasibility studies and they needed a Nigerian financial institution to partner with.

Somehow, i was given their contacts and we agreed to meet with our teams from both sides at Victoria Island. 

I got my team together- about 8 of them- people in e-business, IT and other units that I know will have one thing or the other to do with this company.

I wanted to conclude in just one meeting. As the South African MD and his Israeli partner walked into my office where we were all seated and I stood up to exchange pleasantries with both of them, his eye went to the book on my table. 'Oh, you're reading Tipping Point?', he asked.

I was reading Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell that week and I had the book on my desk in the office. I usually have the books I'm reading either in my car or on my desk. I replied in the affirmative.

He asked for other books of Malcolm Gladwell that I've read and I mentioned Outliers-The Story of Success and What The Dog Saw. He asked for my best among the books and I mentioned Outliers. His best was Tipping Point.

In the space of half a year, a new class division was ripped through American society: those who can live normally through pandemic lockdowns and restrictions versus those who can't. The two sides have a great deal of difficulty communicating across that chasm.

Of course, media and political elites are, at worst, inconvenienced by lockdowns, so news coverage is heavily slanted against the people who are really suffering from these policies. They're already as forgotten as the designated losers of globalist trade policy.

Spend a day watching mainstream media pandemic coverage, then spend the evening with people whose livelihoods have been utterly ruined by pandemic restrictions. It's like traveling from the Earth to Mars. Completely different worlds, totally different outlooks.

It's exactly like the divide between "free trade" winners and losers, people living in comfortable financial and media bubbles vs. people living in hollowed-out ghost towns with skyrocketing mortality rates. The Wuhan virus gave us a new, even bigger class of Designated Losers.

The new class divide cracked open along some economic and social fault lines that were already present and deepening, such as the growing number of people who preferred minimizing human contact while socializing online. It really is the social schism of the new century.

MY JOURNEY AS A DIESEL PLANT FITTER
My journey started in March 2005 when I got an offer of apprenticeship from CMED. I knew nothing about cars and earthmoving equipment.

I also did not know what a Diesel plant fitter was (our education should do better on this front, careers should not be accidental). When I was chasing apprenticeship, I wanted to be an Auto electrician. When the CMED advert came out I did not have a driver’s licence

or learners’ licence, which is a prerequisite if you want to train in the Automotive industry. Diesel Plant Fitting is classified under the Mechanical Industry, so a driver’s licence is not required on application. I was, however, asked for it during my interview and I had one

The interview was hilarious, I cracked their ribs every now and then but that is where I learnt how to take control of an interview. (I knew no one there as well). I told them from the onset that I knew nothing about the trade, but keen to learn, that is why I applied

They asked me what I knew about mechanics in general. I responded that I knew bicycle mechanics because that it what we had at home and everything else contained in the O level integrated science book Science in Zimbabwe. So, they asked me about stuff that was in