The Choice is Yours

Technology and its impact on our lives, our relationships and our perceptions of success.

I graduated from Hilton College in 1998. I was honoured to be invited back as guest speaker at ‘Speech Day’ — the school’s prize giving — on 22 September 2017. This is the speech I delivered.

Good morning ladies and gentlemen, members the board, Mr Chairman, Mr Harris, Parents and Hilton Boys.

It’s a great honor to be here again. Thank you for inviting me.

To the boys here this morning, many people in this audience have made significant sacrifices to give you the opportunity to be at Hilton. Many staff and friends of the extended Hilton College community have contributed immeasurably to your journey’s, just as they did to mine. Those of you leaving this year will find that these people will continue watching you from a distance and will keep cheering you on from the sidelines, as they have done for me.

So don’t think you’re special. You’re not. You are simply the sum of all the kindnesses, lessons, experiences and opportunities that the people you’ve crossed paths with in your life have shared with you. Thank those people. They are who have made you who you are today.

I HAVE A DAUGHTER

I have a daughter. She is 3 years old. Her name is Hannah. A few weeks ago she crawled into our bed at 6.30 a.m. picked up my wife’s iPhone and begged her to, “Press the buttons,” which is her way of saying, “please unlock the iPhone”. My wife refused. “it’s still sleeping time”. After more begging by my daughter, more refusing my by my wife, and more pretending to be asleep by me, my daughter said, “Mom, if you don’t press the buttons I am going to leave this family.” After a pause she followed up with the line, “The choice is yours.”

I was grateful she gave us the choice… But we miss her dearly.

The dilemma we experienced with Hannah is not unusual. Millions of parents around the world grapple with it; but it is relatively new. It is not one generations of parents before mine experienced. It’s not one my parents dealt with. Or even the parents of older children here.

NOW I WAS BORN IN 1980

Now I was born in 1980. Those of you familiar with generational theory will know that Generation X babies were born roughly between 1960 — 1980 and Millenials were born between 1980 — 2000. So I sit on the cusp of these two generations, which makes me a bit of an anomaly. I’m old enough to remember well, the world before the internet revolution of the late 1990s, but I am young enough to feel like I’ve actively participated in and paid attention to it’s cutting edge since it began.

So today I’m going to make the claim that my age and the fact that much of my working life has been in the technology space, gives me a somewhat unique perspective on technology and its presence in our lives today.

A FAMOUS AMERICAN PHYSICIST

A famous American physicist called Richard Feynman used to tell a true story he titled Cargo Cult Science. In the second world war the Americans set up a base on an island in the South Pacific. When they arrived, they made friends with the local tribal people by sharing their cargo. These people had never encountered anyone from off the island before. The Americans dug runways, put lights down the runways, built airport towers and for the duration of the war, planes came and went, bringing cargo.

After the war, the Americans left. 20 years later, researchers visited the island. They discovered that the local people had dug runways. They’d lit fires down the side of those runways. They’d built airport towers out of bamboo. They even had a guy standing on the runway with coconuts on his ears and sticks in his hands. But no planes were landing.

They were doing everything right. The form was perfect. It looked exactly the way it looked when the Americans did it. But it didn’t work because they were missing something essential.

I LOVE THIS STORY

I love this story. I love it because it illustrates how easily we’re able to fool ourselves when we don’t understand the essential bits of a system.

I also love it because it is the best analogy I’ve come across to describe how I feel about the world of technology we’re all trying to navigate today.

We’re not yet sure which parts of the system are essential and which are not.

In some ways it feels like we’re frantically diggging runways and lighting fires. We even have the little guy with the coconuts out there ready to do his thing. But it’s all too new and our experience too limited to know if any of it really counts.

SO I’D LIKE TO INVITE YOU TO JOIN ME

So I’d like to invite you to join me in exploring what I think might, at the end of the day, be the essential ingredients required to succeed in this changed and changing world.

That’s what I look forward to doing with you all today.

Use some of what I say, or use none of it. The choice is yours…

OH HOW THIS WORLD HAS CHANGED

Oh how this world has changed…

Twenty years ago in 1997 I was privileged to spend the first three months of my Grade 11 year on a school exchange at King’s School Canterbury.

Kings was the oldest school in the world — in the year I was there it was going to be turning 1400. Now let me tell you where things were technologically in 1997.

Email had just been introduced at King’s and the school had one email address: info@kings-school-canterbury.ac.uk. To send an email, you had to write your email on a word processor, save it to a stiffy disk (who here knows what a stiffy disk is?) and drop the disk into a pigeon hole in the computer centre. The computer teacher would then copy and paste your note and send the email on your behalf from info@kings.

Receiving email was an even more spectacular a process. It would involve going to the computer center and looking in the same pigeon hole where there would be perhaps five or six A4 pages, folded and stapled closed with a name scribbled on the back. These were incoming emails printed by the computer teacher and if the scribbled name was yours, you had mail!

10 YEARS LATER WE SAW THE INTRODUCTION OF THE IPHONE

10 years after my time at King’s (and neatly 10 years ago) we saw the introduction of the iPhone. Can I have a show of hands to see how many of us here own an iPhone or anything similar. If you have a Microsoft device please don’t raise your hand. Isn’t that incredible?

And how many of us here today remember the day the iPhone was released? (That’s one way to feel old.) I remember that day very well. I was living in London at the time and had waited in great anticipation for its launch. My friend Rob and I queued for 4 hours to get ours. We rushed home to open these rare, mystical devices and sat showing them off to a number our mates who had come over to swoon.

You would not believe the reactions we inspired that evening. We sat zooming photos with our fingers, in and out, over and over again. We were all in complete awe at features everyone in this room takes completely for granted today.

When that iPhone came out you couldn’t choose your apps because the App Store had not yet been invented. The phone shipped with a fixed set of utility apps: calculator, calendar, maps, photos, weather, notes, email, music and a web browser. These were apps that you used only when you needed them rather than when they needed you. That first iPhone didn’t have 3G (edge was as fast as your data connection got); you couldn’t copy and paste; and you couldn’t forward an SMS. We are talking about the dark ages, people.

Fast forward another 10 years and every person in the room now has one of these devices.

SUCH CHANGE. GREAT PROGRESS?

Such change. Great progress? Well yes, in some ways. The challenge we face is that we’re great at recognising the benefits new technology brings — and there are many, very many — but we are terrible when it comes to measuring the things it takes away.

Let’s talk about two of these things. One that reflects on the impact technology is having at a very personal level and one at a global level.

THERE IS A COMPUTER SCIENTIST AT GEORGETOWN

There is a computer scientist at Georgetown university called Cal Newport. He has written a book called Deep Work that I’d highly recommend.

In his book, he describes how modern technology has brought about what he calls,

“a thousand pinpricks of daily obligation, each of which appear completely harmless, but which as a group obliterate our capacity to do deep work.”

Just one more WhatsApp message, just one more Facebook message, just one more email, just one more Instagram notification. And before we know it, the day is over and we have done nothing of any depth.

THE INSTAGRAM NIRVANA

In a recent article on inequality by the renowned British Physicist Stephen Hawking, he points out that the exponential growth of communication technology means, to quote from the article, “that the lives of the richest people in the most prosperous parts of the world are now agonisingly visible to anyone, however poor, who has access to a phone. And since there are now more people with a telephone than access to clean water in sub-Saharan Africa, this will shortly mean nearly everyone on our increasingly crowded planet will not be able to escape the inequality.

The consequences of this are plain to see: the rural poor flock to cities, to shanty towns, driven by hope. And then often, finding that the Instagram nirvana is not available there, they seek it overseas, placing new demands on the economies of the countries in which they arrive, undermining tolerance and further fuelling political populism.”

It’s pretty heavy stuff.

But these technological changes are here to stay so we must learn how to succeed in this world. Fortunately Cal Newport and Stephen Hawking begin to provide answers which I’ll come back to later.

SO WHAT HAVE I LEARNT ON MY OWN JOURNEY

So what have I learnt on my own journey hand in hand with technology; from that first email address at King’s, back to Hilton as Head of School and into my life at Yuppiechef and now at Names & Faces?

Well let me return to Kings…

One of the classes I took while there was Art. I had arrived half way through my class’s 3 month project and I was going to be leaving half way through their next. So the teacher recommended I sit at a new PC they had just installed in the classroom. He proposed I make my project for the term designing the logo for the school’s upcoming 1400 year anniversary celebrations.

Having no idea what I was doing, I spent the term teaching myself how to use some of the earliest versions of Photoshop and CorelDraw and hacked my way to creating a logo. The logo was terrible, but the school liked it and indicated this by using it prominently across all their celebration materials, giving me a great sense of confidence in my ability to design.

I returned to South Africa with a unique, new found skill that felt to me like a super power. The more I designed, the more positive feedback I received, the more I kept designing, and the better I got.

Since returning from that term away design has played a central role in almost everything I have done.

I DIDN’T KNOW IT AT THE TIME

I didn’t know it at the time — but what I spent my time at King’s and subsequently doing was what Cal Newport describes as ‘Deep Work’. The broad premise of Newport’s book is that most people who have risen to the top of their games, regardless of their field of expertise, have done so by developing the capacity to spend 2–3 hours a day, uninterrupted, focussed on the same body of work and over again. They have ignored the 1,000 pinpricks and have found a conviction to focus.

I was lucky in 1997. I didn’t have the technological distractions of today but the premise is the same. Time and concentrated effort in the face of distraction.

Which leads me to my second story…

SIX MONTHS AFTER I RETURNED FROM KINGS

Six months after I returned from King’s, on this day in 1997, it was announced I would be Head of School in 1998. I had always made an effort to know people within the school, but now more than ever, I was struck by how the juniors in the school knew all the seniors while few of the seniors knew the juniors. We walked past the same people every day on the same paths, both pupils and staff, and we were all part of the same school, but if you weren’t in the same house, class or sports team, it was difficult to get to know who was who.

I also became increasingly aware of the difference it made to a junior when I greeted him by name. I needed a solution for myself as I was adamant I’d know every person in the school in my coming matric year.

So I went to my headmaster, Mike Nicholson, and asked if I could make a book that displayed a photograph of every pupil in the school and every staff member in the school. Not a leaver’s book or a year book — a Names & Faces book featuring a photo, basic info and contact details. We never had individual school photos back then, so when Mr Nicholson asked how I was going to get everyone’s picture, I explained I was going to walk around the school with a check list and the first digital camera any of us had ever seen and photograph every pupil and staff member wherever I could find them. He said I sounded crazy, but he liked the idea and agreed to pay for the printing if I managed to pull it off.

The digital camera I used had recently been imported by our Geography department. It was a Casio QV-700. It was a 350,000 pixel camera with 2MB of onboard memory. I could take 14 pictures before I had to download the photos to my computer. Armed with this and my recently acquired design skills from my exchange, I started walking around the school with my check list and I photographed people wherever I could find them: in their dorms, in the dining room, in the staff room, at sports practice. It didn’t matter. I then spent three weeks typing and laying the book out in Word Perfect (a programme which some of you may remember) and we printed a copy for every parent, every staff member and every pupil. And to my delight, everyone loved it.

In the following year, as I was headed to university, a number of schools in the Midlands asked me to make Names & Faces books for them. I spent hundreds of hours taking photographs and laying out those books. My family has vivid memories of walking into my room at 6.30am on several occasions to find me still awake from the night before, working on Names & Faces.

As I got older and moved further away from school, Names & Faces was not a business idea I actively pursued. But every year a handful of schools would get in touch to confirm we were on for the production of the following year’s Names & Faces books, keeping the idea very much alive. The Hilton College Names & Faces book (which is now the app) is in its 20th year.

On leaving university, I worked at Standard Bank for a year. I remember walking into their Simmonds Street head office in Johannesburg where there were 50 people on my floor and thinking, “Wow, a Names & Faces book would be useful here.” But soon I discovered how quickly things change in a business environment compared to a school environment and realized a book would be out of date in a week.

The people I mentioned my frustration to told me to use the people directory on the intranet. But I soon discovered the intranet was terrible. It was badly out of date, information and photographs were missing and I could only access it while sitting at my desk. But most significantly, I could only use it to find people whose names I knew. I couldn’t browse it to get to know the names of people I didn’t yet know.

As I worked and studied in different environments, I noticed this problem over and over again. Until one day, when our Yuppiechef team had grown from 3 to 15 to 50 people, I walked into work and thought to myself, “Who is that customer service person we hired three weeks ago? I interviewed her, I know her husband’s name, I know her background, but I can’t remember her name!” All I wanted was a quick list of my people so I could start a real life conversation. Our intranet didn’t help, WhatsApp didn’t help, Facebook groups didn’t help. What I wanted was a Names & Faces book.

So after stepping back into a non-executive role at Yuppiechef, I called Pete Ducasse and asked if he would allow me to run a trial of a digital version of Names & Faces at the school. He said yes and so once again, almost 20 years on, Hilton College gave me the opportunity and the platform, to solve my own problem and start my next business.

Today we are a team of six at Names & Faces at the start of an exciting journey and I am finally giving this fledgling idea my full attention. Our technology is used by you all at Hilton, by your friends at Michaelhouse and St Annes and now by more than 100 companies around the world.

The journey of Names & Faces which is still very much work in progress has taught me of the need to have courage in you own convictions and values. I believe very deeply in the power of personal connection and personal relationships — increasingly so as the world becomes more virtual.

As my team and I share our very simple idea with organisations around the world we’re excited and encouraged by how many of them share our values and ideals. It has been fascinating to see an idea that began at Hilton 20 years ago meander patiently through the Midlands before finding its momentum around the world today.

Which leads me onto my third and final story about Yuppiechef.

YUPPIECHEF WAS STARTED BY MY TWO PARTNERS

Yuppiechef was started by my two partners, Andrew Smith & Shane Dryden in 2006. Andrew was at Hilton with me and was the smartest guy in our class. After school we both headed down to UCT. Andrew was going to study Computer Science and I was going to study Business Science. But after three months, like all good techies, Andrew decided he was wasting his time and left university to return to Maritzburg to join a web development company.

Over the years we kept in touch and worked on a handful of projects together. Andrew would build the backend technology and I would look after the front end interface design.

I was aware that Shane and Andrew had started Yuppiechef in 2006 but had not heard much about the business from them. Then one day in 2007, while living in London, I received an SMS from Andrew saying, “We’ve just had a fairly large order from your mom.”

So I sent a cheeky message to my mom saying, “Easy on the spending on Yuppiechef…” Within seconds she asked, “How do you know where I have just used my credit card!”

I explained that my friends ran the website and they had let me know, to which she replied, “What other websites do you friends run which we should know about before we choose to transact on them?”

Over the early part of 2008, Andrew asked me to help with Yuppiechef’s design and marketing efforts. Then one day Andrew called me and said, “This business is tiny, we are doing about 5 orders a day, but we’re excited about it and believe that with the right people onboard we can do great things. We have no money to pay you and we can’t draw salaries for at least 18 months, but if you give us blood, sweat and tears we’ll give you an equal piece of the pie.” And that is how we became a team of three.

(Can I have a quick show of hands to ask who here has ordered from Yuppiechef before?)

But the best part of the Yuppiechef story and the part that convinced me that what Andrew & Shane were doing was special was something they did right from the start.

In August 2006 after making the Yuppiechef site live for the first time, Shane sent an email to as many people as he could announcing its launch. The site featured just one brand and thirty products. After a few days the guys received an order from Bevan Dryden. Shane’s surname is Dryden. Bevan is Shane’s dad. The next person to order a few weeks later was a family friends of Andrew’s. The person after that was more family of Shane’s. Until in November of that year, a woman called Denise Gunner ordered a cheese grater from us.

Shane looked at the order and said, “It’s no one from my family. It must be someone from yours.”

Andrew then looked at the order and said, “It’s no one from my family.” They looked at each other and realized it was their first real stranger! But Shane said he couldn’t just put the product in a box and send it off. He had to write her a note to say thank you. So he wrote,

“Dear Denise, thank you so much for shopping with us. Enjoy your cheese grater. Shane and the Yuppiechef team,”

which was Shane and Andrew, sitting in their lounge in Plumstead waiting for the next order to trickle in. And when it finally did a few weeks later, they wrote another thank you note. After five or six orders, each of which included a handwritten note, we received a response from a customer saying, “Wow, I can’t believe my parcel arrived in 24hours and I can’t believe it arrived with a handwritten note! You guys must be so busy. How do you find the time to hand write cards?”

At Yuppiechef it took us a year to get 200 customers. Today on a busy day we’ll do more than 200 orders in an hour. And if you visit our offices you’ll find the names of those first 200 customers frosted on a wall of glass in the entrance.

Today, anyone who joins our team, whether they join as a box packer or as the financial director, spends the first hour of their first day learning how to write cards and helps write cards when our customer service team, who do most of the writing, are swamped with orders.

Because ever since the day Denise Gunner first shopped with us in 2006, every parcel that has ever left our building on its way to a first time customer has been shipped with a handwritten card from someone on our team.

WE COULD NEVER HAVE PREDICTED THE GROWTH OF YUPPIECHEF

We could never have predicted the growth of Yuppiechef at the beginning. All we could do and all we’ve ever been able to do is start small and put one foot in front of another and trust our gut along the way.

In today’s age of celebrity obsession, instant gratification and the constant fear of missing out, it feels unfashionable to simply keep your head down and chip away slowly at the same thing. But for us this has been important and essential aspect of our journey.

Stephen Hawking ends his piece talking of the Instagram Nirvana — let me explore that a moment.

THE HERO’S RIDGE

Since reading his article a few months ago a picture has been developing in my mind that I am intent on having an artist paint for me. It is a painting of a landscape. In the far distance is a great ridge and standing on this ridge are 4 or 5 hero-like figures. These heroes can be whoever or whatever you choose, but they are typically people or companies who garner mass admiration today. In the world of tech startups, these heroes might be Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon — darlings of the tech world.

These figures are the picture’s main focal point. They’re gloriously silhouetted by golden light that radiates towards you, the viewer. After admiring these heros for a few moments, you lower your gaze and notice, for the first time, a massive expanse of desert between you and the ridge. As you look a little closer, you notice the desert has tens of thousands of people trying to cross it, but the conditions are terrible and many appear to have perished on the journey towards to the light.

Then you shift your focus and you notice what looks like a small green field on the far right of the picture. It’s not entirely clear what is going on inside the field, but there are a bunch of people in there, too, and each of them is doing something different. Because the painting lacks the necessary detail, you can’t make out exactly what they’re up to but that part of the picture looks lush and has a good energy so you can tell that whatever it is they’re doing, they’re doing with focus, dedication and delight. And then you notice one last thing.

You notice a path leading out the back of the field. You can’t be sure, but it crosses your mind that it might be a completely different route to the ridge. You follow the path as best you can but it quickly meanders off the right edge of the canvas, into the wilderness and out of sight.

For me this picture tells a tale of many of the misperceptions we suffer from that are brought about by how we’re using technology today. Misperceptions about start-ups and what it takes to build one, misperceptions about a good life and what it takes to live one, misperceptions about people and how we think they’re feeling, and misperceptions about ourselves and what we’re truly capable of.

MY VIEW IS THAT IN 15 YEARS TIME…

It is my view that in 15 years time we will look back at how we are using technology today in a similar way to how today we look back at sugar and tobacco.

Don’t get me wrong, hundreds of millions of us will still be using tech in similar ways, but the more informed perspective will be, “What were we thinking and how could we not have known how bad it all was for us?”

But herein lies the opportunity:

It is my contention that now more than ever, if you are one of the few individuals who is able to minimise the distractions of technology in your life while consciously developing your capacity to focus on one thing uninterrupted, for extended periods of time, (something that was far easier to do in the late 1990s and the early 2000s), you will make extraordinary progress.

I want to relate once again to my daughter Hannah, who by this point in the story you’ll be glad to know, has re-joined our family.

WE DO OUR BEST TO MINIMIZE THE TIME…

We do our best to minimize the time Hannah spends on devices. We don’t do this because we think the device itself is bad for her. We do it because we can see that the alternatives are so much better for her. Playing with her friends, negotiating toys, having conversations with her parents, reading books, climbing and falling out of trees, fighting with her brother, and potentially being so bored that she has no choice but to develop her own imagination rather than staring catatonically mesmerized by a screen.

SO DON’T BE PARALYZED BY THE LIGHT

So don’t be paralyzed by the light. And don’t be drawn in its direction. The path you need to start down is the unexpected and meandering one somewhere off to the right, that neither you nor I can see from where we stand today.

There will be difficult times. Don’t shy away from these. It is often during our hardest times that we learn life’s greatest lessons.

And depending on how you start, the people around you are likely to think you’re crazy.

If it’s 1997, they will certainly think you’re crazy if you tell them your start involves solving a small problem by finding 500 people scattered across a 1,200 hectare estate and photographing them using a 350,000 pixel camera.

If it’s 2008, they’ll think you’ve taken your crazy up a notch if you tell them your start involves joining your two friends who have built a website with 1 brand and 30 products to sell kitchen tools to people over the internet.

And they’ll know you’ve finally lost your marbles if in 2017 you tell them that your start involves doing exactly what you did 20 years ago, only slightly modified now, to suit the iPhone.

People thinking that you’re crazy really doesn’t matter. Because they don’t know where your path might lead and the truth is, neither do you.

All that actually matters in the end is that you find the courage to walk your own path, that you find the conviction to focus and that you get out there and START.