MONDAY, 14 APRIL 2025
If I had to ask myself what my primary goal has been for the past … say, twenty years, I would say it’s to make money. Twenty years ago, I was suddenly no longer alone. A young woman had decided to take a chance on me, and I had to justify her incredibly optimistic hope.
The last thing I want to do is bore the reader again with a list of projects and schemes with which I have attempted to make money over the past two decades. Point is, plenty of the endeavours had nothing to do with gathering knowledge or insight, much less with sharing knowledge and insight with people who might have needed it.
Now, when I teach, I don’t just explain grammar or vocabulary – I use every opportunity I get to inject a little history. Or I try to give a slightly non-cliched opinion when the conversation is about relationships, or other aspects of human existence about which I may have had an intelligent thought in the past. Most of the material I have created so far for ESL students, and the social media material I publish these days, reveal the ambition of the person behind it to share knowledge. (Of course, I assume most people don’t already know what I have to say.)
Other personal projects, like Asian Histories of Listed History, and even Familiegeskiedenis (an Afrikaans site about family history), are not exactly supposed to make money. The ambition has always been more noble-minded.
My primary task – by default, although I don’t think of it that way every day – is to gather knowledge and insight. And when I have managed to obtain another kernel of knowledge or insight, to then share it in a way that is a little different from the next collector of knowledge and insight, in order to hopefully make it somewhat easier for the person receiving the knowledge and insight to lead a happier and more productive life.
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