The week that was 20190601

PROUDEST | MOST GRATEFUL MOMENT

Yesterday the Cape Town team enjoyed another Cheers for Peers. We spent the morning at the National Art Gallery. It was wonderful to take in all the colours, line and form; the beautiful, the weird and some downright disturbing art pieces. This was followed by breakfast (milk tart and lemon meringue breakfast for Winet and myself; the guys were much less sensible with their bacon and eggs :D). 

I am so grateful to spend time with the team. 

MY BIGGEST LESSON THIS WEEK

The day before I left for Rwanda, my desktop computer gave me a weird threatening message, something about issues with my hard drive and that I should back it up otherwise everything would be lost. I promptly ignored it. The day that I left, I received a similar message, so decided that it might be prudent  to maybe back up some of the folders, turned off my computer, and was sure that a week of not working on it would sort it itself out. Sadly it did not, the threats were real.

Fortunately, we work on the cloud, so all was not lost. This exercise has however forced me reevaluate my backup system and has had me clearing out A LOT of clutter on one of my external hard drives. As I was going through the drive I came across many old projects that we had worked on over the last 14 years and it was quite interesting the emotions that it elicited. I was quite surprised at how resentful I felt towards some of the people that have crossed our path in the past who have absolutely taken the mickey out of me and my team.

This exercise did make me realise how far we have come in terms of our core focus as well as having measures in place to avoid past mistakes as far as possible, but that wasn't the key lesson...

This week I finished the brilliant book, Left to Tell, by Immaculée Ilibagiza who survived the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Her story of love and forgiveness is remarkable (a highly recommendable read). Reading about her journey, I realised how incredibly petty I was for being so resentfulness towards people from the past that disrespected us as a team. Instead of working myself up in a tizz and getting angry and annoyed all over again, I sent them love. It was liberating and quite incredible to feel how the weight lifted.

WHAT MADE ME GIGGLE THIS WEEK
More a reminder...

WHAT I read this past month
I absolutely love reading and am aiming to read at least three books a month. I've kept track of the books I've read here. [Instead of reviews on that page, I use emoticons to remind myself whether I liked a book or not:  :D for brilliant, :) it's good, :\ it's OK, :( = terrible don't waste your time]

Besides Left to Tell that I've already mentioned above, I also read:

Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson, was recommended by the World Economic Forum's book club in January. I requested it from our local library and was so ready to get tucked into it. It only arrived at the beginning of May! I then set myself the target to meet the return day of 31 May 2019, exactly a month to work through it. I felt a bit resentful that I had to read it NOW instead of earlier in the year when I had hoped to and was a lot more excited about it (I think this is a GenX trait of feeling resentful of doing things on other people's time not your own :) ). Apart from that, Leonardo da Vinci is fascinating, brilliant and it was wonderful to spend my mornings with him this past month. 

The other book that I finished and thoroughly enjoyed was The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. This was my nighttime read. I started it at the beginning of April. For some or other bizarre reason, I thought that it was science fiction,definitely not!

One last thing