9781529301496

If by some miraculous biological impossibility you were
the only person ever born and alive on Earth, you would be
free of the physical insecurities, life anxieties and worries
about how successful you are or aren’t that we’re all riddled
with now. In your mind, you would already be ‘enough’ –
because you would be the richest, happiest, prettiest,
skinniest, smartest, sexiest, funniest, most successful
person alive. You would be the standard of ‘enough’ in every
conceivable way.
This is why, as a young kid growing up in a relatively poor,
dysfunctional family while living in a middle-class
neighbourhood, I felt unhappy, ashamed and riddled with
feelings of inferiority. The lazy CEO in my head was at work
contrasting my life in the context of the middle-class white
kids I lived among. They seemed flawless and happy, so my
comparison-seeking mind concluded that I was inferior and
that I was not enough.
This damming conclusion of myself presented one clear
answer: if I could just get the things that my lazy CEO mind
used as a measure of comparison to conclude that I was
inferior – if I could have the nice things, the perfect family, a
perfect house and lots of money – I would finally be enough.
So off I went, charging into the world in pursuit of
everything I thought I needed, believing that it would fix
something that was never broken and was only inferior in
the irrational, toxic context that my lazy CEO comparisonobsessed
brain had created.
What I didn’t tell you was I was actually born in a small
poor village in Botswana, in the south of Africa, where there
was an average life expectancy of just 49 years at the turn
of the century.
Had I not left that context as a baby, my family would
have lived at the very top of the social ladder and I would
likely have grown up feeling completely differently …