Entries from October 2007 ↓

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“O man, take care!
What does the deep midnight declare?
“I was asleep—
From a deep dream I woke and swear:—
The world is deep,
Deeper than day had been aware.
Deep is its woe—
Joy—deeper yet than agony:
Woe implores: Go!
But all joy wants eternity—
Wants deep, wants deep eternity.”

I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?

“All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.

“Whoever is the wisest among you is also a mere conflict and cross between plant and ghost. But do I bid you become ghosts or plants?

“Behold, I teach you the overman! The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go!”

– Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, §3, trans. Walter Kaufmann

Also Sprach Zarathustra

You wear a mask. You hide yourself. Your don’t reveal the true you. You deceive us.

Why is that? What is it you fear that forces you to deprive us of your beauty?

Who has scarred you so? Who hurt you? Who was it that made you feel so ashamed of who you are?

Come out, come out from wherever you are. There is nothing and nobody to fear except fear itself.

Come out and show us the you we never knew. Come out and play. Come out and live the life which is yours to enjoy.

Come out, come out and be who you are. Come out and teach us the stuff that you know.

Don’t be scared anymore. Stop running away. Life runs away from you so fast we all need to live today to the full.

Leave the mask you wear aside for today. Like running naked on a beach under a full moon sky, you will enjoy the freedom and leave the mask off for ever a day.

Your smile is radient, it lights up your face and makes us feel happy too. So come, come out and play and let us meet the true you for in this life there is so much and so many places to go see and so many things to do and people to meet.

Come out from behind your mask and join me here on my picnic blanket. Let’s lie back and let the breeze ruffle our hair as we stare up at blue skies and squint at the midday sun while also watching summer swallows darting here and there.

The Mask You Wear

How many times have you stood in front of a door that could lead you to a better,brighter future but have been too darned much of a yellowbellied scardycat to reach out and push the door open? Most of us have walked away from the door wondering if maybe, just maybe we made a mistake by not trusting our instinct to open the door? How many times do you read about it? How many times do you keep saying to yourself, “OK I promise that from tomorrow I will do it”?

How many promises have you broken? How many more disappointments will you weakly let yourself endure? Oh give up why doncha and just phone your local “Soft Bendy Backbones For Rent” outlet. It’ll save time and effort and quicken your demise. Yes go on and make another false promise about that diet, those piano lessons, the bricklaying course or whatever it is that really appeals to your complete lack of ENGAGEMENT.

But you are weak and pathetic and so you won’t do a damn thing about it. Will you? Heck, you don’t even use one of your options to phone a friend or ask the audience. Now that is really pathetic.

But all is not lost. There is a way to help yourself out of the 120ft deep hole you are digging. All you have to do is point your mouse up here above and to your right in the sidebar at the brown cardboard box with the blue arrow pointing into it and/or click here to download the ENGAGE presentation.

If you enjoy being called a cowardy custard, fine. Don’t download the file. Just stay as you are for the rest of your life or you could change and Engage some important stuff about life and make your future a lot brighter. Afterall, the choice is yours.

Open The Door to Your Future

Quite what your blog will get is not yet known or planned or ever given a second thought. It won’t happen. The headline is the thing. It is an old used line but I thought I’d add ‘Your’ and bring the headline a bit closer to home. To your site. Not mine. Your site.

I’ve just had an idea for tomorrow’s headline based on a real event. The headline will say it all but you will want to know more so you will read on. I know you will because if you don’t, the blog gets it.

Now I wonder how much of a veiled threat will it take to entice you to read the entire article? Do threats in headlines work? Do they trigger a defensive mechanism that forces your decision making process to realise that there might be a threat regardless of the fact that I deem myself to be less harmless than the skin of a custard tart. Or does the headline create another reaction? Curiosity.

And is it curiosity that makes you read on? I hope it is because at least your mindset is in a positive frame rather than coming from the defensive/negative need to establish if a threat no matter how veiled does exist.

What drives you to read an article?

Read This Or Your Blog Gets It

This photo is the epitomy of that phrase, “So near yet so far”. It’s a pitiful scene. The colourful skiff, the proud fisherman’s only asset and revenue earner, looks like it nearly made it to the last vestiges of deep water on the now long dry lake.

The juxtaposition of the last puddle of moisture in the midst of the mass expanse of the dry lake bottom vividly portrays a struggle to keep the boat afloat!

This begs the question - what are the fishermen doing for a living now?

Have they managed to engage their plight, analyse their options, make a decision that will benefit them and their familes going forward and put into action a new plan to provide for a new future out of the water?

So near yet so far

ENGAGE 2.0 is here.

You can download ENGAGE 2.0 by clicking the download icon below.

People and the things they do in this life have an amazing capacity to suprise you out of the blue when you least expect it.

For those of my staff who were previously thought of by their ex-bosses as underachievers, I decided to do what I could do to bring out the best in them. They deserved this chance to prove they were not at all underachievers.

And they deserved the opportunity to prove that they could respond to the right stimulus about some important things that do matter in this life and then be able to go ahead to better and more demanding challenges in work and their lives.

After taking stock of the team and their various perceived shortcomings, I put together a small Powerpoint presentation which I call ENGAGE. Most of my staff called ENGAGE “shock treatment”. I call ENGAGE a reality check or wake up and smell the coffee, because it states the obvious in a way that leaves you no room to misunderstand. And ENGAGE says those things that you are often too PC inclined to say in a face to face consultation.

Of the staff who took part, all have increased their job perfomance by a minimum 35% on actual to target. None of the perceived underachievers is one any more. So dramatic is the improvement that last week I sent in application to extend a temp’s contract by 6 months during which time I want to convert her to permanent. Wow! You should see the confidence in her now.

Here are 20+ ways to fully engage some important things in life. Click the icon below to download ENGAGE 2.0.

Unzip the contents and enjoy the slideshow and begin Engaging today!

20+ Ways to Engage

The Moon

Look at it. Wonderful isn’t it? So close you could stretch out your arm and touch it with your fingertips.

And so it is with our deepest dreams, personal aspirations and business goals. One of my goals since I was a young boy in Namibia, is to own a telescope that will let me clearly see the moon close up and much more detail than what can be seen in the photo above. But as so often happens, one’s life gets in the way of certain aspirations so they go unfulfilled.

I still live in hope and with Christmas only a matter of weeks away, I wonder what Santa will bring me? I am also hoping to oneday meet a certain young lady who I have come to respect and admire for her dedication to living her life to the full while also fighting for a better tomorrow for HIV/AIDS victims. Something tells me that I will realise none of the two dreams if I do not ENGAGE the process to make them occur. And so I have decided to write to Santa and to now book my return flight to Johannesburg. You might think that these two ‘dreams’ are pitifully small and easily realisable. Well to me they represent two things I need.

One other Xmas gift I have not dared contemplate getting is an invitation to a 27 Dinner. Like maybe the last week November for example?!! Hint, hint.

All that remains for me to do now is to begin ENGAGING positive thoughts. Self-fulfilling prophesy thoughts.

You Could Touch It

Click here to see Eve’s list of the Top 51 SA blogs on Technorati.

Eve runs the Thought Leader blog for Mail & Guardian and lists the Top 51 SA bloggers who are ranked within the top 100,000 on Technorati out of the reported 70 million blogs they monitor worldwide.

Top 51 SA Blogs on Technorati

“I am always doing things I can’t do - that’s how I get to do them.” -Pablo Picasso

When I first began studying personal development and success in the late 1980’s, many people were teaching a “no-pain, no-gain” philosophy best summed up by the Tony Robbins catchphrase “If you can’t, you must!” The idea was that your limitations are all in your mind, and the way to prove that to yourself was to continually force yourself to do what you don’t want to do, don’t think you can do, or simply feel uncomfortable about
doing.

Continue reading →

Look at that tongue. Ever seen a cat’s tongue up close? I mean real close. Ugh!

Click here to see what a cat’s tongue looks like at close range. Eeewwwww!

Temba Licks His Chops

Sad to be alone isn’t it?

The photo above just says it all. But why should a person, young or old, be made to feel unwanted, outcasts, rejected /abandoned and left to feel totally alone in this world.

How desolate they must feel. How isolated they are. It is a shame.

But what do we do about it? Sweet FA.

We just avoid looking at them. We do not want these lepers of society near us. We know they have brains, eyes, noses, thought processes, lungs and need shelter, security, warmth and food just like we do. But we do what? Nada.

It is easier and more expedient to look the other way and pretend they do not exist. Hey, I do it too. I am to blame as well as you. Yes you.

So what can we do to begin to put things right in this world?

Alone

C’est la vie.

Once again the prospect of streamling costs will bring about the need to say goodbye to staff. Redundancy programmes are fraught with stress and if you are the boss telling staff they are listed, then you feel like the harbinger of death. And this sucks. Big time.

There are prescribed ways to tell your staff member that their job is at risk. While I know that I should concur with management’s dictates and follow the script, I cannot. The scripts I have seen are patronising and in my opinion this is one occassion where patronisation is the last thing your staff need from you.

I’ve even made myself redundant before. And that was like committing suicide. I had to call in the liquidators after the FD ran away and the MD hit maximum uselessness and could not utter any instructions or lead the start-up aged just 7 months, out of the dwang. But the time comes when you realise that there is no way to save the company from going down and the need to call it quits has arrived. So I made the call.

Following my experiences with my start-up colleagues I decided that there is no good way you can dress up bad news. And it is best to get the bad news out first rather than pussyfooting around waiting for an ideal opportunity to present itself. There never is a good time to tell someone that they just lost their job. So do it there and then in as gentle a tone as you can without falling into melodramatic colapsing into tears, vocal fades and hushed tones.

Just lower the volume a tad and speak confidently and clearly. You staffer needs to be told what the reduction in force programme entails so is relying on you more now than ever.

Your confidence must ooze through and it helps make a bad time ever so slightly easier. Not better. I express my confidence in the persons skills and character. I also guide them to openings in other departments that are not impacted by the need to reduce headcount. I also tout them proactively around the company and use my network to try get them into an interview where their particular skill will benefit the other department or outside company.

This is the very least I can do for a person whose time, efforts and skills have helped me succeed at my job.

Redundancy Sucks

Not that I am sensitive or ultra-sensitive to negative comments. I accept them but only if the person offering their opinion is someone I trust. I just find critics to be the parasites of media. And I loathe them passionately. In essence, whose rules are they applying?

So here is what I think I would like to do:

1. Ignore them after breaking their typing fingers.
2. Ask who asked for an opinion and offer 20p to them to go call & tell someone who cares.
3.Tell them to go get a job where they can do an honest day’s work.
4. Ask whose morals, tastes and ethics they are basing their ill-informed and baseless opinion on.
5. Tell them to grow up, get a life and to stop wasting everyones’ time.

5 Ways I Handle Critics