I’ve lost my house three times to bad business decisions.
Rock Bottom is a familiar place for me. Not only have I lost our home, but I’ve had to sell furniture to a neighbour for petrol money to drive back home with my pregnant wife and then two-year-old toddler. Honestly, I cannot quite remember the drive itself. However, the humiliating negotiation with my Nigerian neighbour – we lived in Northgate at the time – and surrendering to his merciless offer.
Nevertheless, bounced back on all occasions. Today’s newsletter shares the hard-learned principles about facing rock bottom, what happens in the mind, and how one can claw out of the dark cave of shame and personal failure. While my experiences may be helpful in revealing principles, they will inevitably be different. Above all, I hope to inspire anybody reading this and assure them that hitting rock bottom is not the end of the world.
The Myth of Rock Bottom
The term rock bottom is a misnomer. One imagines falling into a cape and eventually hitting its bottom with a thud – perhaps cracking a rib or something else. Either way, the idea is that one finds oneself helpless and hopeless. The odds of getting up, let alone climbing out of the abyss seem impossible. Worse, hyenas and vultures lurk in the dark, smelling the flesh of the condemned.
Rock bottom, however, does not work like that. It is probably worse. There is no rock bottom because one never hits the floor. The idea of hitting the floor suggests that things cannot get worse than they are. However, things can always get worse. I remember thinking that things could not possibly get worse, and then my son suffered an asthma attack when we barely had food in the house, let alone money to take him to the hospital. I taught him how to meditate and introduced breathing exercises. Luckily they worked. This served as a rude awakening to the reality of rock bottom.
The first principle is to appreciate that your situation can always get worse. Logically, one should not do anything that can (or will) make things worse. We will get to what these things are in a moment. The good news is that if the situation can always get worse, then one can always stop it from getting worse and turn it around. The question is how.
Survival Games
There are many ways one gets into rock bottom. The first time I got to rock bottom was when my son was bottom. His lungs collapsed shortly after birth and, having no medical aid, racked up medical bills that left us destitute. We received a letter from our landlord – a yellow letter slipped under the door – instructing us to vacate the premises by a certain date. If memory serves me correctly, it was within a week.
One evening, I went to spar to buy bread using my dad’s car. It was a fancy car and when I walked out of it, a gentleman asked where I worked and how I managed to buy such a car at such an early age. I did not disclose that it was my dad’s car and we proceeded with small talk. To show me he could piss further, he told me about all the properties he owned in town and, crucially, that he just vacated his apartment to move to a larger house and was looking for a tenant. Remember, this was a stranger.
We met the next day. This time I was driving my house, a much smaller car. We spoke about various opportunities but I offered to buy his apartment. Importantly, I offered to occupy the property as soon as possible. Not only did he agree, but he offered to help me move as well. He instructed his workers to pick up our furniture in a truck and deliver it to his apartment – our new home.
We had escaped the guillotine a hair’s width, but we were not out of the woods yet. My gamble was that the paperwork and time needed to close the deal, including raising money, would be three months. The worst-case scenario was that we had a roof over our heads for one month, at which point my new friend-turned-landlord would demand occupational rent or kick us out. Nevertheless, we had a month and that was good enough. Remember, our son was an infant with medical issues and my wife had barely recovered from pregnancy at the time. Hope was dim.
Nevertheless, survival is a street fight. A great philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that self-preservation is a moral obligation. In other words, you must do what you can – do whatever it takes – to survive. Even killing someone in self-defence is permissible by law because it is about self-preservation. Rock bottom is no time for egos; it is time for doing whatever it takes.
Mind Games
Your greatest enemy is your mind. This is a cliché but carries a kernel of truth. After selling our furniture and moving back home to a small town in Mpumalanga, I fell into a dark mental space where nothing seemed to work. My friends stopped taking my calls. Deals fell through. Everything I touched seemed to turn into a turd.
Meanwhile, my wife gave birth to our daughter and I could not provide for them. Instead, my mother – through her work as a traffic officer – provided for all of us, including my sisters who were still in school. The shame and destruction of character was unimaginable and suicidal thoughts were a silent enemy, constantly waging war against my will to survive.
This is the part where, as a reader, you might feel dissatisfied. Eventually, I snapped out of self-deprecating thoughts. I do not know what happened. However, one afternoon it dawned on me that moping and playing victim was not productive. I walked to a nearby cafe grabbed a free local newspaper and read it. The headline announced that a new president of the local chamber of commerce was announced. I walked to the newspaper’s offices and asked where the chamber of commerce was. It was a few blocks away.
When I arrived at the chamber – the local tourism info centre – I met a certain Mrs De Jager. She was friendly and quizzed me about my origins and what brought me to a small town. While we spoke the president, Athol Stark, marched into the premises and Mrs De Jager introduced me to him. Similarly, he asked getting-to-know-each-other questions.
I asked where the youth and startup business owners met. The answer led to the next step.
Taking Initiative
There was no, let’s call it, youth league for entrepreneurs. I took that as a sign to organise an event, inviting all the small business owners to meet the main business owners and compare notes. I went to the municipality, which told me about a youth organisation supported by the local economic development (LED) council. I met with their chairperson and proposed an event, which they immediately accepted.
Then I wrote a letter to the local newspaper, asking them to help spread the word. Similarly, they wrote a story and shared the event’s details, which would be held at the old municipal buildings in Wesselton – the township in Ermelo. The building was provided for free. After that, went back to the chamber of commerce and invited the President to speak, alongside his exco members. They all agreed and some sponsored small articles like bottled water and printing services.
The event was spectacular. Unbeknownst to me, the young entrepreneurs had dreamed of meeting the local heavyweights in business. The event was well received and led to the formation of a small group called Ubumbano (building each other), where we met every two weeks as young entrepreneurs to mentor and support each other.
The event cost nothing. I learned that opportunities are everywhere. However, one must first overcome the negative mind to see them. While there is no hard and fast rule, one way is to forget about money and focus on solving a problem. Usually, the problem will be revealed by other people – one seldom figures it out themselves. In other words, go out more often. Meet people.
The Thing About Money
I read somewhere – and I forgot where – that money is a latent indicator. This principle was shared again, more recently, by a friend with whom I consult about business. He developed a business logic, which similarly holds that money is the last thing to worry about. By the one sees movements in money, many things have happened before that to cause that movement. Therefore, one must be more concerned with what causes the money to move.
Money moves because of value. This is a broad word and perhaps another source of dissatisfaction for you as a reader. I think about value as desire – anything attractive to a person. Imagine being lost in the desert and baking in the sun. After a while, you will desire food and water. Anybody that offers them will be offering you something of value. Likewise, imagine leaving a restaurant having gorged yourself on a buffet of sandwiches, pastries, deserts – you name it. Suddenly, food and water would be less valuable.
Value, therefore, keeps changing. The trick is identifying (and predicting) where value will change and become more over time. Example. I run a ticketing platform – skybookings. Tickets hardly sell when they are announced. However, people feel the fear of missing out closer to the event and start buying. Knowing this, my clients (and perhaps all wise event planners) offer low-cost early-bird tickets. Then they raise the price closer to the time because the value increases.
Nonetheless, my point is that focusing on money is unproductive because it is a result – it is a consequence of having done other things right. However, it is far worse to fish from a shrinking pond. Rather look for areas that indicate future growth – where people are flocking into (or will soon flock). Learn the skills, meet the relevant people and figure out how to make money in an area with future growth prospects.
Planning for the future
The worst thing you could do in 2024 is become a graphic designer or web designer. Back in 2004 when the web was new, I could charge clients R50,000-00 for a 5-page website. Today, there is no real value in a website. Apart from businesses opting for social media pages, they can also open free accounts on Wix and design their own websites. Over time, the value of web design and graphic design has decreased, making it a shrinking pond.
Having spent 23 years as a software engineer, I also know that my days are also numbered. Artificial Intelligence will do most of the work if not all of it. However, either way, software development will soon become as commoditised as graphic design or web design if not worse. I see a future where one can talk to a GPT of sorts and it will crank out an app.
In preparing for the future, I am studying philosophy (applied ethics to be exact), which is a step higher than mere software engineering. My gamble is that since AI will do the work, professionals will no longer be concerned with whether something can be done, they will be concerned with whether it should be done, which is a philosophical question – a moral question to be exact.
I am therefore preparing for the future by transitioning into a career as a professional philosopher. In other words, you too would look to the future and try to see what it holds for you. This is easier said than done it is part of what I do for businesses when I consultant for them. However, a good starting point is reading my article on The Art of War, posted on LinkedIn. It is about strategy and my thesis is strategy is about ensuring the future. Sun Tzu provided a comprehensive set of tools for doing this, which I explained in the article.
Summary and Conclusion
The Greeks believed in the goddess of fortune – FORTUNA. They believed that one could do all the right things in life but still not attain the desired results. This is life planting and tending to one’s garden as one should, but not getting rain. This recognition that effort does not necessarily lead to results has since been lost to the idea of meritocracy.
Today we believe the opposite. We believe that success is directly proportional to effort. Those without success, we might say, have not put in sufficient effort. However, we forget that most of what we use on our path to success is not our doing. For instance, this computer is a product of millions of hours that I had nothing to do with creating. Therefore, it is a fallacy to believe that effort leads to outcome.
Seen this way, one should never feel like an idiot for making the wrong decision. We all make decisions based on the best available information. Furthermore, life can throw curveballs, perhaps not at the scale of COVID, but enough to leave us stumped. Hence, taking a few steps back before making important decisions is crucial. Consulting a professional, a mentor or a friend creates an opportunity for critical and rational thought.
Well, that’s it from me today.
Until next week.
Vusi Sindane
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