Lectures

The other day I was thinking that sometimes we feel as though some topics repeat themselves while you are at university and how sometimes one can think that certain things are just too obvious.

The truth is that it is not always only about the subject, it is also about what ideas the lecturer triggers in you. Sometimes you can be there just listening to something that you heard the year before but that one person makes you see it all in a totally different light.

I must say (and some of my friends can confirm) that sometimes a lecturer can make my imagination and creativity go wild.  I start to have all sort of ideas of what to do that I can’t do right away because I don’t have the time for it all.  If I can’t accomplish that idea straight away it will for sure go onto my to-do list.

So I say thanks to most of my lecturers, not necessarily only for what they taught me throughout the last few years but certainly also for stimulating my creativity.

Andy Warhol said, “In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” You can’t choose the 15 minutes but why would you be world famous?

I guess I would like to be famous for doing something that would improve the lives of other people. I would like to have lived according to John Bunyon’s quote "You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you." and be famous for it because of encouraging others to do the same.

I haven’t gotten there yet, but I could say that I have experienced being kind of “famous” because of the Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial I participated in. People actually recognised me on the street especially when I was wearing green.

It was very weird, people stare at you or talk to you as if they know you, and it was only a 30 second commercial. Can you imagine what real famous people go through every day?

Here is the video of my 30 seconds of fame :P

Pictures bring good memories

Last week I created groups on facebook for my different school classes. One of the schools I left in 1995 and since then I had contact with very few people. Since the group was created we have had some pictures of “back in the day” posted there. It is so funny how looking at those pictures and people made me feel like I was a child again and made me want to see some more pictures.

It is funny how pictures can brings back good memories. So I sat there and laughed about things I had forgotten and really enjoyed it. This technology is great to have allowed us to take tonnes of pictures but I must say, I miss flipping through the pages of a photo album. But nowadays it is just too hard to choose which pictures will make it to the album and which will be left out of it.

A skill set called leadership

Leadership for me is a skill that a person is born with. I guess that people can learn the things that are necessary to become a good leader, but a great and remarkable leader is born with it. I think that leadership has a lot to do with personality, to have the skill of talking and transmitting your message as well as to be able to understand others.

Being able to understand where the people that you are leading are coming from is a big part of being a great leader. Most people in top management positions can’t understand why their workforce behaves the way they do and this weakens their leadership.

Being able to explain things in a way that the workforce understands is also very important. A leader needs to be able to make their decision logical for those who follow. If you can explain “why”, your followers will work forward with you.

I think that some people are born with the skill of listening, understanding and being understood. There is a lot that can be learnt to develop this skill but the really good ones are born with the gift.

Who moved my cheese

I read this book for the first time last week and I would say that people should read it regularly. The book is about change and how we respond to change that wasn’t a choice of ours.

Things are always changing, even gradually, and we need to be able to accept it and change with it. There is no use complaining about something when you know that complaining won’t change anything.

Whenever you see that you are complaining about things I would recommend that you take some time and read this book, maybe what you are in need of is just some new cheese.

“Rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read” Frank Zappa

I guess that when Zappa said that it was a critique of how people don’t look outside the box and the miss communication because of it. The information that the interviewee gives won’t find the reader as the meaning is distorted on the way.

The people that can’t talk, the artists, can express themselves but not necessarily in ways that other will understand. The way their minds assimilate things and how they express it verbally in a conversation can differ.

Then the people that can’t write understand it their own way, and need to write for people that can’t read. People who can’t read means that people will interpret the written article differently from what the people who can’t write wrote.

There will be 3 versions of the same conversation, almost like a broken telephone. Therefore Rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.

Customer service

A few weeks ago I got the “Club” magazine from Edgars. I don’t have an Edgars account and to tell you the truth I hardly ever go there but I saw a nice pair of boots in the magazine and decided to go there and check them out.

Because I’m very forgetful I decided to take the magazine with me so that I could find the right pair of boots quickly. When I finally found the boots I tried them on and I liked them but when I looked at the price there was a R100 difference between what they were labelled as and what they were advertised as in the magazine. I thought that perhaps the new price just hadn’t been placed on the box yet so I decided to verify once I was at the cashier.

When I got to the cashier the person attending me was more interested in talking to the client at the cashier next to her than being of service. When she finished I asked her to check the price of the boots on the system and she told me the price is on the box. I then told her that the price in the magazine was different, hence my query, but she just looked at me with a “so what” attitude and showed me the price that was on the box. Since I had the magazine with me I showed it to her and she insisted that the price on the box (R100 more than the price advertised in the magazine) was the price I must pay, so I told her to call the manager. The manager asked the problem was and I explained the situation. He reacted by doing exactly the same thing as the cashier, he showed me the price on the box. I showed him the magazine but he hardly looked at it and said that it is obviously a different pair of boots. I then pointed out details of the boots that showed that the boots are the same. Then he turned around and said that he was going to do me this “favour” by charging the price that the boots were advertised at. Well that made me totally upset and I told him that he wasn’t doing me any favour since as a customer I have the right to receive the goods at the price at which they are advertised.

I left the place with my boots, paying the advertised price, and with the certainty that there is a reason why I am not an Edgars customer.

List your top 200 achievements

I guess we all have more than 200 achievements to talk about, however I want to list the main ones, the other 142 I’ll leave for the other ¾ of my life :)
 

1.                   Winning my first race (in my mom’s belly)

2.                   Surviving 9 months inside my mom’s belly

3.                   Going through the stress that was birth

4.                   Taking my first breath

5.                   Drinking

6.                   Eating

7.                   Rolling

8.                   Crawling

9.                   Making funny noises

10.                Walking

11.                Speaking

12.                Running

13.                Going to school

14.                Making friends

15.                Actually speaking

16.                Participating in the school play

17.                Learning to choose

18.                Reading and writing

19.                Sleeping away from my house for the first time

20.                Learning to swim

21.                Riding in a lift by myself

22.                Riding a bike

23.                Going to the bakery by myself

24.                Rollerblading

25.                Surviving having my finger broken during a soccer match

26.                Making my first business work by selling drawings and beaded things at school

27.                Travelling by aeroplane

28.                Going through a modelling competition

29.                Accepting my curly hair after years of straight hair

30.                Living in Sao Paulo without my parents for a month

31.                Learning English

32.                Travelling

33.                Living in different countries

34.                Working all over the world

35.                Learning about other cultures

36.                Falling in love

37.                Learning some more English

38.                Travelling by myself

39.                Learning even more English

40.                Getting to the top of Lions Head

41.                Getting to the top of Table Mountain after a 3 hour hike

42.                Bartending

43.                Falling in love again

44.                Getting a waitressing job

45.                Becoming totally independent

46.                Finishing my English course

47.                Finishing the Big Walk 20km

48.                Passing my Public Relations short course

49.                Getting my drivers license

50.                Getting my first “career” job

51.                Organising my first event

52.                Having my own event business

53.                Organising my first big event

54.                Learning even more English

55.                Expanding my business

56.                Completing an events course

57.                Public Relations National Diploma (soon to be BTech)

58.                New job

Little to talk about

For the last few days time has been flying and before I know it I see that it is time to write my blog again. It is amazing how sometimes one’s mind can just flow with imagination to able to fill lots of posts and the next moment one’s mind is almost empty of thoughts.
 

Lately my mind is giving me very little to write about. This is not because there isn’t much happening but because there is a lot happening and when it is time to write my mind is begging for a rest. Besides that, everything I think about writing or I have already written seems worthy of only a few lines.

I feel like my mind moves from one subject to another and all these topics can be spoken about in less than five lines.

What motivates me?

I find that the main thing that motivates anyone, including me, is happiness. All the other things are derivatives of happiness or are a way to make you happy. Depending on the goal you have there is always something that will bring happiness.
 

An example of this is my goal to lose weight.  What motivates me to lose weight can be wearing a certain pair of jeans and when I do lose the weight and am able to wear those jeans it makes me happy.

I think that if we simplify things so that they are not so complicated, at the end of the day all we really want is to be happy.