The Displaced African

This is day 5 of My 4 Hour Work Week Journey. Please make sure you read the rest of the articles that came before this one to understand where I am in the journey. Click here to buy a copy of the 4 hour work week and go on the journey with me.

Hey everyone, I hope you are having a great day, night, afternoon, siesta-time, no time, everytime, wherever you are.

Quick Thanks…..Again

I am pretty psyced:I did my first ever radio interview with Linda from Capital FM this morning and surprisingly I was super comfortable doing and so public thanks to Linda for making me super comfortable and for creating a fun and informative question list.

The interview had between 4 – 7 false starts and so the way she rolled with the punches even as sleep did battle with her eyes was pretty cool, pretty cool. Asante sana sana sana (Thank you very very very much).

Today’s Video

It will make a lot of sense as I go through the journey.

Questions and Actions

One of the key ideas of the book, the 4 hour work week, which I absoloutely love is quite often in the book he has Q & A: Questions and actions.

This is where he basically makes you look inward and ask yourself particular questions all with the end result being that you take action that takes you closer to your ideal lifestyle. The D for Definition part of the book has three questions and actions so I’ll get right into it

Questions and Actions: Pulling you Out of the Comfort Zone

Tim knows that a lot of what he says will seem counter-intuitive and illogical and so in his first Q & A immediately goes about the task of poking holes in this real world and its rules that we hold so dear to.

To play along with me let’s answer the following three questions which are the first Q&A:

1) How has being “realistic” and “responsible” kept you from living your ideal lifestyle?

2) How has doing what you “should” resulted in sub-par experiences or regret for not having done something else?

3) Look at what you are doing and ask yourself, ” What would happen if I did the opposite of all the people around me?”

4) Finally, ask, “What will I sacrifice if I go down this track for the next 10, 20, 30 or 50 years?”

My Answers (No Copying Though 😉 )

1) Hmmm. I think this one goes all the way back to when I was 16 years old. As those of you who have read my story would know, I have had delusions of grandeur for many years.

Though I am a huge supporter of secondary education and love the fact that I have a great high school diploma, I think as I had simply dropped out of school if I had intended and committed myself fully to serving Africa and Africans and/or becoming a performer, projects like the Displaced African would have started a lot sooner.

I was at the peak of my mental clarity when I was 16 and since then my ideas have definitely been clouded and influenced by superficial concerns of the world.

I’ll never really know what I could have achieved or what I could have created or changed had I thrown caution to the wind and gone out into the world with a clear vision and a deep passion. (Hope that answer wasn’t too ambiguous, leave me a comment below and let me know if it was)

2) This answer will probably fly over the heads of a lot of folks, but I don’t know if I shared this, but I am very pedantic and anal about how I interact with people. I analyse it and think about it quite often, what I did wrong or right, what different groups of people respond to and so on and so on.

I think following what other people did and their ways of interacting and not sticking to my guns resulted in my social life not being as it should have been at many stages in life.

I abdicated responsibility for determining my identity within social situations to other people and over time I lost my spark, my fire, became more and more timid and lost my chutzpah. A lot less women were met and I had a lot less fun than I should have. Hmm, dunno if folks will get this answer either, but it felt like the right answer to me.

3) I am already doing this: let’s see what happens at the end of this 4 hour work week journey and over the course of the life of the Displaced African.

4) You know, one of the huge reasons I chose to start this blog was because of looking around and overall not really being impressed by the way African immigrants were conducting life. In the United States for example, we are the best educated ethnic group and here in Oz folks are far from book-illeterate or penny foolish.

And yet, I never heard much about people who were doing great things in the diaspora. No books, no movies, no websites, no “urban legends”, no real legends. Even once I got here, over time I realized that many people here seemed to be living waaayyyy below their potential in terms of intellect and education. Now this could be for two reasons:

a) We Africans in the diaspora are not good at getting the word out there about our successes and/or I am very ignorant about the people who do great things out here.

b) We don’t have that many successes to celebrate. Either way, this blog makes some sense.

Hmm, this post is long enough as is and so I will leave the other two Questions and Actions for the next post.

To ensure you don’t miss a single moment of my 4 hour work week journey, subscribe to the site via RSS or email.

Have a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious day,

Mwangi

Tags: 4 hour wor week, Capital FM, cash flow muse, Four hour work week, lifestyle design, Tim Ferriss, Timothy Ferriss

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under My 4 Hour Work Week Journey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.