A man without Qualities

“…if he monitors his feelings, he finds nothing he can accept without reservation. He seeks a possible beloved but can’t tell whether it’s the right one; he is capable of killing without being sure that he will have to.

The drive of his own nature to keep developing prevents him from believing that anything is final and complete, yet everything he encounters behaves as though it were final and complete. He suspects the given order of things is not as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of a future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted. What better can he do than hold himself apart from the world, in the good sense exemplified by the scientist’s guarded attitude toward facts that might be tempting him to premature conclusions? Hence he hesitates in trying to make something of himself; a character, a profession, a fixed mode of being, are for him concepts that already shadow forth the outlines of the skeleton, which is all that will be left of him in the end” 

The Man without qualities page 269.

I love this passage, certainly captures succinctly the spirit of the book, the idea of dropping out, or dropping in but never being fused, never settling on something because life is uncertain, what is certain about it is that it will change. 

Of course they do? right?

I am currently reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Beautiful and the Damned”. and I came across this excerpt.

the clarity of his mind, its sophistication, its versatile intelligence, all at their maturity and dominated by some purpose yet to be born will find him work to do. On this his minor dream faded-work to do: he tried to imagine himself in Congress rooting around in the litter of that incredible pigsty with the narrow and porcine brows he saw pictured sometimes in the rotogravure sections of the Sunday newspaper, those glorified proletarians babbling blandly to the nation the ideas of high school seniors! Little men with copybook ambitions who by mediocrity had thought to emerge from mediocrity into the lustreless and unromantic heaven of a government by the people - and the best, the dozen shrewd men at the top, egotistic and cynical, were content to lead this choir of white ties and wire collar-buttons in a discordant and amazing hymn, compounded of a vague confusion between wealth as a reward of virtue and wealth as a proof of vice, and continued cheers for God, the constitutuion and the Rocky Mountains!

Reading this, I had to do a double check to be sure I had not inadvertently switched over into a contemporary book. Oh how this describes our current reality.

Maybe our toys and tools and environment changes …. evolution (at least of congressmen) does not happen in a century. 

I have been reading “The Wire” quotes all day

This one from Bunny

Somewhere back in the beginning of time, this district had itself a civic dilemma of epic proportions. The city council had just passed a law that forbade alcoholic consumption in public areas; on the streets and on the corners. But the corner is, it was and it always will be the poorman’s lounge. It’s where a man wants to be on a hot summer’s night. It’s cheaper than a bar. Catch a nice breeze and watch the girls go on by. But the law is the law so what are the western cops gonna do? They arrest every dude for tipping back a High Life, there’d be no time for any other kind of police work. And if they look the other way, they open themselves up to all kinds of flaunting, all kinds of disrespect. Now, this is before my time but somewhere back in the 50’s or the 60’s, there was a moment of goddamn genius by some nameless smokehound who comes out the Cut-Rate one day and on his way to the corner he slips that just bought pint of elderberry into a paper bag. A great moment of civic compromise. That small wrinkled ass paper bag allowed the corner boys to have their drink in peace and gave us permission to go and do police work. The kind of police work that’s actually worth the effort, that’s actually worth taking a bullet for. Dozerman got shot last night buying three vials. Three. There has never been a paper bag for drugs. Until now.

One of the very cool things happening in Africa at the moment is that many returnees are bypassing the formal employment sectors and turning instead towards entrepreneurship - I struggle to see anything but awesomeness in this. As the great economist Joseph Schumpeter said “human development depends primarily on entrepreneurship”

 He also added that “the entrepreneurs function was to revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological possibility”

Exceptional abilities and exceptional men were required and  the entrepreneur distinguished himself by a willingness to destroy old patterns of thought and action. 

Innovation means overcoming obstacles, inertia and resistance. Carrying out a new plan and acting according to a customary one are things as different as making a road and walking along it”

Now more than ever this is needed in Nigeria, as Africa’s most populous country we have to lead on this. We have to find our insurgents that are willing to take on the system, empower them, support them and cheer them on. Africa needs to join the great march towards prosperity that the rest of the world has been on for the past two centuries.

But as we go along, we have some cultural challenges. Our high context society emphasizes unity and community but I believe it is time to start pissing one another off and giving the middle finger to the gate-keepers.

I love the co-creation hub but I think they should care less about the CEO’s that visit, the British high commission, the foundations and government. Fuck them, you should be fighting to neutralize their hold on society. No I am not calling for anarchy but damn it, they don’t share the same goals as you and real insurgents do not collaborate with incumbents. They defeat them. We need big ideas - big fucking ideas. 

So lets spur innovation and follow in the words of Schumpeter, let’s destroy certain patterns of thought. Lets take on the system and lets take the keys from the gate-keepers. Build-Ship, tweak, ship, ship, ship, grow - change the world

Until it is a true us vs them mentality- I don’t think entrepreneurship will take root.

I was catching up on blogs this morning when I read about some of the big trends that are going to come to define our humanity, http://bit.ly/yAXeaC. One of the trends mentioned was “Methuselarity” those of you that have read the bible are aware of the the story of Methuselah, dude lived for like 1000 yrs (bullshit). Jokes aside, with our advancement in healthcare and diagnostics plus our deepening knowledge of the human body, is it far fetched to think that people will soon be living up to 200 years?  If so, would you want to?

I often joke that I would be dead by 50, well partially a joke because I believe life should be short and sweet. Why live for so long? Is the point of living to just be alive or what does it really mean? When you have done all that needs doing, don’t you just get bored? How many dinner parties, trips around the world, grandkids, weddings, breathtaking moments, breathtaking sights can one take before becoming utterly bored. Can’t say for sure but a mutative expansion in life expectancy feels to me a recipe for ennui.

I say 50 because it forces me to do all that I want to do, there is a charm in something that is finite, especially when the cessation date is known. If you ever want college students to get anything done, you give them a deadline, don’t and you will get everything the last day of school.

Life without a deadline will probably flow like that also, too much of a waste, I ll pass.  

A thought occurred to me this morning as I was listening to morning edition and the various partisan responses; they all agreed about one thing - we love our military.

The military has often been an example of what is possible, it was intergrated before the rest of society, and welcomed LGBT members before everyone else did. There is brotherhood in the military, loyalty - Semper Fidelis, brothers and sisters living together, dying together and in the process becoming one. I would guess that contemporary American military is probably the most tolerant of all American subgroups.

So here is another idea to save Nigeria - compulsory military and police service for students coming out of secondary school for 2years.

Algorithms should ensure a proper ethnic breakdown of all the camps, activities should foster understanding and the idea of nationhood should be indoctrinated into these young minds. They should go in as individuals but come out more humane, more mature, still of free thought but most importantly - Nigerians. 

Israel does it, others countries do also, I can’t think of any reason why this is an utterly bad idea. 

And yes I intended my headline to be a yell, we have not done enough. 

I was on my way back from a meeting with one of my partners when we got to talking about Nigeria, exasperated, he said I just hope the country breaks up. This is the second time I have heard this in the past week, I yelled at my brother when he said it last week.

Nigeria is too diverse and we have been unable to make it work but we have collectively failed the concept of Nigeria, we have not done enough to make it work. In a country in which the divorce rate is less than 2% I find it troubling that a split remains the first choice. But really the question is this? What have we ever done to make the country work?

Imagine when life with a lover becomes complex, you try to make it work, you go to therapy you talk, you include family etc but you try, you try to make it work, to salvage the life you had together, the memories. We have not done that for Nigeria.

Europe is still in trouble and they had a choice of weakening the bonds that tied them together. But they did not, the doubled down and sought deeper integration. Why can’t we do that?

That Nigeria cannot work is an opinion and not a statement of fact. A breakup is going to be brutal, a move so drastic that I cannot think about the other side of it.

We have not done enough for this country, we need to do more, I have some ideas and I know you do also, we can avoid hell.

“war is a violent teacher”

For whatever reason’s, Africans have chosen to learn the lessons of life the hard way, over and over again through war. The past few weeks in Nigeria have been very unsettling, the war drums are coming alive, talks of a failed state are more frequent, bombings, political instability but most troubling the talks of secession.

Let me state unequivocally, I am against secession because I do not think it works, at the very best we end up like Czecholslovakia but in reality the split will probably be more like Sudan. Splits to do not work, they are are like coporate mergers, the underlying problems still exists.

So here’s and idea, instead of talking about a split, how about we deepen the ties? This is what I suggest; that we find a way to systematically kill off most of our languages.

Marg showed me a map of Nigeria broken into the different languages yesterday, 150million people speaking no less than 30 languages, no wonder we have not been able to foster any sense of national identity.

My thoughts on this are evolving and I don’t know how it would play, it may have to do with paying parents to not teach their local language to their kids, only speaking the lingua franka, killing off indigenous newspapers and radio stations etc.

Seems crazy but I reckon our success depends on our ability to form a national identity, we are not going to do that if we speak 30 different languages.

We are Nigeria!

I am often shocked at the amount of vitriol and nastiness I encounter in the comments sections of the blogs I read. ESPN is by far the worst, the Economist the best and all others exist to some varying degree along the obscene to intelligent continuum. I often worry about the negative effects of our online chatter on our level of civility but perhaps there is some good to be found. 

I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR on my way from the gym when I heard a story about the protest in Morocco. The activist said that social media and the shield of the screen now affords people the opportunity to speak their mind about what they really think. Whereas before you needed a newspaper, a journalist etc to issue public statement, you can now say what you want and the world can instantly read it, on Facebook, on Twitter or Tumblr. While the newspaper could be shut down and journalists arrested, how do you arrest and imprison 1million people criticizing a regime? Or Calling a president ugly and dumb?

I don’t know that social media will get people in the streets but it should scare leaders, especially the bad ones. Over time, when people are no longer afraid, when the fog is lifted; things happen. 

Every night before I go to sleep, I take about a minute to go over the wins and the fails of the day, I have been doing this for about 5yrs. Last year I decided to try this exercise, this time around summing up my entire year using a set of measurable and unmeasurable attributes.

I started 2011 weighing 155lbs, I am at about 158lbs although much stronger. I did not make great strides in the way I spend, I still need to continue to work on my personal balance sheet. I finished 33 books this year, started 35. I will not bore you with the rest but I had a seemingly okay year.

If I was to sum up this year, two words come to mind, fast and growth. The year flew by, it seemed there was hardly any time to do what needed doing, a symptom of perhaps poor time management or increased activity (I don’t know). I also grew this year, psychologically and spiritually. I think that I can look back at 2011 as the year I reached full maturity. Up until now, I never really owned my problems, it was shared by my parents but for the first time in my life, I found myself in situations where I was comfortable making decisions that I would have sought guidance for in the past. In what seems paradoxical, I became closer to my parents this year.

A lot happened this year, cool projects folded, cool ones launched, my grandma died, I got to see some new places, friends got married and had kids, others got divorced and generally speaking the ebb and the flow of life kept its normal pace.

Here’s to hoping for a growth filled 2012, the realization of cool projects and financial benefits. I also hope that the lover stays, that the mind stays and time slows down a bit.

Here is to you, and your hopes, I wish you the strength to take on life

Happy new year

E