Whenever I step off the plane in Johannesburg I am inspired. South Africa bursts with sun and smiles. So much so that one unsmiling person seems surly.
It’s different in Britain and Norway. You will find lots of unsmiling faces. It’s not that they are unhappy. They are just not happy enough to smile.
The further north you go the more serious people are, as you might be after being cooped up in an igloo alone for seven months without sun with a partner with whom you stopped talking back in early autumn.
I feel that the effervescence here in SA is because of the sun. It’s tough to feel down when you have so much solar power lifting you up.
The only people who really see this are tourists. If you listen to them on the plane going home they talk about the sun and the people. They talk about how often you smile here.
I can’t recall ever hearing departing tourists talking about any of the fears newspapers here broadcast each day. Maybe that’s because they’re too busy having fun to read the news or watch TV.
South Africans talk about what they do not have without balancing it with what they have in abundance. Take the Internet for instance. It is slower here than in many places and it costs more. In the midst of complaining about it we do not realise that it is plenty good enough.
My business is broadcasting ideas and skills. I teach people how to open their own businesses, and how to find ways to enhance their current ventures. One of the questions I’m most often asked is whether the South African Internet is good enough to run an online venture. Yes, for almost any venture you might want to start.
On Tuesday I broadcast a one-hour webinar from my hotel bedroom for the Academy of Small Business start-up series. I used my smartphone as a wireless router. The phone had a regular 3G connection via a SIM I had bought that morning. The download speed was 5 Mb and the upload speed was 1 Mb. It was plenty good enough to broadcast with. 4G is much faster but visitors cannot easily get that.
Every book about writing will tell you that if you want to be a writer, just start writing. This is the same as wanting to start up a business. The problem is that we want to reach the prowess of Stephen King without doing the amount of practice that he has done, and still does.
If you want to start a business then just start. While you still have a day job is a fine time. Almost as good a time as not having any job. You merely have to start. There is no risk in starting as long as you do not sign anything you do not understand – and that should not be needed until you know you already have traction.