Wednesday evening at the Sandton Gautrain station around 1800. I get to the platform and it’s rush hour, people from work going home. I stand on the side of the platform and I just observe people streaming onto the platform. Without fail, 9 out of 10 pulled out their smartphones and start staring at small…

  Texting, e-mail, the number of likes we collect, the ding, the buzz or the flash of our phones that tells us “You’ve got mail,” feels amazing. We associate this feeling with, “ooh, something for me” with getting a text or e-mail or the like. Some people have formed neural connections that drive them to…

Successful relationships are those where there are only two people involved. To be intimate in a relationship means shutting the door to outsiders and focusing on your partner. The absolute hardest part of having a secret life with God is not allowing ourselves to be distracted by other things. In a technologically driven world, distractions…

A friend's car got involved in an accident and he is struggling to get the insurance to pay up due to some small loophole in the contract. I always get calls from banks offering me credit card facilities with huge credit limit, or get letters offering me overdraft or loans. These friendly call centre agents…

To quit is not the same as failing. Strategic quitting is a conscious decision you make based on the choices that are available to you. My personal test is fairly simple and straight-forward: If you realise you are at a dead end compared with what you could be investing in, quitting is not only a…

Coping is what people do when they try to muddle and limp through. They cope with a bad job or difficult task. The problem with coping is that it never leads to exceptional performance. Mediocre work is rarely because of a lack of talent and often because of the Cul-de-Sac. All coping does is waste…

Right at this moment, my clairvoyance tells me you are having a conversation that involves a lot of rationalisation. You are explaining to yourself why those Cul-de-Sac on the read you are in are not really dead ends [they are.] You are busy defending the mediocre work your company does because it is the best…

What a spectacularly bad piece of advice. Never quit? Never quit wetting your bed? Never quit that job that makes you miserable? Never quit selling a product that is now obsolete? Never quit compromising your values, ethics and principles? Never quit cutting corners? Never quit a sales strategy that is not yielding results? Wait a…

It is okay to quit, sometimes. In fact, it is okay to quit often. It is smart to quit smoking, emotional abuse, manipulative behavior, bad-mouthing, gambling, backstabbing, arrogance, prideful habits etc. Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time. You should quit if you are on a dead-end…

Mpho just got another promotion. He worked for a software company in Johannesburg, and, over the last fourteen years, he has had a wide range of jobs. For the first seven or eight years, Mpho was in business development and sales. He handled big accounts account for a while, flying to Cape Town, Nairobi, Nigeria,…

When you look at marketing from the industrial point view, the question you ask when marketing your business is: “where is the mass?” “How do I reach everybody with a product that is average?” "How do we make this offering popular?" This is when we keep score of the wrong thing. The father of value…

There is no such thing as a "self-made man". We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the makeup of our character and of our thoughts, as well as our success. Other than in a Rambo movie, there is no such thing as an army of one. *Pencil illustration is courtesy…