Ewan's Corner

Posts Tagged ‘life’

I formally started at Derivco seven years ago today. What was supposed to be a one-year stint (before relocating to one of my favourite places in the world) turned into the best 7 working years of my life, while my personal life has also changed dramatically for the better.

Recently Derivco hosted the first GIBS Leadership Forum event in Durban. Keynote speaker was Brand Pretorius, chairman and chief executive of McCarthy Motor Holdings.

At the end of his speech one of the things he was asked was how he managed a work/life balance and his answer has been rattling around in my head for days. He said that if he could do it all over again he would spend more time with the ones he loved, and that by the grace of God his wife and sons still loved him.

I seem to daily face the tug-of-war between my desire to provide financially for my family (now and in the future) and my desire to spend precious family time with them – the two usually being mutually exclusive. I love my family dearly, and don’t want to miss out on time with my wonderful wife and amazing little boys as they grow up – I am privileged to come from a wonderful family with parents who sacrificed a lot to spend quality time with my brothers and I (my parents are about to celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary – rare indeed) and I believe it made a huge positive difference to all of us.

On the other hand I want my family to be financially secure and happy, now and in the future – and I need to work hard to achieve this. I know money can’t buy happiness, but ever since my little boys were born (and we made the decision for my wife to be a stay-at-home-mom if possible) I feel an even greater need to achieve at work – to provide. Money freaks me out sometimes. If you add the fact that I love what I do and where I work, and I always have far more ideas and plans than I ever have time to implement or follow through, it becomes even more difficult to maintain a balance.

Happily I think I do a pretty good job maintaining a good balance (my wife will disagree at times :-) and I believe it benefits me, my family and my work. I force myself to remember that although there will always be someone at work who can and will put in more hours than I do, I can still do a great job focusing on working smarter and harder rather than simply working longer hours.

It helps every now and again to listen to someone I respect and look up to in a business / leadership sense like Brand Pretorius, who has been there and done that. It also helps to talk to others in the same boat – I am definitely not alone.

“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

– Carl Sagan, May 11, 1996

Resources:
APOD for Oct 16th 2006 “In the Shadow of Saturn” (a newer perhaps better “blue dot” image)
NASA / JPL detail on the above image

Last night at 21h45 we welcomed Daniel Ben McPhail to the world – the newest member of the McPhail family :-)

All went well, Mom and baby are well and happy, and we have another wonderful little boy to thank God for! 3.4 kgs, 10/10 Apgar score – just like his older brother. Yet again I am incredibly proud of my wife, who endured a really painful final phase of labour when her epidural stopped working, and handled it all with a strength i (and i suspect she) didn’t realise she had.

I almost have feeling back in my right hand.

I can’t wait to see how Caleb reacts to his new little brother in person – visiting at the hospital tonight he kept crying “Daniel! Daniel!” and trying to get to the little person he has heard so much about.
Daniel you share your birthday with the anniversary of the first manned flight into space (Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man to fly in space – 1961) and the first Space Shuttle launch in 1981. You are obviously destined to become an astronaut, no matter what your mom says.

“As through the calendar I delve
I pause to rejoice in April twelve.
Yea, be I in sickness or be I in health
My favorite date is April twealth.
…”

- From “Lines in Praise of a Date Made Praiseworthy Solely by Something Very Nice That Happened to It“, by Ogden Nash.

Ten weeks and 3 days old – finally we can tell *everyone* about our latest blessing. Around April 24th 2006 (Clair’s birthday!) Caleb will be getting a brother/sister :) Everything is perfect so far, and we’re madly excited – personally I’m even more excited this time around, less to be nervous about, fewer unknowns, stuff we can recycle. We know we can handle a baby, emotionally and physically – and Caleb is such a wonderful little boy right now, he is practically a poster child for huge families. I don’t really have any boy/girl preference – ok maybe the idea of dealing with a girl is a little more daunting (especially when she starts dating… visions of me walking around with a baseball bat / shotgun). Clair definitely wants a girl – she placed her order when she was 5 :-)

I am so very very proud of my amazing, wonderful wife.

Thank you God. We are truly blessed.