I'm an idiot

OK, it’s not quite that bad. But for someone who has been trained and is supposedly good at seeing market gaps I missed a BIG one, which is a market in Cape Town where you can consistently get fresh, organic veggies AND your grass-fed meats AND (well you get the idea). I have to run all over town sourcing these things, and if I miss a weekend at the Biscuit Mill … well it’s better now than it was because I can buy the good meat from the gym. But really. Took my co-worker suggesting this as a way to make sure that our GrowZone entrepreneur/franchisees could make a good living from growing organically. Well, heck, if the numbers make sense maybe we’ll make it happen. First thing is to ask Wild in Woodstock why they aren’t already doing this, and whether they’d potentially be interested in collaborating.

Also this morning I figured something out that in retrospect is so incredibly obvious that I was an idiot not to see it sooner, and an even bigger idiot for taking so long to figure it out! See, when something is not internally consistent there is always a reason why, and Occam’s Razor states that the simplest explanation is the one most likely to be true. So, in this case, the answer to my puzzle was not only staring me in the face, but had literally been said to my face, and I missed it because I thought it wasn’t the main message. Puzzles, always puzzles. Well, that’s what keeps life interesting I suppose, except that when I can’t figure something out, my nature is such that I keep trying. Sometimes I think it might be better to bash my head against a brick wall! Anyway this is a long story and not interesting to pretty much anyone except for me so I won’t bore y’all with the details.

I will again repeat the power of kundalini yoga – usually I go in there and just try and clear my brain so that whatever it does to my brain just happens. Today I didn’t even bother, I just let my mind go and it spun and spun and spun and then finally I figured out what I was thinking about. Back to that whole sometimes you can get where you want to go by letting up a little bit; not the easiest type of thing for a type A personality!

Also, shocker, the world doesn’t revolve around me, and because of our egos we all tend to forget this. Sometimes when you think something is about you, it’s actually about somebody else.

So, an interesting weekend all the way around and if I had to sum up how I feel right now it is incredibly at peace, but also extremely excited for the future.

Saturday started with the beach workout. Like an idiot I didn’t put on sunscreen so I wound up getting a little sunburn/wind burn. We met at Camps Bay and then the wind was so crazy that we moved to Clifton where it’s usually better but it was still pretty bad there. Our warmup was to run to the end of the beach and back and on the way back the wind came up and seriously it was like sandstorm hectic – I was yelping with pain as the sand hit me and tried to run behind a big rock! That was some serious exfoliation.

The workout itself was fine, although we didn’t beat the other team at the metcon part because we were not doing the same workout (I am not going to say they were cheating because it’s actually true that we just interpreted the rules differently). Then we jumped in the ocean, and moved back to Sandbar where we had lunch including some amazing double chocolate cookies one of the guys had brought from the Biscuit Mill. I had a bit of a surreal experience here, I was talking to these guys something about a yacht in Bali and then all of a sudden I thought of Mama Rosie and her son who died in the shack fire and I realised just exactly how separate our worlds were. Sometimes knowing something intellectually and having it actually hit you are two different things!

There was another weird experience at this lunch where one of our coaches was talking about paleo man and how paleo man would do something like work for 4 hours and then play around for 4 hours, and that this was more natural or something. I just burst out laughing and couldn’t control myself, it was very strange. The thought of only working four hours a day is just unfathomable to me. I am not sure I could do that. But the uncontrollable laughter was also very strange…

After lunch I headed to the market, and my streak of being able to go in there and do some surgical shopping came to a crashing halt as I ran into a couple of people. Apparently there’s going to be a good party a week from Tuesday but I might not be in town. Hoping to get back to Boston in time to catch Laa-Laa, who leaves on the 23rd. On this week, my freebie from the grass-fed meat guy was some lamb pomegranate sausages which were amazing!

The evening featured two braais, and mixing about every kind of alcohol you can think of! I started with home brewed beer, and moved on to red wine, mojitos, more red wine, then finally martinis at Asoka! And today I feel fine, albeit a little dehydrated. And I do want to report that the CrossFit boys ate most of my cookie because I temporarily abandoned it. Guess that’ll teach me to leave an undefended cookie around but hey, I didn’t really need the calories anyway.

As I write this I am sitting in the same café in Kalk Bay that I went to last weekend. Wow, I can’t believe last weekend was only a week ago, it actually seems like about three weeks. I needed to come here to clear my head and get some work done; somehow motivation today to work at home wasn’t the best! I think I was sitting at the Wellness Warehouse with a couple of people and it took me about an hour from when I started talking about leaving actually to get around to doing it!

I think I’m giving up milk again. It’s just not working for me. Also, I really don’t like marshmallows. Why do you give out marshmallows with coffee anyway? Strange…

Unrelated (makes sense, there’s not much in my world related to marshmallows!): I’ve been thinking a lot recently about loss aversion bias. This essentially says that we fear loss much more than we enjoy the potential for reward. This is why it is not natural for us to take risks, and why most people never jump off of proverbial cliffs. It’s also why we get stuck in ruts, and it happens so gradually you may not even necessarily realize you are in the Grand Canyon of a rut! I was in more than a bit of a rut at my old job, I was quite bored. Got some news yesterday that my old boss, the CEO, had been fired by the board. Don’t know a lot of details as to why, but that’s interesting. I am curious to see what happens next. I guess it will be kind of exciting to go back and catch up with my ex-co-workers, one of whom is going through a really tough time personally just now so hey maybe I can provide some emotional support of my own.

But back to the loss aversion bias: I think the core lesson here is that we must be more thoughtful about our decision-making. This cartoon says it best. And, actually, I am now thinking back to the one part of the conversation I had in this very café that stuck with me, when I was asked what, exactly, I am afraid of. Good thing to ask yourself whenever you catch yourself afraid to do something, or trying to talk yourself out of doing something like finding a new job, or moving to a new place, asking out that cute girl across the room, or even just throwing yourself into something fully. Hmm, like lifting heavy weights: if you don’t believe you can do it, you won’t, but if you give it a try you might just succeed. So: what are you afraid of?