Many people I speak to pose the following question to me on a frequent basis: What can I do to ensure that I achieve success in my life? There are normally two things I mention first when trying to answer the question. The first one is that it is good for our society to have people who are prepared to confront this important question. The second one is that it is encouraging to see these people commanding the courage to actually go outside of themselves to seek advice on how to address questions related to their future.

South Africa is traditionally a society with very high levels of club culture and many people hide and enjoy easy comfort behind the power of organisations and institutions until it is too late to confront the fundamentals of their individual lives. That is why it is so good to see people, in their individual capacities, making conscious decisions to shun the culture of blind comfort and faith in favour of finding and fashioning things out for themselves.

Something that I find particularly pleasing as well is the fact that the question is not asked only by young people starting out in entry level jobs in the world of work. The question is also raised by young people studying at universities and other institutions of higher learning as well as relatively mature people who notice that they are losing time. What that means is that people are becoming increasingly aware that their backgrounds, educations and talents alone will not necessarily make them successful. That has resulted in many of them starting to rigorously embrace looking for assistance from people they perceive as likely to help.

As a personal principle, I try to avoid oversimplifying things by giving clear-cut answers to difficult questions. In any case, I have always considered success to be something highly subjective. There is already too much in our society that we glorify and regard as success that is not and will never be. I sometimes feel compelled to take a stand. Unless there is plenty of time available, I normally just engage people in talks about issues such as having a strategic plan and having mentors and eventually doing a lot of self-study to understand both yourself and the world you live in.

I have always held the view that knowledge and skills consciousness as a concept does not yet occupy the centre stage it needs to occupy in the lives of many people in our country. There are still far too many South Africans who are outside of the mainstream learning processes. The situation is made even worse by the fact that many young people continue to be born into and raised in environments that disadvantage them in terms of development.

Too many of the people I see or speak to do not have easy access to people with relevant, value-adding and cutting-edge knowledge to help them build their careers and shape their lives. The sheer size and complexity of the information available in the world today makes it absolutely necessary that our young people as well as people disadvantaged by poor schooling have affordable and simplified access to people and institutions who are both repositories and competent processors of information. This will help them accelerate their learning and move quickly into the performance or implementation phases of their lives.

There are two main learning processes in our society. The first one is the one that takes people through good schools and serious tertiary or higher learning institutions to make them ready for both work and life. The second one takes people with limited education and puts them in learning-rich occupations and gives them more or less the same chance of success in life as those following the first route.

The second route, although much more unpredictable to pursue for people looking for more than just survival in life, is the one more readily available to the majority of people in our country. There is simply no way an economy built to cater for the needs of only five percent of the total population is suddenly going to find the resources to put each young child through tertiary education. The problem, though, is that the route of achieving real success through diligence with one’s job is not properly appreciated.

The job route is poorly marketed as an avenue for not only earning a livelihood but also for launching successful and rewarding careers. What needs to be appreciated is that the number of our young people who are fortunate enough to go straight from school to university, much as we support and value their contributions, are a tiny minority and will not give us the critical mass we need to meaningfully reverse the frontiers of poverty in our country.

This means we must work hard to stop people following the job route from going mechanically and half-heartedly through their job processes without fully appreciating the rich and rare opportunities at their disposal. We must teach them to learn to work for more than just their salaries. We must teach them to work for learning, development and success. We must teach them to work for the success of the eternal dream of removing Africa from the basement of continental prosperity table.

Many young people who are not able to move straight from school to university do not have family backgrounds steeped in proper career management and learning in general. So it takes them a long time to make sense of the work situation and devote their creative energies and courage to using their jobs to achieve success for themselves and those they love or owe. Our society must do everything in its power to ensure that these young people are given the best support in order to increase their chances of success in their jobs. We need to provide them with proper and effective mentorship and talent management programmes at both work and community levels.

It is only when we seriously take care of our jobs that we can increase the chances of turning some of them into careers. I know that in the current economic climate employed people have a bigger chance of losing their jobs than unemployed people have of finding employment. But that makes it even more imperative that we give people the know-how to keep and develop their jobs into viable careers.

Broad-based and effective participation in the economic mainstream processes by the previously marginalised people of our country is and must be what the next phase of our transformation is about. But people cannot enter and participate meaningfully in the mainstream economy unless they are first allowed to be part of the mainstream learning processes.

We must take steps to turn our country into a place where the majority of our people choose to turn every job into a career. That way we can lay a solid foundation for those with courage and creativity in our society, every society must have its fair share, to take us a level higher by turning some careers into callings.

Many of the big organisations that employ thousands of our citizens in our land today were envisioned and created by courageous people who shunned comfort and embraced what they believed to be the callings and purposes of their lives. South Africa owes it to itself more than anybody else to continue to produce and support this rare breed of people.

Gibson Sakong
Executive Chairman – Montshepetja Academy