Chapter 1 - why I wrote this book?
This book is for radicals, revolutionaries and game changers who believe they can do things their own way! It is for people who want a place in the world where they are comfortable and where they are living on their own terms so that every day is a play day.
You will never understand why I wrote this book unless you have aimed or tried something in your life and you didn’t succeed. You will never understand why I wrote this book unless you have gone through fear-induced mediocrity where you have felt that something was missing in your life. This is because revival always come from the poor in spirit. These are individuals who hurt, heal, grow and have the boldness to then teach others.
This boldness in a person’s life doesn’t come because they want to do something, but because they are hurting, broken and because they care. They just simply care.
What happens in your life in the first 30 years is probably not your fault. Dr Holland, when formulating his famous personality theory, stipulates that your personality is a result physical environment, parental interaction, hereditary and personal factors as well as cultural influences. I would also add that who you are now is also linked to the things you are running away from. For example, most of us were trained to run away from poverty. This is why we wake up to chase sustenance and become comfortable in jobs we hate. My hope is change this with this contribution in word form.
I probably wrote it at my angriest moment (while still in the wilderness) which might result in it being very brutal and ungrateful of the systems that got us here. But I guess this is the best form of art – brutal, honest, frank, direct and candid.
Why are we stuck?
I have figured out that more and more people are stuck in careers they hate and are working in jobs they despise – the only reason for going to the job is for the sake of self-sustenance. After all, this is the definition of a job: something that you wouldn’t do if you did not receive money. This, I believe, is rotting the core of all our systems. We are not choosing careers based on our gifts and natural inclinations, but based on “what career can give me more money” (I know I did). The pathology of this is, for example, having nurses who aren’t really caregivers at heart, teachers who not really educators and law enforcers who do not want to guard and protect people.
As a society we are frequently and repeatedly asking ourselves questions like “at this point in my life what can I do with my gift?” and “do I need to go back and study the thing I have always wanted to do?” We are probably starting to see how useless education is if a gift is not attached to it in one form or another. The good news is that it is 2023 and you don’t have to do things you hate and go to a job you despise for the rest of your life.
Theorem statement: Until you find the purpose for life, your plans for success will always frustrate you. This is because the best, unrivaled and unsurpassable success is tied to your purpose for life, and your purpose is tied to a gift you have. There is only one way to dominate in life and that is THROUGH YOUR GIFT.
I believe that each and every one of us is born to dominate a certain area of life that we each have the natural capacity for. Every one of us, to some degree, possesses a spirit of dominion and this spirit is inherently put in us by God because we are in the likeness of His image (He is a dominator). You are fully equipped to dominate in a specific area of life, and probably it is where your true success lies. You cannot school yourself to it (otherwise all educated people would be successful). You cannot manipulate your way to it either (otherwise all wrongdoers would be successful).
Nobody taught me that our gifts are important for our fulfilment. It is not in our school curriculum. My gift came wrapped in suffering where I couldn’t figure out why I was struggling to finish a degree a while I was the hardest working student in the Mechanical Engineering department at UKZN. It finally dawned on me in my fifth year of doing the degree that something is not right. “Why am I painfully and agonizingly trying to drill technical skills in me when my natural talents had a tendency to lie in social skills? First of all I don’t like working with machines and systems – I love working with people and solving people problems.” “And after being taught these technical skills there will be a spot in a system waiting for me to dedicate my life, time, energy and my sweat for 8 hours a day where my token of thanks will only be R30 000 salary? All of this to forget my natural talents (remember we were told that our natural skills were just hobbies)?” Unfortunately, this is how most of the working class feels now. But it is not too late.
The money keeps us going but is that all life will be? Do you want to keep waking up in the morning and doing something where most things don’t resonate with your gift? Look at you! Look at what you have accepted!
Deep in you there is a natural DNA coding that always poses questions like “is this all it will be for me?” or “why do I have to do this?”. These questions are normal because the human spirit cannot be oppressed permanently, and education is somewhat a tool of oppression for a majority unfortunately (I will prove this).
Dr Nelson Mandela is famously quoted for saying at the launch of Mindset Network in Johannesburg (Mandela, 2003) that education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world. Is this really true though? Are all the educated people really changing the world, or is it the ones who left education and pursued what they were good in (and actually left school altogether) that are changing the world? In this book I will prove the latter.
On the other end of the scale, I have to give credit to education because it has the ability to take someone from the deep rural areas and put them in a position that would be similarly occupied by someone who grew up with all the privilege. For example, two people from polar opposite backgrounds can both be senior engineers at a large engineering company. Education was a great equalizer for both these individuals.
Careers are getting finished!
The education that one gets at school is specifically designed to put you in a slot which is called a career. But there is a problem: the slots are getting finished. This is shown by the shocking unemployment rate which is at a record high of 32.6%, data from Stats SA shows. Among the highest unemployment rates were recorded for the youth (those aged between 15 and 24) at 63.3% and those aged between 25 and 34 at 41.3%. Unemployment among the black African population remains higher than the national average at 36.7%, up from 36.5% recorded in the fourth quarter. Black African women are the most vulnerable with an unemployment rate of 38.3%, according to Stats SA.
More and more are graduates are redundant with their degrees, diploma and certificates. You will see these qualifications frequently displayed on social media and every once in a while, you will find someone standing at a robot with them.
A brief history
The educational system was very well thought of by people in North America who knew innovation and design in 1893 because it gave everyone a chance at all the skills. This is primarily why you have multiple subjects at school. They innovatively saw that the world was moving from agriculture to manufacturing and they knew that millions of children would benefit from such a change, and they were right!
The mandate of that system was simple: school learners must be able to repeat the same task over and over efficiently without error. Companies such as Ford profited from such a system and understandably America became powerful due to the strong middle class who did such work .
This routine of execution of operations would eventually discourage creativity. This makes sense because manufacturing factories in the early 1900’s didn’t need innovators, they needed people who could do the same routine over and over with less error as possible.
Workers had to be punctual; respond to shift changes at the sound of bells; be habituated to repetitive activity; eat lunch when, where, and for as long as they were told; not question authority. So our school system works perfectly at what it was designed for, which is, in the advanced nations, a world which no longer exists.
Let us look at the u-shaped graph below. For the past 100 years this educational system described above did work brilliantly because as more and more people got educated (INTENSITY OF COMPETITION), the better people’s lives improved – more jobs, wealth, etc (INCENTIVES OF EDUCATION).
Somewhere in the year 2000 this started to change. Can you guess what caused the change? The answer to this is somewhere in this book
We are starting to see a sharp decline in the incentives of education (few jobs, more poverty, etc) although more and more people are educated. Why is this happening?
Here is a thought for you: cars have drastically changed in the past 100 years. Why is education not upgrading at a similar rate or better?
So, what now?
Find something that you are naturally adept at, and figure out a way of making a living out of it, because if you do that, every day will be a play day - Judge Judy
You better start thinking beyond your job! What is your gift? What is your uniqueness? What can you bring to the table that only you can offer? Remember; you are unique and with your uniqueness (capabilities, character, feelings, or motivations) comes a commodity that the world needs NOW! Please do us a favour and bestow it upon us. We need it
A lion raised in captivity which has never been in the wild and all his experiences have always been in a cage, why do they then lock the cage if its experiences were always in the cage? They lock the cage because they know that even though the experiences of the lion might be in the cage, it has the instinct that tell it “I belong out there!”. This illustration is the same thing to you – your instincts tell you that even though you are stuck wherever you are, you are bigger than this! You belong out there! You might not even have the knowledge or training for what you want but there is a natural urge or a itching yearning in your to be free.
One of my lecturers told me that the world is a cold and lonely place without a degree. I agreed at that time but I have changed my mind and I beg to differ now. I say that the world is a cold and lonely place without discovering your area of gifting. This is because the real job of the future is a person who understands creativity, design and language. This is someone, in my opinion, who cannot fit in any slot, someone who has no working hours and someone who has an innate ability to work independently without being “programmed”. Only your gift will allow creativity, only your gift allows for design and only your gift allows for different expressions.
Let us educate ourselves about our gifts and this book is just the first step in that direction. Let us not be bribed anymore: let us be the ones bribing companies for jobs so that we can get money to fund our areas of gifting because time is running out for us to show case our brilliance here on earth. Let us take our job money and build our empires privately at home or in our own private spaces until our gifts are refined.
Companies should hire us because they see a gift that adds value to their company, not because they need a skill. Skills can be replaced but gifts cannot. In fact, when you are in a company due to a skill you will always be worried. But if you know you are there because of your gift you won’t care if you are fired or not because you will take your gifts with you somewhere else. A bird carries the gift of flight and if you chase it away it takes its gift of flying and will fly somewhere else.
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn – Alvin Toffle.
Excerpt from the book “How to quit your job and purpose”