When Shortcuts Turn Into Missions

I tried to save more money this year by moving into cheaper accomodation. I understood that this way wasn't going to be the easiest as it required me tightening my belt and going without. I agreed to those terms and sucked it up.

I am spending more time in London because I decide I have earned a pick-me-up (i.e. friends and family) at the end of most weeks. I thought my old landlord was a pain - this one is five times worse. I am saving money, but I am sending a threatening e-mail approximately once a week about crap I shouldn't have to deal with. On the plus side, the neighbours are lovely and we all agree we rent from a jackass. I am counting the days until I move out - I am seriously considering setting up a countdown and prominently displaying it somewhere that will give me sustenance.

Has it been easy? No.
Has it been fun? Hell no!

But I'm glad I am going through the experience. It is character-building and it gives me a chance to reassess what I am willing to do to save money.

Initially, in my quest to stamp out debt, I considered many shortcuts - such as going without everything I enjoy. I discovered I am not into hardcore sacrfice. What happened was, I went on serious random shopping sprees to compensate for the hard few months. Though I love every single thing I purchased, I do accept my timing was poor and my planning non-existent. It probably set ym debt recovery back by a good few months.

I am willing to take the scenic route to achieving goals. I agree with the cliche - life is too short to live in a bedsit be unhappy.

The Best X-Factor Audition This Year

I'm always sad when the initial stages of X Factor / Pop Idol or any other audition-centered TV programme is over. That's because you are guaranteed some awesome television in the early stages – you know, before everyone starts taking themselves way too seriously.

Case in point: Alan Walton

Now seriously, how adorable is he?

When Others Make You Believe in Yourself

I had the pleasure of meeting a very accomplished professional recently. We talked a little and I'm sure he wouldn't have remembered me, had I not e-mailed asking him to mentor me in a very specific area of my professional development. So, I have my first official mentor and he is awesome. He stays on top of what we agree and follows up. He also expects a lot from me, which in turn causes me to push myself - so far, so good.

Before I formally approached him and asked him to mentor me, I had a serious bout of self-doubt. I thought he might think it a waste of his time - because I am on a detour from the professional qualification route. I thought he might already have mentees. I spoke to certain members of my family about how he inspired me when we met. My family encouraged me to go for it. This experience reminds me of the many times I did something because of my family and in spite of myself. This is that appreciation post. I love them. Much.

Even when I don't believe in myself, even when I am down and broken, my family continue to have unwavering faith in me.

The Danger of the Single Story

In one short speech, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie painted one of the most beautiful arguments for reading, writing, pride in oneself, the immigrant experience and perspective that comes with time and experience.

If videos aren't your thing, and you prefer text, I'll post the transcript below:

I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call "the danger of the single story." I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader. And what I read were British and American children's books.

I was also an early writer. And when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading. All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples. And they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow. We ate mangoes. And we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story.

What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books, by their very nature, had to have foreigners in them, and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many of them available. And they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.

But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized.

Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.

I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So the year I turned eight we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn't finish my dinner my mother would say, "Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing." So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family.

Then one Saturday we went to his village to visit. And his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket, made of dyed raffia, that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them is how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.

Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listed to what she called my "tribal music," and was consequently very dissapointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.

What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning, pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa. A single story of catastrophe. In this single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her, in any way. No possibility of feelings more complex than pity. No possibility of a connection as human equals.

I must say that before I went to the U.S. I didn't consciously identify as African. But in the U.S. whenever Africa came up people turned to me. Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity. And in many ways I think of myself now as African. Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country. The most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in "India, Africa and other countries."

So after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate's response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves, and waiting to be saved, by a kind, white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide's family.

This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Locke, who sailed to west Africa in 1561, and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as "beasts who have no houses," he writes, "They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts."

Now, I've laughed every time I've read this. And one must admire the imagination of John Locke. But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West. A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet, Rudyard Kipling, are "half devil, half child."

And so I began to realize that my American roommate must have, throughout her life, seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novel was not "authentically African." Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places. But I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. In fact I did not know what African authenticity was. The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore they were not authentically African.

But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at the time, was tense. And there were debates going on about immigration. And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.

I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself. So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is "nkali." It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another." Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali. How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story, and to start with, "secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have and entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.

I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called "American Psycho" and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers. Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation.

I would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. And now, this is not because I am a better person than that student, but, because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America.

When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me. But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family.

But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare. One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our firetrucks did not have water. I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education, so that sometimes my parents were not paid their salaries. And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives.

All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience, and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes. There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo. And depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe. And it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them.

I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.

So what if before my Mexican trip I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? What if my mother had told us that Fide's family was poor and hardworking? What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls "a balance of stories."

What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Mukta Bakaray, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? Now, the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don't read literature. He disagreed. He felt that people who could read, would read, if you made literature affordable and available to them.

Shortly after he published my first novel I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview. And a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said, "I really liked your novel. I didn't like the ending. Now you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen ..." And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. Now I was not only charmed, I was very moved. Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. She had not only read the book, but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel.

Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Fumi Onda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music? Talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers. What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband's consent before renewing their passports? What if my roommate knew about Nollywood, full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds? Films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce. What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue to nurse ambition?

Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government. But also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government, rather than because of it. I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer. And it is amazing to me how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories.

My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust. And we have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist, and providing books for state schools that don't have anything in their libraries, and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories. Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.

The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her southern relatives who had moved to the north. She introduced them to a book about the southern life that they had left behind. "They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained." I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. Thank you.

video and transcript credit

Powerful indeed.

10 Best Things To Say When Caught Sleeping At Your Desk

10. "They told me at the blood bank this might happen."

9. "This is just the 15 minute power nap they raved about in the time
management course you sent me to."

8. "Whew! I guess I left the top off the whiteout. You probably got here
just in time."

7. "I wasn't sleeping! I was meditating on the mission statement and
envisioning a new business strategy."

6. "I was testing my keyboard for drool resistance."

5. "I was doing a highly specific yoga exercise to relieve work-related
stress. Do you discriminate against people who practice yoga?"

4. "Well! Why did you interrupt me? I had almost figured out how to
handle that big accounting problem."

3. "Did you ever notice sound coming out of these keyboards when you put your ear down real close?"

2. "Who put decaf in the wrong pot?!?"

and the NUMBER ONE best response if you get caught sleeping at your
desk...

1. Raise your head slowly and say, "…in Jesus name, Amen."

Hehehehe too funny

source

The Infinite Book: Coolest Concept this Year

I can't wait for the day this is a reality - A colour e-reader with a touch responsive screen, internet capability whilst retaining that "page turning" element. I would queue for this in a heartbeat.

source

Kindle, eat your heart out.

Where Do I Hoard in a Recession?

Though most nations have managed to pull their economy out of a recession, the UK is still knee deep in it. Businesses continue to make cuts, people are still hoarding money and the recession is set to continue into 2010.

Everyone wants to attack Gordon Brown for dragging his feet when it came to the banking sector bailout, dithering when it came to dropping interest rates swiftly and for no US-like stimulus package (forgetting the man is Prime Minister and not the Chancellor anymore). So the condemnation for not doing enough, soon enough becomes a bandwagon and, my oh my, are people jumping on it.

All this while, all I'm thinking is, "where is the safest place for me to put my money?" When it think safe, I don’t mean protected from loss because I know the FSA guarantees more money than I have in savings. I am talking about the investment vehicles that will do the best in this economy. I keep coming back to shares – no matter where I look.

With that starting point, the question becomes: "what shall I invest my money in for growth?" My answer is – I don't know, but I'm dedicating time to finding out. I only have one requirement: it must be an Equity-traded Fund. I am partial to anything which avoids the more developed world. I am not risk averse.

If only you could buy a Public Sector ETF *sigh*

Where Was This When I Needed It?

I lived in a large student house with five other people when I was at university. I bought pretty nice food and it always seemed to disappear. Sometimes, it was replaced by cheaper / lesser quality stuff and some kind of cutesy note, typically a smiley face and the word sorry - with no name. Other times it just "disappeared".

One of my housemates, after several attempts to figure out who was eatign their food, took to post-its ith his name ont hem and stating he had licked everything. He was crazy enough to do it so noone every called his bluff. My food continued to go missing.

If only I had one of these:

source

I would have been sorted. I'm buying one for the next family member who moves off campus.

Will Aid: Doing It For Charity

November is Will Aid month. For this month only, you can get your will drafted for the price of a charitable donation to a specified list of charities. The starting price is £75. This is about a third of what most firms charge for your basic will. It's a bargain with the fringe benefit of good karma.

In addition, my firm is participating this year and I'm excited we are giving back in this way. I know I have made my rants about the way my firm approaches charitable giving, so I'm glad they are implementing an intiative that I can get behind. So, go on and invest in some financial peace of mind – nothing is as good as knowing everything is up to date.

So go to the website, put in your postcode and pay a solicitor in your area a visit. Get the peace of mind an up-to-date will offers and the good feeling that comes from charitable deeds.

The Moral of the Story Is...

Perseverance overcomes all difficulties.

I heard on the news that a 68 year old South Korean lady managed to pass her driving test today. I wondered why this was making the news, until they elaborated.

It was her 950^th attempt. At the theory bit.


Now, I understand where she is coming from – it took me three attempts to pass the abomination that is the UK Hazard Perception test (though one of my fails was the fault of my instructor's negligent advice, but that's a story for another day). Good luck to the lady as she prepares for her practical exam.

What Would You Do If You Won the Lottery?

The Euromillions Lottery jackpot was £90 million this week. On Tuesday, my brother and I were chatting and he reminded me of this. Now, usually I don't play the lottery – I think it is throwing money away. I'd much sooner give my money away and know where it went. However, when the jackpot is that substantial, I'll put a tenner in and hope for the best. I have never won anything and I am not bitter.

My attitude to money has changed over the years, but I'm no spendthrift. Were I ever to come into some money, I would spend a bit of it on things that make me happy. My brother asked me what I would do with the money if I won. Surprisingly, my answer did not include quitting my job and I gave 40% to family. Can you believe, in this hypothetical game, my brother would not let me spend a measly £100,000 on accessories? That is a sole extravagance of £100,000 out of £90,000,000. The conversation went something like this:

Bro bro: No, you won't spend £100,000 on bags. Have you lost your mind?

Me: Of course not. I plan to be sensible and invest most of it. I'm only spending £100,000.

BB: No way. I'll let you spend £20,000 each year and that's it. You own enough bags already.

Me: I have some bags, but more and a few pairs of shoes wouldn't dent the finances.

BB: I'll tip off all the stores and have you banned. You should be giving it all to fund managers.

Me: Erm, Madoff is real. I'd like to enjoy my money a bit

BB: You are still young. Remember, you have your whole life to plan for.

Me: Yes, I know. That is why I won't quit my job.

BB: If you continue with the crazy talk, I’ll have you sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Then you can't do dumb stuff with your money.

**Disbelief**

It's a sad day when a girl can't spend 0.111% of an imaginary lottery windfall to buy a few bags and some shoes. Sad day I tell ya. What would be your sole extravagance? I hope you have no grouches raining on your imaginary shopping spree parade.

Are You Conditioned for Success?

I'm not, but I attended a master class last week that might help me become just that. It was insightful and I took away a lot from it. I’ll run through some of the key points:

Context is not everything.
It is true that what seems like a great idea in one scenario, could very well be a bad idea in another. Try not to base decisions about today on comparisons with the past / possible. The overarching principle in situations is to consider what is going on at present.


Think like an economist: compare utility.
Opportunity costing is a beautiful thing, and it is free. Maximise your utility; consider what else you can do with your money / time / resources. After all, it is your money. By doing so, you recover the advantage in a situation. There is no reason to relinquish control in your life to market forces or other people.


Change your behaviour, and watch your thinking follow.
In order to gain something you never had, you must do something you’ve never done. If you are serious about changing things, start putting your money where your mouth is. If you want to feel better, start walking regularly. If you want to become an investment mogul, research stocks and shares and invest in something. Very soon, your mindset will change from that of a person "attempting", to that of a person who "does".


Separate the rhetoric from the reality.
Talking is great, it really is and I do a lot of it all the time. I wax lyrical about what I want, how I want it and when I want it. I also dedicate many hours to researching what other people believe the way to get to where I want to go is. In the master class, the stress was on disengaging from the rhetoric. Take the lesson, but be real about your situation. If saving 33.33(recurring)% of your income is a pipe dream at this point, don’t beat yourself down for doing less – recognise where you are and that an alternative route is just fine.


Now I'm fired up and full of creative energy. One thing that wasn't said, but is very important to me, is not losing focus. I'm easily swept in the current when interacting in such experiences, but once the master class becomes a distant memory, I am sure old habits will creep in. I'll try to keep a watchful eye on that.