Aren’t You Tired of All These Masterclasses?

You might have more passport stamps than I do but nowhere in your travels have you seen a gravedigger hosting a masterclass on how to dig a hole. It’s because men’s success has been hijacked into showmanship about what you do at work and not what it helps you do in life.

See, nobody hoards happiness more than a man that goes about quietly doing his job, paying the bills with his earnings, saving for a rainy day and educating his children. 

This man has no interest in telling you how he did it because to him, his success is making sure that the poverty and illiteracy that ravaged the generations before him do not rear their heads into his lineage. 

Success, to him, is not how he climbed the corporate ladder, leveraged his network, optimized Artificial Intelligence to fast track his annual sales targets or whatever people copy and paste from Google to say in front of underpaid middle management professionals scrolling their phones for vacancies.

Surgical analysis will show that life is a logistical nightmare that cannot be condensed into some K800 per head breakfast with a life coach. 

But we go with it because success now has a template. An endless litany of qualifications, coupled with many years of local, regional and international experience in a fast-paced multi-cultural environment. Dear Lord.

Anything else and you haven’t made it in life.

You’re not successful – and have no capacity to lecture anyone about it – because you’ve only educated your children, sibling’s children, built a house and have a steady income stream as a welder in Garden Compound. 

Success, at its bare minimum, is doing the work, getting paid and clearing the balance on your child’s university fees. But we have placed where we work above what the work does to help us protect, lead and provide. It has created derision about how you earn a living as a man.

I can hear it already. Who’s stopping plumbers from teaching people how to unclog the toilet in a tavern. True but who’s lining up to pay K1,500 to hear how to be successful? 

A generation of men sheep herded to the notion that they’re not successful if they earn a living using paintbrushes, spanners, brooms, engine oil, grinders, tile fix or a welding machine. Can’t post my workplace on social media? No, thank you. 

Expecting every man to follow the same success path is juice that’s not worth the squeeze. So, let’s leave the next man to carry on with his carpentry, plumbing, building, cooking, tailoring, panel beating and mechanical work.

We’ve probably overthought the entire reason we work. The impact of what we do will always speak for itself. You don’t even know the guy that cut down the tree for your casket. But his family does because that’s how he leads and provides.