Ashley Mwanza

IT IS an age old cliché that people learn from their faults and failings. However, these faults and failings must be pointed out for them to know they are there in the first place. When you make a mistake it is good to be upfront and honest with yourself, denial causes you to repeat the same mistake deceiving yourself to believe it will have a different outcome. Thus more emotional baggage and consequences taunt your trail.

Don't dwell on mistakes, but shake the dust off your feet and move on by avoiding anything that will take you down that path again. Sometimes mistakes can open up a new part of you. Identify what drove you to make that mistake and address it and make the needed changes.

You can only learn from a mistake after you admit you’ve made it. As soon as you start blaming other people (or the universe itself) you distance yourself from any possible lesson. But if you courageously stand up and honestly say “This is my mistake and I am responsible” the possibilities for learning will move towards you. Admission of a mistake, even if only privately to yourself, makes learning possible by moving the focus away from blame assignment and towards understanding. Wise people admit their mistakes easily. They know progress accelerates when they do

Mistakes are an excellent form of instruction. Unfortunately, once corrected, errors are usually forgotten, especially by the people who make them. We don’t like to dwell on our failures. That’s natural, but it also hampers our ability to avoid repeating errors. We need to embrace our errors and understand that they are the keys to more accurate work. Errors breed accuracy, if handled properly.

William George Jordan wrote The Crown of Individuality in 1909. Below are some powerful excerpts on the wrong and the right attitude we should have towards our past mistakes.

There are only two classes of people who never make mistakes; they are the dead and the unborn. Mistakes are the growing pains of wisdom. Without them there would be no growth, no progress, no conquest.

Life is time given to us to learn how to live. Some people like to wander in the cemetery of their past errors, to reread the old epitaphs, and to spend hours in mourning over the grave of a wrong. This new mistake does not antidote the old one. The remorse that paralyzes hope, corrodes purpose, and deadens energy is not moral health. It is selfish and cowardly surrender to the dominance of the past. It is lost motion in morals.

Musing over the dreams of youth, the golden hopes that have not blossomed into deeds is a dangerous mental dissipation. It adds weights, not wings, to purpose. “It might have been” is the lullaby of regret people use to suppress courage. Let us never accept mistakes as final. In the end, right living and right doing must triumph.

As we progress in life, we will continue to make mistakes. The key here is to step back and learn. Whatever lessons you gain from mistakes will be invaluable because you will not make the same mistakes. Lessons learnt stay learnt. Everyone makes mistakes. Nobody’s perfect. But the people who will come out ahead are the ones that learn from their mistakes and take that knowledge and use it the next time. Be wise.

"Flops are part of life’s menu. Everyone makes mistakes. High achievers learn by their mistakes. By doing that, an error becomes the raw material out of which future successes are forged. Failure is not a crime. Failure to learn from failure is."

Ashley Mwanza

Flag of the Republic of South Sudan 

“Scars remind us of where we have been but they don’t have to dictate where we are going,” the words of David Rossi (Character in 'Criminal Minds')

We all sail the waters of trials and tribulations and we become stuck, but at some point the tribulations ‘subside’. This is the point we need to move forward. A hearty congratulations to the people of  the Republic of South Sudan on the birth of their nation. We bore witness to the passage of history and the transformation of the map of Africa and the world. President Barack Obama declared: "Today is a reminder that after the darkness of war, the light of a new dawn is possible." It is indeed, and now is the time for the South Sudanese people to move forward. 9 July 2011 will be a day that not only the South Sudanese will cherish but the entire African continent and the rest of the world. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon mentioned that “nationhood has come at steep cost."

But, “what we need to know about the past is that no matter what has happened, it has all worked together to bring us to this very moment. And this is the moment we can choose to make everything new. Right now.”

When we hold on to the past we are usually holding on to a part of life that we will never get back and that is preventing us from progressing forward and realizing our future. The people of South Sudan can and will never forget the atrocities that lasted for decades. But now they have to accept that in our sad world we have to realize that pain is another part of life that we have to deal with. Yes, the pain of losing loved ones and more so livelihoods may prohibit us from thinking as clearly as we would like to, but we have to learn how to overcome this pain eventually so that our past may be released from our lives. We have to forgive those who have wronged us, and also apologise for the hurt we have caused and let the past go, so that we may turn around and face forward towards the future.

Johnnie Carson, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs a couple of months ago stated that, “these are two states (Sudan and the Republic of South Sudan) that are very much in the same boat. If one falls over, it’s likely that the other one would also fall over. We want to see a South Sudan that is strong and stable and we want to see a north Sudan that is also strong, democratic and stable and economically growing," he said. We all have a past.  But ultimately our past does not define us. It is there, but there is nothing we can do about it so we should work together, let it go and move on. The past is the past.  It is what it is.  We can’t change it.  If it is negative, then it acts as an anchor holding us back.  If it is positive, we can only lean on that so much and for so long.

Letting go can be painful.  It can even feel wrong in certain circumstances, but the only way we can move on is to let go. Today is the start of a better tomorrow for Republic of South Sudan. The 8 million plus inhabitants of the new nation must not remain mired in the quicksand of their past another day.  They have to embrace the moment they have right now to make a positive difference.  It is up to them.  Will they let go of their past and build a better future?

There is a foundational truth that underlies all change, which is, that in order to embrace the new, we need to release the old. If you want to go forward in your life, you need to let go of the things in your past that will impede or even prevent you from moving on. This can be likened to trying to walk forward while looking backwards; progress is less than satisfactory.

By continuing to dwell on events and set-backs a door is opened for resentment, hurt, grudges, self-pity, excuses, and bitterness to take root in people’s hearts and lives. The key to unlocking the door of our self-made prison is forgiveness. We do not have the power to change the past whether it be events or situations. Forgiveness cuts us loose and frees us to move forward and create a new future. 

Valentino Achak Deng, one of tens of thousands of child refugees who fled the war said, "tomorrow is a new day, and we are a new country ready to face our challenges on our own feet."  It is a tall order indeed, and their feet better be very firm on the ground especially those of President Salva Kirr. On the day of its birth, Ban Ki-moon noted, the Republic of South Sudan will rank near the bottom of all recognized human development indices, including the world's highest maternal mortality rate and a female illiteracy rate of over 80 per cent. “Critical issues of poverty, insecurity and lack of infrastructure must all be addressed by a relatively new government with little experience and only embryonic institutions," said Ki-moon. But with the strong winds having subsided, surely there is hope for a better tomorrow. 

Ashley Mwanza

YOU can’t be really creative if your mind is full of untended business. Many people procrastinate and never quite get around to doing the things that they consider really important or really rewarding. Why? Often because they are afraid they won’t do them well enough. As long as they don’t work on those elusive projects, they can tell themselves they would do them really well if only they had time. They never have to face the fact of actually attempting to achieve their real goal, and because they never do it, it’s a source of frustration and anxiety instead of satisfaction. Don’t get caught in this energy-sucking trap. Start that project. Paint that picture. Learn that language. BEGIN.

Ashley Mwanza

PRODUCTIVITY is about using less effort to accomplish things. Productive work is positive, relaxed and sustainable. Life should not be stressful and difficult. It should be full of energy and clarity, focus and momentum especially but not exclusively work.

Think of throwing a stone into a pond. The water responds to the stone in a perfectly appropriate way. The water does not move too much and neither does it move less than enough. It does what it has to do and then returns to what it was.Unfortunately, most of us do not work like water.

We are full of stress and anxiety, pressed for time, overwhelmed by details, and bogged down by worry and nagging chores left undone. We do too much and too little, often at the same time. We are frantically busy but we unconsciously waste time. There’s the common phrase; “I’ve been busy”, but you have been busy doing what exactly?

Ashley Mwanza

In the past week I had discussions with friends who are at a ‘crossroads’ in their lives. But after listening to them I realised one commonality. Strategy was lacking, or if it was there it was just not good enough. To be specific, they all have fuzzy strategic objectives. One form this problem can take is a scrambled mess of things to accomplish, a dog’s dinner of goals. A long list of things to do or accomplish, often mislabelled as strategies or objectives, is not a strategy. It is just a list of things to do. A strategy is a way through a difficulty, an approach to overcoming an obstacle, a response to a challenge. Life is a challenge, devise a strategy.

‘To do’ lists usually grow out of ‘planning’ for one’s future, in which one comes up with things they would like to accomplish. Rather than focus on a few important items, one sweeps the goals into the ‘strategic plan’. Then, in recognition that it is a dog’s dinner, the label “long term” is added, implying that none of these things can be accomplished soon. Yet despite it all, they plough ahead trying to achieve the all the goals at once, mission impossible. A vivid example is the strategy of the mayor of a small city in the Pacific Northwest in the USA. His planning committee’s strategic plan contained 47 strategies and 178 action items. Action item number 122 was “create a strategic plan.”

This leads into the second type of a weak strategic objective, the “blue sky”, typically a simple restatement of the desired state of affairs or of the challenge. It skips over the annoying fact that one has no clue as to how to get to achieve their goals. One may choose to successfully identify the key challenge and propose an overall approach to dealing with the challenge. But if the consequent strategic objectives are just as difficult to meet as the original challenge, the strategy has added little value.

Good strategy, in contrast, works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favourable outcomes. It also builds a bridge between the critical challenge at the heart of the strategy and action, between desire and immediate objectives that lie within grasp. Thus, the objectives that a good strategy sets stand a good chance of being accomplished, given existing resources and competencies. 

Strategy involves focus and, therefore, choice. And choice means setting aside some goals in favour of others. When this hard work is not done, weak strategy is the result.

By now, I hope you are fully awake to the dramatic differences between good and bad strategy. To close off here are tips in crafting good strategies, which have a basic underlying structure:

1. A diagnosis: an explanation of the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as being the critical ones.

2. A guiding policy: an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis.

3. Coherent actions: steps that are coordinated with one another to support the accomplishment of the guiding policy.

To accomplish anything in life you have to be a strategist, and the core of the strategist’s life is always the same: discover the crucial factors in a situation and design a way to coordinate and focus actions to deal with them.

Some parts of this article are borrowed material from McKinsey Quarterly, June 2011, from an article by Richard Rumelt’s ‘The perils of bad strategy’ (the article is adapted from his forthcoming book, ‘Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters’, Crown Publishing, July 2011).