12:08 AM, and I have had the most blindingly eye-opening of realisations.

I watched something that resonated so deeply and blew my mind away in its simplicity that I almost had a breakdown, especially because it reaffirmed for me that which I had known, had tried to fix but only half-heartedly.

I have been walking down the wrong path since 2005. Focusing on the wrong side of the coin.

My passion is not in numbers or sales targets or financial results. My passion is not in business deals or billion shilling revenues. Yes, they are nice things, but they will only wear me down.

What am I passionate about?

The craft. The product. The experience. The story. The interaction. The emotional connection between people and the things they interact with, both digital and physical. I want to sit down with a client and understand their need and create for them the product that solves their exact need, and then go an extra step and solve for them a problem they didn’t know they had.

I want to build and create works of art that will make the world around us more beautiful, more useful. I want to create products, tell stories and think up ideas that will change the way we see and interact with the world around us.

I’m a craftsman. I find joy in building, creating and refining. That is my side of the coin.

I’m not a salesman. I do not find joy in pushing numbers or pushing targets. I only do it (with moderate success), because it must be done.

I need to find someone truly passionate about that side of the coin. I have tried this on and off, and it has been one of my half-hearted attempts, and it has failed because subsconsciously, I felt that the burden was mine. That I was the one that needed to lead the companies to a place I believed only I understood.

But now I know. A sad, brutal but important realisation. My leadership is about creativity, technical innovation and world changing ideas. The money that results from it all is a really good bonus.

While I have had decent success with management and financial leadership, it is not a strength. For 8 years, I have tried to solve this by learning more, teaching myself more and interacting more with business leaders, and it has worked… to an extent. However, now, more than ever before, I understand perfectly; excellence demands razor-focus and extreme sacrifice. And it also demands finding and working with people who have the right passion for the right position.

I know my weakness, and always have known. But starting now, I will not rest until that weakness has been completely eliminated.

Above all, be true to yourself, and if you cannot put your heart in it, take yourself out of it.
- Hardy D. Jackson

Thank Go(o)d(ness) It’s Friday!

A war cry that echoes to the heavens after a seemingly brutal five days of work. Uttered loudly by the weary and work-worn and even louder by the idle and disorderly. [Side note: Did you know that many countries and cultures have experiemented with five, six and ten day weeks? And that what you call a "week" now has lived through multiple incarnations over time? True story.]

So it’s Friday! Time to lose yourself, wind down, do something crazy.

Time to parrrtty! And! Forget! Your! Problems! Right?!

The average weekend night in Kampala sees more than half the revellers spending between 50,000/= and 150,000/= ( $20 and $60), which, if you are the afore-mentioned average reveller, puts an average dent of 200,000/= to 600,000/= in your average wallet on an average month. The beautiful thing? You never quite notice it until you’re doing the maths on Saturday morning and wondering where the expletive the 200,000/= you withdrew from the ATM machine went.

You know the drill perfectly well, don’t deny. You put in an insane where’s-my-overtime-money five minutes of extra work, leave the office at 5:05PM and high-five your work-colleagues like the world just handed you another 100 years. You head to the ATM, withdraw 100,000/= for groceries, baby’s diapers and maybe, just maybe one beer. You bump into Fred or Agnes and it goes something like this:

Whaaaat’ssss uuuuuup!!
WAAZUP PLAYER! FRIDAY, RIGHT?!
Totally! Hectic week man, need to just CHILL!!
Sooo… whatsup, where are you heading?
Not sure man, but Scovia said she would HOOOLLA! OH, HANG ON. *phone up* JAMES!! Waaaazzzzzuuuuuuupppp. PLOT?! For real? We are SO ON. *phone down* SOOO. There’s this thing at Cayenne!
Niiicee. Right on my way home. But man, two beers and I’m out. Mama baby WHAAAT!
HAHAHA. WORD.
*car or boda* BLUUUUURRRRR.

Roughly 10 hours later, there are suddenly 60,000 people at some house party in Namugongo, and you cannot fathom where the expletive they came from, how you got here, and everything is so damn bright, and everything makes perfect sense and there is this humming noise SMACK IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR BRAIN and everyone is SO loud and some poor soul is hanging onto your every word like you are GOD! And you ARE GOD!

So, I have two related issues that really really really stress me.

A. I have the metabolism of a hummingbird. Except, perhaps, not as -hours-away-from-death dramatic.

With the exception of insects, hummingbirds while in flight have the highest metabolism of all animals, a necessity in order to support the rapid beating of their wings. Their heart rate can reach as high as 1,260 beats per minute, a rate once measured in a Blue-throated Hummingbird. They also consume more than their own weight in nectar each day, and to do so they must visit hundreds of flowers daily. Hummingbirds are continuously hours away from starving to death, and are able to store just enough energy to survive overnight.

B. My body type is classified as ectomorph:

Ectomorphs are characterized by long and thin muscles/limbs and low fat storage; usually referred to as slim. Ectomorphs are not predisposed to store fat or build muscle.

The combination of those two factors; high metabolism and genetics squarely in the ectomorph zone, mean that I am doomed to be skinny for my entire life, which is not something I’m happy about. Buying clothes is a nightmare, and no one really likes looking this gaunt. More importantly, my BMI (body mass index) is constantly in the unhealthy zone. And to make things worse, I just generally don’t find the time to eat anything or exercise. When I eventually find food, I eat voraciously (and ferociously), like my body is trying to store up reserves for the next couple of days, barely remembering that it is going to be burnt out in a couple of hours.

My single biggest indiscipline is health; healthy food and healthy exercise. I cannot cook to save my life (tried once, gave up that sad, miserable chapter) and given that I work nearly 18 hours a day, it doesn’t make for a pretty lifestly and, as you can imagine, my health is not the best.

Today, I started off angry, and at about 11pm, to cool off, decided to write, it started off angry as well, but two hours later, turned into something completely different. Disclaimer: I have a fiction blog called Jeremiah Kenzi, and on that blog, the characters curse like (modest) sailors, you’ve been warned.

So, go here to read the fiction story, titled These Times Eternal.

Now, moving on, this one will be brief.

The Asylum: Day 5 – A Wondrous Tapestry

This world is a tapestry, and our lives are like thread weaving through this tapestry, intertwining with other lives, interacting with the people and the world around us and in subtle ways, changing, and being changed. Our very thoughts and actions impact the texture, tone, colour and fabric  creating a kaleidoscopic pattern so beautiful, so intricate that from afar, it is impossible to imagine that this… massive creation is the work of beings seemingly insignificant when you consider the scale of the universe.

But, when you dig deep and look really close, and try to appreciate the beauty of the tapestry by studying a single strand of thread, all you see is chaos. Total, absolute anarchy. Rough, uncouth thread segments suddenly changing into even lumpier strings, splitting off, joining awkwardly with other more ridiculous looking threads, some ending so suddenly and abruptly that it breaks the heart, others going on forever that they get lost in the distance. You see ungainly gaps from one string to the next, with almost no sense of art, or style or even simply, order, and you begin to question the bigger picture, wondering how any of those threads could possibly add to something so elegant.

Warning: This post is all over the place, but it’s about one thing:

The Beat.

I got Jai’s Culture Shock album a month ago, from Nevender – who sits right across from me in the office and is one of the most diligent people I have ever met or worked with – and I absolutely love it. The heavy hip hop baselines guiding an amazing praise and worship session and… well, let’s just say it’s almost always the first album of choice when I need something upbeat to listen to. That and David Guetta’s Nothing But the Beat, with a distinct bias towards the “Titanium” collabo with Sia, a war-cry of survival and resistance against a world and people trying to bring us down.

I started walking back home from work (again) a few weeks back, assuming, of course, that I am able to leave the office before eight in the evening. The 10kg “work package” ( huge-ass 17″ Dell XPS laptop, external drives, internet connection, notebooks, books and other accessories) in my backpack gives me a crazy workout, as I intentionally walk briskly to take advantage. It’s a 10 minute walk at a brisk pace and 20 minutes at a lazy pace. Not much of a work-out on its own, but the 10kg changes everything. Throw in a good pair of headphones and a good beat willingly assaulting my eardrums and it makes a huge difference.

I love these walks because they give me time to think and study without distraction. Just… be. Switch off and go with the flow of humanity swirling around me, oblivious to each other except for the occasional bump and curse or jeer, minds focused on purely an end to the chaos of the day and the start of a new one, dreams, goals and ambitions met or not. I love watching people, I love listening to them even more. I’m fascinated by what goes on in their minds, their pains, their sorrows, their joys and their secrets, dark or not. I seek to understand the world around me, and the biggest thing there is to understand is humanity. Plus, I have an unquenchable thirst to help the people around me, much to my perpetual detriment.

But I digress.

The Beat.

a·sy·lum

1. refuge: a shelter from danger or hardship
2. mental hospital: a hospital for mentally incompetent or unbalanced person