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- [00:00]
Vusi Tembegwayo
Foreign.
- [00:05]
Chikwandi
I don't know if you're ever gonna listen to this. Nice note. My name is Chikwandi. I am from Malawi. I just recently graduated. When I was in second year for our speech class, my speech was about high heels, like the history of high heels. So when you went back to like the Persian soldiers and the aristocrats and how it became like a woman's thing, it was just like, oh yes, I did this. Most importantly, I just loved how you were able to dive into it and how to make heels so relatable in the sense of like when a woman wears heels. When I wear heels, I feel more powerful, I feel more confident. I feel like I can conquer the world literally. So to be able to take that feeling and approach it in my day to day life, in the things that I do, even now as a graduate trying to either find a job or start a business or just try to figure out the direction I want for my life or the trajectory that I want for my life and to have the heal effect, as a friend of mine calls it, the heal effect. It was really, really nice. Thank you so much. I loved, loved. I think this is perhaps my favorite episode of all of your episodes and I am so grateful. Thank you.
- [01:10]
Lesley
Hello family. My name is Lesley. I'm from Pretoria and I'm still a student studying. I've been a fan of VT podcast for quite some time now and I've been learning from listening to those podcasts and also implementing what you have said. And I could say that it, it is working because of I see a change in my life. The way I think, the way I talk, the way I present myself, even I can see the change in your conversations that you have. In a way they build the person that I'm trying to be. Actually my favorite podcast or my favorite topics that have touched hills and submarines, those are one of the favorite topics that you've touch. And I actually have two questions from you. One is which is which books would you Recommend for a 22 year old boy from Pretoria to read? And other question is at the age that you are now, what is something that you have wished you would have known by the age where you were 22 or 23? Thank you.
- [02:23]
Vusi Tembegwayo
It's time to take your seat at the table. Find out how with Vulcit Tembegwayo as we discuss ideas that matter. A catalyst for bold action. Do you see what it took? Is it clearer who you see when you look in the mirror? That little treat courtesy of one I think is one of the greatest ever to hold a mic. One of the greatest ever to occupy the booth. The one, the only, the incredible Keenan Forbes of also known as. Also known as AKA AKA did you guys get that? Hello, family, and welcome to another episode of the VT Podcast. And here we talk about ideas that matter. So excited to be back in the studio, back at the booth. I've been traveling, I've been all over the world, I've been jetting about and I've thoroughly enjoyed all of the stuff that I've been doing all over the world. This is in part why you've not heard from us at the VT Podcast for some time. First, second, I'm very excited. We've also been setting up our video studio. So very soon you guys will be able to enjoy the VT podcast on YouTube and in video. I'm going to be interviewing guests. We're doing some really, really cool, exciting stuff. We've thought about the programmatic stuff, we've thought about segments, guests, and we're breaking the whole thing down. It's going to be a banger. And you know it's going to be a banger, right? Because we are right up there with one of the top podcasts in both the country and arguably the continent. And all of that said, we only do an audio format podcast. We don't have a video element. So could you imagine how the VT community and the family is going to all congregate the minute we add video elements to this? It's going to be so, so, so exciting. This week, friends and family, I want to talk to you a bit about the things I wish I knew when I was 22. And I'm really inspired by the audio that we started this clip with, right? Because this young man says, he says, what are the things you wish you knew when you were 22? Are the books you'd recommend to your 22 year old self? And I'll share both with you. You know, just kind of as I warm up again to us getting back on stream with our podcasts, the five things I wish I knew when I was 22 and the five books I would recommend to myself at 22. These lessons are the lessons that if I learned them, would have saved me an awful lot of time. But sadly, as is often the case in life, it's only experience that can give us wisdom. Certain things you literally need to experience. You can't read about them and then have the wisdom, right? Reading about it gives you the knowledge. Experiencing it gives you the wisdom and the distance between knowledge and wisdom. Is this thing we call discernment, the ability to be able to discern based on the wisdoms that life has given you. So what are then the five lessons Vusi Tembegwayo thought he or would have loved to learn or wished he knew when he was 22? Lesson number one, it takes as long as it takes. Whatever it is that you're working on in your life has a natural cadence, a natural rhythm, a natural speed. Now, in the modern day, we love to hasten things up, we love to quicken things up. We have quick everything, quick meals, instant meals. We go to the fast foods and it's the food that is fast. We go to the gym and we want to get the quick workout, the 12 month, the 12 week plan, the three month plan. And all of these things that we're doing, we do them so that we can accelerate the results of getting to the end point. We've become such a result obsessed generation that we don't even take the time to enjoy the process anymore. And what I've learned over the years has been that the lessons I value the most don't come from achieving the result, they come from honoring the process. So the first lesson that I wish I knew when I was 22 is to be a student of the process. In fact, to enjoy it, to recognize that it's going to take as long as it's going to take. Lesson number two, a hater is somebody who secretly envies you. If I knew this, I would have saved myself so much trouble and strife and anguish and fighting over people, I didn't realize this. But when I started doing exceedingly and exceptionally well and God was really, really, really blessing me, the higher up I climbed, the more hate I started getting. Now, when you're a high achiever, as some of you listening to this podcast are, let me tell you a bit about the life of a high achiever. High achievers are quite used to standing on the stage and hearing a round of applause. We are high achievers. So throughout our lives, we've always been the ones who are first, second or third in whatever conquest that we're in. We're very, very affair with standing on the stage, standing on the platform, holding a trophy, and standing and looking at the audience and hearing the round of applause. It takes a different set of experiences but also a different kind of wisdom to be able to deal with hate. And when I was younger and less experienced, I didn't know that all the haters I had were people who just secretly envied what I had achieved. It took me taking a step back and watching those people try to move in the spaces where I had moved, try to occupy seats and positions that I had occupied, and try to leverage the influence that I leveraged over people to recognize that they didn't hate me, they just hated my anointing. See, when somebody hates on you, it's not you they hate. It's not you or how you look or how you sound. It's not where you come from or what your background is, or what your education is, or whether or not you are educated. It's not even whether or not they feel that you are qualified for that job. What they really, really hate is that God was in the neighborhood, skipped over them and anointed you. It took me the longest time to learn that the hater hates the idea that God gifted you something because what that means to them is that God said they were not worthy. Haters hate because they haven't learned to unlock their own gift yet. You'll never be hated on by somebody who's unlocked their own gift. They're too busy maximizing it, they're too busy leveraging it. They're too busy living in the moment of that dream. Some people hate you because you represent who they would have liked to be. They come from a, I don't know, wealthy background and you've had to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and so your success makes them look like non achievers, not because they are less wealthy than you, but because you did it from the ground up. Or as Drake says, we started from the bottom, now we're here. That's the second lesson. I wish I knew. The third lesson I wish I knew was to return the phone call when I'm thinking about it. A week ago I got a call from a friend of mine who told me that a mutual friend of ours had passed away very young, in his 30s, and he'd suffered asphyxiation or something to do with his chest or his heart. He had several health complications. But two days prior to my receiving that call from this particular friend, the mutual friend, who's now late, sent me a WhatsApp. And he said, hey bro, I just dreamt about you. And something told my soul to call you and see if you're okay. I called. You didn't answer the phone. So here's the WhatsApp. So later on that day, as Vusi is wont and anybody out there who has my number will tell you this like I'm one of those people you send a WhatsApp to. It's going to take me a day or two, maybe a week, could be three to reply, but I'll get to it eventually. So later that day, and I was sitting on my study desk and at home, and I was scrolling through copious messages. I'm on 762 Unread at the moment, so forgive me if you're one of the people who's messaged me and I haven't come back to you. And I found his message and I picked it up and I was like, oh, okay, cool. And I replied to him and I said, hey, bro, really busy at the moment. I'll. I'll give you a ring when things calm down. Guess what? 48 hours later, he was dead and things hadn't calmed down. Sometimes the gift of the present is exactly that, the present. What I should have done, frankly, was just as I read that message, pick up the phone and phoned him. I should have said to him, hey, Benny boy, how you doing? I miss you. I know we haven't spoken in a long time. I wish you well. I hope the family's good. I hope God is keeping you. And if there's anything I can do, just feel free to reach out. Now, I can't make that phone call because if I do, he's not the one answering it. The third lesson I wish I knew was to return that phone call. The fourth lesson I wish I knew when I was 22, was that money is buying time. The role of money is not to buy gifts, it's not to buy holidays, it's not to impress people, it's not to. It's not even to buy you comfort. The role of money is to buy you the single thing you cannot manufacture. Time. The way banks calculate our wealth is completely incorrect because they keep our wealth in the currency of that nation, whether it's the United States dollar or the Aussie dollar or the British pound or wherever you might find yourself. If you're in Latin America, it might be the peso. But if your life's bank account were truly to be counted, it would be in the seconds that you lived. It was in that beautiful song in the early 2000s by perhaps one of the greatest rappers to come out of South Africa, duxinganga, who said, 525,600 minutes. How do you measure a year? And I think it's important for us to remember then that the role of the money we make is to buy time. So, yeah, go out into the world, make money, have copious amounts of It. But the reason you do that is so that you get to determine what you want to do on a Wednesday afternoon. You get to go and watch your children play that hockey game. You get to take that holiday and go to the Rugby World Cup. You get to buy time. And the fifth lesson I wish I knew when I was 22 is that no matter how egregious somebody has wronged you, forgiveness is not a gift to them, it's a gift to you. There are certain blessings you will never be able to unlock in life. There are certain gifts God will never be able to give you because God is unable to bless a dark and tainted heart. When we forgive, then it is not the other that we forgive. It is a gift to ourselves. When we forgive, we open ourselves up to the wisdom of the universe. When we forgive, we open ourselves up to the grace of God. When we forgive. It's in the Lord's Prayer, isn't it? For those of us who are Christians, it literally says, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And I think over the years, one of the things I've learned has been I always thought that I had a short memory. It would really annoy me. Like somebody would do something that would piss me off and we'd part ways and it'd be fairly egregious. And I'd see them a few years later and I'd be smiling, giving them a hug, and greeting them again. I had forgotten what they had done that upset me. I'd forgotten that they'd stolen from me. I'd forgotten that they cheated me. I'd forgotten that they lied about me or lied to me. I had forgotten. And when I was younger, I always thought that that was a weakness, the inability to hold a grudge. I didn't realize that it was a gift God had given me to keep my heart pure. He rendered me mute, and he took that muscle away. So today, no matter how much I try, I genuinely struggle to hold grudges. What I wish I knew when I was 22 was that that's not a weakness, it's a strength. Forgiveness is a gift that you give to yourself. These five lessons, friends, these simple five lessons have shaped my life, and I hope they will do the same for you. But if you wanted to read books that have morphed and changed the way that I think, what then would you read? I might have shared this list with you guys before, but here goes. The first book I ever read that fundamentally changed the way I think about the world I'll never forget. I was in grade 11, standard nine, the South Africans called it. I was in my 11th year at high school and somebody gifted me this incredible book by an amazing man called Stephen Covey, who's now late called the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I read that book and it changed my life. The second book I ever read was given to me by a fellow who was working in investment banking. And at the time I was thinking about whether or not to get into ib and he said to me, you've really got to read this book. And I read this amazing, amazing book called the Richest man in Babylon. The third book I read that changed my life was the one that really changed the trajectory of my professional public speaking career. It was this amazing book that got me to really respect data analytics and the science behind having an idea. That it was one thing for you to have an idea, but quite another for you to have the science to back up that idea. It was written by this incredible man called Jim Collins and it's called From Good to Great. The fourth book I have an autographed copy and wouldn't be a book list without it is the Long Walk to Freedom by the founding father of our democracy, Nelson Mandela. And the fifth book that changed my life, a book that I'm still studying today. The more I read of it, the more I interpret. It is the Bible. And so for each of you here, I hope that from that list you can draw some inspiration. But at the very least that you might start thinking to yourself about where do you search and look for wisdom? I know that you've missed me and I've missed you too. That's it, friends. That is our podcast for this week. If you want to learn more about how you can connect with me or be mentored by me, go to vtclub100.com that's vtclub100.com It's a community that I run where I mentor people from all over the world. You get to connect with me on a one on one basis and attend my masterminds. And if you would like for us to help you scale your business, for those of you out there who are founders and entrepreneurs taking your business to the next level, we run the most incredible accelerator program you can visit SchoolOfScale co. That's SchoolOfScale co. Friends and family, that is our podcast for the week. I wish you good health. Sayonara. This podcast was proudly brought to you by my growth fund in partnership with Sound and Sounds Media.