If I have to give people advice about making money, I would advise them to consider their identity: Who are you? (Why are you this person?) Who do you want to be? (Why?) How do you see your purpose in life? (Why this purpose?) What makes you happy? (Why do these things make you happy?) Would you rather sell something – someone else’s products, or your time, your knowledge, your abilities or your experience, or would you rather take a risk speculating on some or other market?
One problem: Few people are ready with answers to these questions.
Another problem: Many people are too easily tempted to do things they shouldn’t be doing; and of course, too many people are too easily deceived.
I have mentioned this before, but I am doing it again today, solemnly, in public: I am asking myself, pretty please, to not become a fuddy-duddy, a cranky old geezer.
As a matter of course it is mostly men who will understand this plea, particularly if they have reached their so-called middle years.
Middle-aged and older men are known for their conservative attitudes, and in many cases seem to have a permanent bee in their bonnets and a chip on their shoulders. They regularly feel as if their manhood is being challenged. One of the younger generation of men just has to think of doing something wrong, like parking in the wrong place, talking too loudly on his phone, or cutting in line in the queue at IKEA’s restaurant in Kaohsiung (while actually only re-joining his friend), and the old geezer pushes up in a man who a few moments before was just a normal human being. He gets red in the face, his hair turns a greyer shade from pure outrage, he wants to read someone the riot act, and he says things like, “Please! For the love of god, just wake up!”
That everyone shakes their heads and his wife distances herself from him one small step at a time matter little to him.
Even though there are places where old geezers still rule – Saudi Arabia being a fine example, it seems like fuddy-duddies are an endangered species – red in the face from almost permanent consternation because someone dared to do something with which he disagrees, and with a feeling that if the world had ever belonged to him, it is certainly no longer the case.
Now I just need to build up some resistance to my inner old geezer who wants to show his puffed-up face every now and then and wag his finger at perfect strangers.
I just had an insight into my activities in 2006. Perusing the notes of that year it is plain to see, to my great embarrassment, that I wanted to make a quick buck. I obviously fell for the opinion of information vendors that it was easy for anyone to start earning money on the internet without months or years of patience and hard work.
Surely I must have known what the general impression was of get-rich-quick schemes. Why did I fall for it, then? Why – and I have wondered about this a lot over the last ten years – did I not just pick a niche or an interest or a need with a market willing to pay for stuff, and slowly and patiently built up an online asset?
On 27 November 2006 I wrote: “I’ve increasingly come under the impression that I ignore my real strengths because I have until now believed that it will take ‘too long’ to make money from it.” And later a warning: “Beware of going over to the opposite extreme – losing myself for the next few weeks in creative work I would enjoy more, but that won’t necessarily bring in any money.”
Why did I not start building an online business? Why did I not work on a commercial site that could have started generating profit within six months or a year?
The reason, as I’ve discovered, is simple: If I had wanted to work on something for six months or a year before I made any money with it, I would have worked on my own projects. I had temporarily given up on my writing because I thought – or wanted to believe – that I could make money quickly in other ways, to then return to writing, this time with enough money to amongst other things pay someone to proofread my material and perhaps even to cancel some classes and thus own more of my time.
1. My older grandfather, Johannes Jurgens Bornman, was born in the Vredefort district of the then independent Boer republic of the Orange Free State, on 16 February 1900 – less than a month before the Union Jack was hoisted in Bloemfontein.
2. My younger grandfather, Barend Jakobus Lodewikus Smit, was born on 25 May 1913. His eldest sister, Martha Helena Smit, was born on 6 May 1900, and died on 11 October 1901, during some of the darkest days of the Anglo-Boer War.
3. My great-grandfather Bernardus Gerhardus Smit was born on 20 October 1874. His wife, my great-grandmother Martha Helena Coetsee was born on 19 June 1880. It is quite likely thanks to her that my grandfather, my father and I have Coetsee family names.
FRIDAY, 6 MAY 2016
I find family history interesting for three reasons:
1. In the first place, family history is a collection of stories – of people, places, and times different from our own.
2. It is a good thing to recall the names of people who have been dead and gone for decades, and sometimes centuries, as if you are stretching out your hand across time to pat them on the shoulder to say: Decades or centuries from now your name will still occasionally be mentioned – you will not be forgotten.
3. It is interesting to trace the sources of my genetic composition, my biological self – not to be able to say “who I am”, just to say: Oh, so that’s how the line goes.
MONDAY, 9 MAY 2016
Family history, so I have learned, is personal in ways that you may never have guessed. A part of the person that you would become was present through all those generations over the centuries. If one person did not tie the knot with a certain other person, you would not exist. Same story if one person did not die prematurely to leave behind a widow or widower who then got married to another person.
One example: The first husband of Anna Margaretha Roos was killed along with Piet Retief in 1838. Her father, her brother and her brother’s two children (or two of his children) were killed at Bloukrans shortly thereafter. Now, as a child I learned of Blood River and Piet Retief and Bloukrans. What I never realised was that a part of what would become my genetic blueprint was present at some of those places. Had Anna Roos for example also died along with her father and brother at Bloukrans, a part of what would later become my genetic puzzle would have been lost, and I would therefore not exist. (She remarried a few years later, this time to my great-great-great-grandfather.)
For the unique composition of cells that would become I to be born in Pretoria in June 1971, it was imperative for a long list of people not to have died earlier than they eventually did, and that they had to marry and conceive children with exactly the right people.
Important to note: If they had not gotten married to those people and conceived children with them, they would probably have conceived and raised other children with other people, which would eventually have led to the birth of other unique combinations of cells in 1971, or 1972, or 1973 … but it would not have led to my birth, and my subsequent existence for the past 45 years.
Thus, for my being to have come into existence, it was important that certain people with specific genetic particles had to escape death at particular times and places – amongst many sets of circumstances, the battlefields of Natal in the 1830s and those of the Boer republics at the turn of the century.
My maternal grandfather Johannes Jurgens Bornman and grandmother Maria Christina Magdalena Gertruida Cloete (married in 1924)My paternal great-grandfather Bernardus Gerhardus Smit and great-grandmother Martha Helena Coetsee (married in 1897)
