I’m listening to Tim Ferris’s podcast where Neil Gaiman, one of the best fiction writers alive is talking. His voice is hypnotic. It penetrates straight to the emotional mind. It’s not only because of his majestic accent but also the passion he shows when describing writing.

Nietzsche through his many illnesses and madness still found the focus and thinking that would go on to inspire generations of thinkers, including Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Herman Hesse, long after his death.

I don’t like Mondays. It’s as if my soul leaves my body on Sunday night and only returns on Tuesday morning. Maybe it’s a feeling that I have inherited from my 11-year-old self during my school years, where dread and anxiety took control of me most Monday mornings. Or perhaps it’s the fact that I haven’t been enjoying my work for a long while now and Monday is the first day of non-enjoyment.

Gibran wrote in both Arabic and English, and his best work was produced in the era of the Roaring Twenties in New York, USA. He was influenced by the free thought and exuberance of that time, and he was regularly associated with W.B. Yeats, Carl Jung and August Rodin. His seminal book The Prophet is amongst the best-selling books of all time after the Bible and Shakespeare’s collections.

I love how honest and refreshing he is, not only to the public but to himself. He doesn’t paint an evangelical picture of himself trying to save mankind as so many other people do, but instead, he is honest enough to say that he does it for himself.

The story is told of the CEO who calls his CFO to authorise the travel and associated costs of an expensive training programme for some core members of his team.  Aghast at the high cost for the programme, the CFO remarks, ‘we are spending all this money to train them.  What if they leave our company even after we have spent all this money training then?” The CEO was calm and responded, ‘Ah, but what if we don’t train them and they stay?’

My week started on a high as my football team, Man Utd, won a difficult game away to Chelsea. I don’t know what football does to me, but somehow it transports me to my 11-year old self. Winning means that adrenaline starts pumping through my veins, my heart beats faster and that immediately I’m in a great mood. However, when we lose, I’m best avoided for a few hours.

Acceptance is not an easy concept to understand. It is also one, which is saddled with many negative undertones. As Carl Jung said, “the most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”

It was apparently Dr Martin Luther King who said you don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step – and as I sat with a group of 70 odd women global leaders at a meeting convened by Vital Voices in Johannesburg, I completely understood Dr King’s words more so than ever before.

In Psychology, consciousness is defined as the individual awareness of our unique thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations, and environment. Our conscious experiences are continually shifting and changing.

It was towards the end of May 2011 and Manchester United, my beloved football team, was going to face Barcelona (with Lionel Messi) in the Champions League final at Wembley in England—a stadium that I knew well.

We are just like the many different trees standing in a forest. No two are alike. Perhaps one is more beautiful to look at, another can bear more fruit, and another has the strength to sustain a large area of earth through its extensive roots. However, they are not ashamed of their inadequacies, but rather stand tall in their true, special nature.

The price of entrepreneurship is uncertainty, and the prize is a vision fulfilled, success even in the midst of uncertainty. Much of the process of entrepreneurship involves tremendous risk taking. Risk that is buoyed with competency, skills, ability, networking, service excellence and good fortune. It is often the uncertainty in those moments that fuel your drive to success – and I think that is what Anita Roddick meant when she said that the survival nature of entrepreneurship fuels creativity

I write because I’m not blessed by any other means to access my mind. I write to make sense of myself—how I feel, what I want, and what I fear. I write to make sense of the world around me and to notice things more carefully. I write to understand what exactly I am meant to be doing in my life.

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realise that it had passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life, but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”

“Whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you’ve ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don’t see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect— between the two things I’ve mentioned: the floating or the swimming.

One trait that I constantly see in many of the terrific business leaders that I come into contact with day in and day out is courage. Courage can be defined as many things. Indeed it is defined as many things, but I guess one definition that really resonates with me is the definition of courage as the willingness to be afraid and to act anyway.

One morning, while taking a walk along the corniche, I saw a tattoo shop and went in out of curiosity. A short, boyish man with tattoo-covered arms looked up at me. “What do you want to do? I’m free for the next hour, and then it’s booked till next week Thursday,” he said.

The Gifts of Adversity are those things that seem like detours, but which turn out to be tiny re-adjustments that help guide us to our destination.