A Hustler's Bible

A Hustler’s Bible

By GAYTON McKENZIE

Also by Gayton McKenzie

The Choice: The Gayton McKenzie Story 

– as told to Charles Cilliers

Published by ZAR Empire

Tel: +27(0) 11 472 5161, +27(0) 73 920 5585

Fax: +27(0) 866 959 870

charles.cilliers@gmail.com

Company reg. no 2012/094195/07

A Hustler's Bible

By Gayton McKenzie

Published by Gayton McKenzie at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Gayton McKenzie

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Editor and e-book formatter: Charles Cilliers

Proofreaders: Kate Whitaker, Liezl Basson

Cover designer: Kobus Faber

Cover photograph: Moloko McKenzie

ISBN: 978 0 620 55772 6 (epub)

Dedication

This book marks the anniversary of exactly ten years out of prison for me. In that time, so many people came my way and helped me to build my life, step by step, day by day, to achieve the many things I had only been able to dream about behind bars. 

I would never have made it without all of you. 

You know who you are and you know what you mean to me. I dedicate this book to you.

The Hustler’s Way

I can’t be described adequately. Nobody can be. The word that comes closest to who I am is ‘hustler’. That’s me. The definition from the Urban Dictionary I like best is:

Being a hustler is about the way one lives one’s life. Going out on the streets, or wherever, making money and working hard for it. A hustler is not lazy, he’s consistently out earning money. He gets the money by using his smarts and outcunning everyone out there. A hustler has ambition and a more serious approach to life. He’s more mature. It can apply to any race, and it’s the way you hold and carry yourself.

Obviously, the word has its associations with street crime and gangsterism. That’s not how it’s used in this book and that’s not how it should be understood. It’s not how many young people use it today. 

The principles of hustling apply equally well to those trying to make it as honest people who don’t have book smarts, but can still outthink, outmanoeuvre and outpace everyone else in the room – regardless of how many degrees or diplomas they may have. That’s not to say you shouldn’t get an education, but just because you don’t have an education doesn’t mean you need to think you’re stupid, act like you’re stupid and assume people who do have an education are smarter than you. Even someone with five PhDs doesn’t know everything – but he also doesn’t think someone who’s studied something he hasn’t is smarter than he is.

The important thing is to learn how to think and behave. Fix your attitude, and the rest will follow.

I wrote this book for the guy who doesn’t have the luxury of funds or time to go to university right now. I wrote this for the graduate without a job; for guys who don’t want to be just anyone, but somebody; for guys who don’t know what to say or how to behave when they find themselves in the company of people they admire or want to impress; I wrote this, too, for girls grappling with the questions of family and career. I wrote this for somebody like me, who knows that come rain, sunshine or thunder I will drive the car I love, I will live in a big house, and I will give to charity. I will live the high life, but not beyond my means, and not forgetting my roots. 

I never saw this as a sweet, fleeting dream, but as something I was willing to work hard for. And to hustle for.

Most importantly, I wrote this book for the person who is tired of just surviving; for the guy who is fed up with avoiding private numbers because it might just be one of the many institutions he owes money to; I wrote this book for the guys who have long figured out that most of what we are being told about making it in life doesn’t really deal with the hurdle of something like living in a township, or being released from prison with no savings, no inheritance to count on and no one to borrow money from; most importantly, I wrote this book for the young people who don’t want to go into crime or go back to it, but who don’t think they have another choice. I wanted them to read this book to understand that there is a choice, that you can live an honest, productive life no matter your circumstances or your background. If I could do it, then anybody can.

I wrote this book to inspire and to encourage you to choose the best version of yourself you can be, and to live the best version of your life that it is possible to live.

People like me come from a place not known to produce many captains of industry and billionaire-club members; in fact, we supply the workforce for these captains. Our own people are often shocked by and frown at our ambitions to climb the social ladder into positions of authority where we can join elite clubs. 

Some, with the best of intentions, try to save us from heartache by discouraging us from following our impossible dreams, not because they don’t believe in us – they just know the scales are heavily stacked against us.

In this book, I will deal with issues many people might deem unnecessary, too simple or less important. For instance, having the right table manners and grooming habits. To many, this is hardly worth writing about, but to the next guy this is precisely the thing that might prove the difference between winning over a possible funder or never hearing back from him again. 

This book will, however, also be dealing with deeper issues, such as my personal philosophies as well as practical matters such as the importance of contracts. We’ll be touching on whatever I wished someone had told me in my own climb to the top.

Someone once asked me a very important question on Twitter, which made me realise I may well be knowledgeable enough to write a book like this. The question was: what qualifies you to give me advice?

Here’s my answer:

I come from a poor family. I joined a gang at an early age. I committed heinous crimes that landed me in jail. I spent around ten years of my life in a maximum-security prison. I did crime simply because I knew the life of my father was not the kind of life that I wanted to live: that of a semiskilled worker who can only offer his time and his hands without any prospect of any real financial success. 

Doing those crimes was a terrible mistake and at some point in prison I finally realised that. I made a vow that I would come out of jail and be even more successful as an honest man than I had ever been as a bank robber. At first I wasn’t sure how I would even begin to do that as all I had was a dusty old matric school certificate that no one would care to even look at.

I paid the hard price for my crimes. My whole youth was taken from me. But through a hard-knock life I learned lessons you cannot find in any classroom or book. I used those lessons to assist me in my climb to the top. After jail, I managed to go from a starting salary of R1 000 a month to earning R1.5 million a month. 

While most ex-prisoners rightfully complain about not being able to find a job, I rose to become the acting CEO of a mining company listed on both the Johannesburg and London stock exchanges. I built a life for myself, for my family and for many other ex-prisoners desperate for a chance in life. I founded one of the most successful mining consultancy companies in Africa, with the world’s fourth-largest gold-producing company as a client. 

I did that in spite of my past, in spite of having a criminal record, in spite of never having attended university for a day. This success has earned me numerous enemies who simply cannot accept that someone like me can succeed by not treading the well-worn institutional path with its ivy-clad walls. They consider me an affront against the social order, against the very nature of society.

To them, I seem to break the rules – but what they fail to see is that I abide by a very specific code, and a set of rules every bit as instructive as the things you can learn at the Harvard Business Schools and the Cambridge Colleges of the world.

To many, my success should be impossible, but as my hero Muhammad Ali once said: Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.

And despite all my successes, I continued to take crazy risks that could have lost me everything. And at one stage, I almost did lose everything. But I came through it and I’m still here. I write about that too because I now know, better than most, what works and what doesn’t.

You might not agree with some of the things you’ll read here. You might be right and maybe I’m wrong – but the risk of being wrong is not going to stop me from releasing this book. As my friend Kenny Kunene, who you will also read more about in this book, always tells me: If you don’t want people to criticise you, then you should do nothing. But if you do nothing, you will be nothing. And you will die having achieved nothing.

If you’re reading this book, the first decision you need to make is that you want to be more than nothing. Much more.

Some of what’s in here is straight, plain advice, told as simply as I can tell it. But the rest of what’s in here are stories from my life, with lessons you will have to interpret and see for yourself, much the same way that I had to when these things first happened to me. Maybe you will take your own lessons from my experiences, maybe you won’t. But, as they say, if you can learn from another guy’s mistakes and successes, then you don’t have to make those same mistakes yourself; you can build on the successful foundation already laid by others. That’s the way real progress happens. And maybe it’ll be you writing your own hustler’s bible some day, with advice that’s a whole lot better than mine.

One thing you will not find in this book is a lot of advice that only applies to someone who is down-and-out. That is just a starting point, but if you read this book, you should accept that there is a long road ahead of you, with much that you need to know and understand on your road to success. 

So, really, this book is for anyone, no matter how far along you may already be in your hustle. There will be something in here that will speak to you.

Most of what’s in here is for someone who has started a business or a project and then finds himself in the deep end, unsure of how to think and behave. So you will find a lot about how to run a business, what happens when the big money starts streaming in, how to deal with having staff, business partners and big investors – and a lot more that other business books deal with. 

What’s different here, though, is it’s told from my perspective, of having had to face all those things myself, without being prepared for it by my upbringing and my past. The lessons meant double to me because I needed them twice as much as other people. 

So yes, this book will mostly speak to people who want to be their own boss, who want to manage other people and be a leader who other people are proud to follow. Because that is what I have tried to be, it’s what I know and can write about. There’s advice in here for those of us who don’t want to be leaders and visionaries, but most of the book is written for those who have a burning desire to lead – not because they want praise and glory for being the boss, but because they are ready for the responsibility that leadership bestows.

This book was also born partly out of seeing and reading those popular road-to-riches books written by (mostly) Americans who don’t know anything about our lives except that we might keep a few wild animals in our back yard. Some, if asked what a township is, might say that it is a ship in town. Soon after you buy these American books you realise the author may as well be speaking about life on another planet. He or she certainly isn’t talking to the everyday, down-at-heel African.

I have seen people obsessively clutching books like The Secret, Rich Dad Poor Dad and The Instant Millionaire, but many people who grow up in a township don’t even have a dad to begin with. A poor dad would be an improvement. 

The advice of something like The Secret suggests you must believe and wish for something and if you do this regularly and faithfully enough, then that thing you are visualising and wishing for will eventually be yours thanks to the power of attraction. They also call this the power of the subconscious mind. That may seem to work for some, but for the rest of us, especially where I grew up, there was little else going on except people spending their whole lives wishing for things, but they attracted nothing much – nothing much worth writing about anyway.

That’s why this book is for the people who know that to get anywhere in life, you have to hustle like crazy for it.

I see the same people who were reading these popular self-help books years later, and for many of them I see no visible improvement at all in their lives or their behaviour. These people are serious about having better lives, but it’s difficult to improve yourself if a lot of what you’re being told to do simply doesn’t apply to your realities. Most self-help books have not been written for this economy or the kind of upbringing many in Africa receive.

I will use many examples of well-known people from America because these are people we all know, but I will also speak of a few lesser-known ones from Africa – whose stories we can learn from.

This book is for the person who can’t see success as an option but as a necessity – they know that funding for their project will not easily come their way. They are the people who will have to build from the ground up. For them, it could take many years, perhaps even more than one generation – but they do what they have to do because the only other outcome is failure, and failure is not an option.

Many a business book I read always cautions against using your last few cents – they always say that if there is no cash there is no business, but they just don’t get that our last cents are sometimes also our first cents: what we have scraped together to start a business. The worst thing you can do is wait too long to start something; people will always give you more reasons not to do something than to do it. 

Another favourite line in these American books is that you should try to get an interest-free loan from your parents. Those of us lucky enough to have them, have parents who mostly survived on loans all their lives. They’ve struggled just to put food on the table, let alone being able to lend you a dime. You can forget about that.

It’s very hard to find solutions for places you do not know. One can’t provide answers to problems you aren’t familiar with, but that’s what some of us hope these American books will do. It was Einstein who once said if he were given only an hour to solve the problems of the world, he would spend the first fifty-five minutes trying to properly understand its problems. 

Really knowing the problem helps. Solutions are hiding in the very structure of problems. If it turns out you think a problem has no solution, at least you’ll know you can spend the rest of your time trying to solve the things you can.

I’d like to think I have done my fifty-five minutes of looking at the problems, and that this book is my five minutes of attempting to deal with some of the hurdles we hustlers face, both in our personal lives and in the business world. This is not just a business book. It’s a life book.

Ultimately, I hope this book inspires, irritates and moves you to action. Whatever the reading of this book does to you, I hope, most of all, that you can put it down on the last page with a powerful sense of knowing that, indeed, you can make it. No matter your circumstances, someone who was once worse off than you is much better off than you today. That should not make you feel jealous. That should inspire you.

You may want to crucify me for having written such a thick book, but I wanted to include as much as I could about everything I needed along the way. I didn’t want to leave out that one paragraph that could be the difference between failure and success, even if just for one grateful reader. So skim over what you think you don’t need, but don’t think yourself too good to learn (and relearn) new (or old) lessons. There’s also so much more I wanted to say, but this is the start of what should be your own personal journey to discovering more and always wanting to know more. No book will ever contain all the answers to all the questions you may have.

So enjoy, learn, interrogate, implement.

Welcome to the hustler’s way.

The Dog is Not Dead Yet

For many years, after my release from prison, my life consisted of driving around, with the occasional flight, giving motivational talks. But driving to my speaking engagements was what I did most. I once encountered a hitchhiker. I never usually stop for them but this one caught my attention simply because he was holding a huge bucket and had a strange object next to him. So I stopped more out of curiosity than kindness. The strange object was a dog, and a sick one at that. 

I immediately wanted to drive on, but his excitement on seeing me prevented me. The man was on his way to a vet for his sick dog. But when I looked at the dog I immediately knew this poor animal stood no chance. It would be just a matter of hours or even minutes before he would most likely be dead. 

I told my new passenger that he was wasting his time. The dog was going to die.

He replied, without thinking: The dog is not dead yet. 

I then said: I know, but it is going to die soon, to which I got the answer I was still going to get more than ten times during our drive: Yes. But it is not dead yet. 

Reluctantly, I allowed him to put the dog on the back seat on top of a covering of newspapers. I allowed all of this only because it was a rented car. 

The poor mutt had foam coming out of his mouth. He looked abject. The man loaded his bucket and cloths into the boot of the car.

We played our game of verbal tennis all the way into town, me pointing out the seemingly obvious fact that the dog had no chance and him repeating that the dog was not dead yet. 

Tiring of this, I tried to steer the conversation to something more clearly constructive and asked him what he was planning to do with his bucket and cloths.

He replied that he had no money but intended to wash a few cars to use that money to pay for the dog’s medical bill. I realised that I was giving a lift to either a total madman or a deeply caring person. Probably both.

He told me he was a worker on a farm that had recently shut down and he survived by doing odd jobs for different people. I also learnt he had never been to school. Because I realised that he had a great love for his dog I kept on reminding him that the dog was going to die – I felt it was important he start to accept the inevitable now instead of try for some impossible cure that would only needlessly cost him money – but he just patiently replied every time that his dog was not dead yet.

He was a man on a mission to find some cars to wash and then pay for his dog’s bill. In town, after asking around, we got directions to the animal clinic. 

My conscience pricked me and I offered to pay the R1 200 (about $130) that was required to treat the animal. I gave the man another R200 for a lift back home in case he failed to find another curious driver. 

I also told him that I would be heading back on the same route in about four hours anyway, so if he couldn’t find a lift he was welcome to wait for me.

I went on to my daily hustle of speaking to school kids and my passenger soon left my mind. Many hours later, in the urgency of rushing back home, I almost forgot about him, but when I got to the town again I remembered that he might still be around so I drove towards picking him up.

By this time it wasn’t just about curiosity. I also felt empathy for a man who must have just lost the dog that he cared for so deeply. When I got to the medical centre’s street the first thing I saw was that my hitchhiker was bouncing a tennis ball and a very not-dead dog was running after it and bringing it back to him. It turned out the dog needed a drip and some antibiotics, but it was going to be just fine.

The dog was jumping up and down, and I still don’t know who was happiest in that moment: me, the dog’s owner or just the dog.

He gave me back R500. He told me R200 was the transport money I had earlier given him, which he wouldn’t need now. Another R200 was because the vet’s receptionist had made a mistake by quoting R1 200 when it had actually been only R1 000 and the last R100 was because he had seen two very dirty cars and had simply washed them. One guy berated him for doing so unasked but the other one’s owner was a woman who was so happy about it that she gave him R100. 

I didn’t say a word on our way back. I couldn’t, because my eyes were filled with tears the whole way. I struggled to even see the road properly. I cried because I didn’t know, coming from prison, that people like this still existed. I cried because I was thinking about all the excuses I had heard from prisoners who said they are stealing because they are poor. But I was crying most of all for this man’s simple display of gratitude.

When we reached his destination, I handed him back the R500. 

He thanked me as if I had saved his life instead of the dog’s. He asked me what my name was, which made me feel guilty because I should’ve asked him that question much earlier. 

I said: Gayton. He replied that he would honour me by renaming his dog Gayton to remind him of how he had one day met a good man. 

I told him I would be honoured if he did. 

And I sped off so that he would not see the rush of my tears. I simply could not hold them any more.

I took so many lessons from my experience that day and the phrase the dog is not dead yet has come up in my mind so many times over the years to remind me never to lose hope at times when many others would simply have given up. 

I want to return to the many lessons of this story, but first you need to read the rest of my book.

Commitment to Dreams

Upon my release from jail I looked at the different career options available to me. Nothing interested me more than becoming a motivational speaker. Before I could go into business I needed to spend several years rehabilitating my image. I wasn’t naive about it – no one just forgives and forgets that you were once a bank robber, and I knew it would take years to turn that around. I accepted that fact and I knew that the sooner I could start my talks and reach as many people as possible, the sooner I could build towards my long-term goal of being seen as a man who is much more than just another ex-gangster from jail.

I knew that just calling myself a motivational speaker would not be enough though. It’s a very competitive and a very unusual profession – the people who make it are all dynamic, highly unusual, charismatic and very memorable characters. I knew to say I’m a motivational speaker would only have meaning if I was being booked in favour of the top speakers on the circuit in South Africa, for more bookings and for more money. 

I knew I had a long way to go.

Motivational speakers are like the rock stars of the business world. Unless you’ve actually seen that world, it’s hard to understand it – but if you’ve ever been part of a talk or a seminar offered by a motivational speaker, then you’ll understand a little bit about the kind of world I wanted to be a part of, while not really being the kind of person normally embraced by the speaking circuit.

I suppose you could say Mike Lipkin was one of the first guys in South Africa to make motivational speaking a well-known and even respected profession. While he was doing his Say yes! stuff I was in prison, but I knew all about it and there was something about the idea of being a motivational speaker that just took hold for me. It was a small seed and it never stopped growing inside me. While Mike Lipkin was travelling the country, speaking to as many people as he could with his positive you can do it messages he was also doing his bit to inspire a country deeply divided by years of apartheid. People were yearning for positive messages in South Africa, which was being bombarded daily with bad-news stories, fear and the constant threat that perhaps our young democracy wouldn’t make it.

It’s still much like that today – all the more reason for people to need people who truly motivate them.

By the time I came out of jail in 2003, Mike Lipkin had already moved back to Canada, but the motivational speaking circuit was by then already pretty established and companies were willing to set aside significant amounts of their budgets to invite guest speakers to their workplaces to inspire staff with something new and different, while breaking up the humdrum monotony of the daily grind. Many employers noticed that having a motivational speaker address staff could get people more focused and productive for months, so they saw it as a necessary investment in their business – which it is. Employees easily get stuck in a rut and lose sight of the big picture and their bosses are stuck in their own rut. It often takes someone from the outside to inject more energy into a work environment.

It doesn’t always work, but a truly exceptional motivational speaker is able to plant seeds among a few members of staff almost everywhere he or she goes, which will blossom and show fruit in some way – sometimes only years later.

The most rewarding part, for me, of ever having been a motivational speaker, has been those moments, many years after I gave a talk somewhere, when someone approached me and told me that I stopped him from committing suicide and he turned his life around. Another would say I gave her the courage, through my own story, to leave her abusive husband and build her own career. Some of the school kids, from the millions I spoke to, looked me up years later to say that they gave up crime and drugs to become young entrepreneurs, lawyers, medical students, race-car drivers – you name it. I heard so many things that both humbled me and made me beam inside with pride.

There are also the many, far-less-dramatic stories people have told me about how I simply brightened their day or gave them the most memorable talk in their school career. That mattered to me too. The small victories are as important as the major coups.

That sort of stuff gets what you do to make sense.

In prison, I didn’t really understand what the big fuss was about this bald guy, Mike Lipkin, in his yellow T-shirts, but I realised I was also sharp-witted, had a unique personal story and a few terrifying prison ones, I could tell a few jokes and I really believed in the power of following my own dream so much that I wanted to inspire other people to follow theirs. Mike Lipkin didn’t have the come-from-nothing life story that I wanted to tell people about – but he was still able to inspire people on a massive scale, and he had become a household name in the process. I wanted to be able to do what he’d done, but with an even more substantive message.

While in prison, it eventually became a huge dream of mine to become one of the best motivational speakers on the speaking circuit. To achieve this, soon after my release I asked Ria De Villiers to help me get started and she put her heart, soul and reputation on the line to see me become a success.

Before she recommended me to anyone, though, she asked me to give an ad hoc speech at the St Andrews School hall in Bloemfontein – just to see if I had any potential at all. Present was Charles, who’d later go on to help me write my life story, and two other teachers. 

The plan was that I would give my talk and they would critique it – and man, did they. They told me what had worked for them, and what had been beginner’s nonsense – which, according to them, was most of it. 

They said I could think it over and perhaps we could try again in a week or so.

I was really taken aback. I thought they’d all be blown away by my talk. I’d been thinking about it for months on end – in prison, it was just about the only thing I’d been pondering in my bed, staring up at the ceiling. I’d been convinced I could blow anyone away with my hard-hitting message. But these people just sort of looked through me and tapped their pencils on their notepads.

I asked them for a few minutes, to think it over right there and try again immediately. I tried to leave in and improve on the few things they had liked and I tried to find solutions for the many problems. 

They were a bit happier the second time – but I was made to start over, time and again.

In that situation, had I still been thinking like a gangster, that situation would have been somewhat different. No one criticises a gangster; no one makes a gangster go back and redo anything. A gangster takes that kind of thing personally. By the third round of criticism I would have probably just taken out a gun, made them all hand over their wallets and jewellery and left. Maybe I’d have shot Charles, whose criticisms were particularly annoying, in the knee – but if I’d let my ego dictate my response that day I would have been utterly lost. 

Those people were honestly trying to help me. The best thing I ever did for myself was not going into that hall (or any of the thousands I went into after that) with an inflated ego and a don’t-you-mess-with-me kind of mentality that so many youngsters always have. 

I went in there as I was: a person badly in need of the kind of help and advice that would bridge the enormous gap between being an ex-con with a dream and a motivational speaker with an action plan.

I was willing to do anything required of me. Many of us ask for help, but then lose our way. We sit in classrooms and instead of paying attention and absorbing valuable lessons, we try to show off or become the teacher ourselves.

My internship as a motivational speaker was probably about as tough as it gets. I started with high school kids – and believe me, there is no tougher crowd than a room packed with more than a thousand noisy teenagers, who are all out to prove how generally unimpressed they are with everything. 

My first talk went reasonably well but there were many mini-disasters in the beginning. 

At Eunice Girls’ High, for some reason I decided to play a recording of I Believe I Can Fly by R Kelly – in the middle of my talk – as if this was a song only I had ever heard before. But the sound was terrible and my CD had already been played to death so much in my car that the track started jumping. Then we couldn’t get the damn thing to stop playing until someone had the good sense to switch off the entire PA system and reboot it. 

I recovered what little dignity I could scrape together and finished my talk. Fortunately the girls seemed to love it anyway and were queuing up to take photos with me afterwards (so I couldn’t have been that bad), but it taught me a lesson that stayed with me for the rest of my career. I never used any technical gimmicks ever again. 

I developed a set of talks that never needed any CD player, laptop, PowerPoint projector or even a microphone. I could deliver my talk, projecting my voice across the dusty fields of a township school’s soccer field with the same impact as I could deliver it to a group of twenty directors in a seminar hall at a research institute in London. I learned how to read any group, get their attention within the first minute of standing up in front of them, and deliver a talk that would appeal to them in a way it wouldn’t to someone else – I didn’t always get it right, but I almost never got it wrong – and that was all thanks to year after year, day in and out, speaking to school kids – and in the beginning for no money at all.

To most of the people who’d always known me, trying to figure out what the hell I was doing, I was a freak who had lost his mind. I was ridiculed daily by the gangsters who’d once rolled with me, who now would point at my broke ass in my community as a warning to the other kids about how the mighty fall when they think they’re better than everybody else.

But I didn’t care. I ignored them because they didn’t know my goals. They ridiculed what they failed to understand. I stayed focused. I spoke at places where the audiences were at first not the least bit interested in what I had to say, and I learned that you have the first sixty seconds to turn that around – I figured out how to get that right. 

 I was asked the most brutal questions by school children and I learnt how to field almost anything and everything. Chubb gave me my first opportunity, but I never took anything for granted. I worked my butt off, sometimes doing five schools in one morning, a business and its staff in the afternoon and everyone from the community’s parent-teacher association that night. I lived off lozenges and TCP, and I would speak no matter how sick I felt, no matter how bad my flu was, no matter my mood or my migraine. For five years I didn’t take a single day off and I spent my evenings reading books about the greatest speeches and speakers in history. I endlessly watched videos and listened to recordings. It completely consumed me, because I understood that it’s not enough to just be good at something. It only really matters when you are absolutely bloody amazing at it.

Putting in those hard yards with the school kids finally began to pay off. Those kids all had parents and some of those parents had businesses – some of them owned entire industries. I started hearing from Chubb that some people were inviting me to speak at their businesses because their kids simply wouldn’t shut up about me. At first I’d charge R2 000 a talk. Then we got braver and it went to R5 000. It just kept getting more expensive all the time. At some talks, I later earned R50 000 an hour, and the main reason I could charge that was that some companies were willing to pay that. Had I started out thinking I would earn R50 000 an hour I’d still be at home dreaming about it (though I don’t think I would really have believed it possible). I started out doing it for free, but I built up momentum steadily. The snowball effect is as true today as when it was first mentioned. If you roll a small snowball down a snowy mountainside, by the time it gets to the bottom it might be as big as a car. Or so I’m told – I’m yet to find myself on a snowy mountainside.

The point is, just start and you’ll collect all the substance you need along the way to grow, improve and become unstoppable.

As a speaker, it wasn’t even that long before I was fully booked. New Beginnings, a company that specialises in motivational speaking, chose me as their best speaker for three years in a row. I built