Category: environment

Independence Run

March 21st, 2023

It’s Independence Day in Namibia, and I went for a run. Nothing out of the ordinary, just 40 minutes of the road, nature and I. But I didn’t know what I would learn.

I saw a couple of familiar faces as we slogged along. Then, as I was winding down, I was taught a lesson about keeping my mouth shut when an insect flew onto my welcoming tongue. Arghh, but I lived, and the insect unfortunately didn’t. May it rest in peace.

Then I met a friend, who told me he is doing 33 kilometers of running, one for every year of independence. Wow, I thought. Who would have thought of that, such a gesture to the Land of the Brave.

Advertisement
Context matters

March 4th, 2023

What appears to be a simple joke to one person can be perplexing to another. If I cannot relate to the context, how can I participate? This is a useful question as we ask ourselves why our message is not resonating with those we seek to connect with.

Context serves as an essential bridge that must be established for communication to be effective. But contextual information need not overload the message, just as a bridge only needs to enable us to cross to the other side.

We can ensure the presence of context in our communication by thinking about the needs of the recipient, and focusing only on the critical information to create the bridge.
Action counts

December 16th, 2022

Sometimes we say thoughts count, and they do. As the seeds are the origin of plants, so are thoughts the origin of execution.

However, a thought that is not acted upon serves the same thing as an unplanted seed.

What counts is action, putting the thought to work. Starting from preparation for planting, to working the field like a farmer until the crop ripens. Just like with crop, not all ideas will succeed. But if it works, we get to feed off the rewards.

So, yes, thoughts count, but so does the action. And maybe, all we need to do is take the next step.
The Trend Line

August 23rd, 2022

We are always forecasting, from judging the speed of oncoming vehicles as you navigate your way, planning our day to day activities, to planning for retirement.

In doing this, we might rely on trends from the past. The trends tells us a good story about the past, while smoothing out the bumps and valleys. It also gives us the false confidence that the conditions of today will prevail tomorrow. That we will not be more innovative than we are today, or that there won’t be new stumbling blocks.

Sometimes, though, the bumps and the valleys might reveal more about the future than the overall trend. Like the past, the future is seldom a force-fitted graph.
The search

August 12th, 2022

The same distance seems longer on the way in, when you don’t know how far you have to travel, than when you return.

Behind every turn, you envision the destination, only to be disappointed time and again. It also seems like it takes forever to get there.

Yet, when we turn around, we realize we were not that far.

Category: environment

Independence Run

Context matters

Action counts

The Trend Line

The search