Tanaka Mutakwa

Today is my 33rd birthday. As usual, I am excited about what the future has to offer.

I have tried to make it a tradition to write an article on my birthday. I unfortunately broke the tradition last year as I never got round to writing an article on the day. In the theme of not breaking the chain, today I would like to talk about building good habits.

As an avid runner, I am often asked by people how I’ve managed to successfully build a consistent running habit? That is a great question from a fitness perspective, however I think a more interesting question is – how does one build any good habit?

Today I would like to share 3 books that helped me understand the science behind building habits, what habits are, how to build good habits, and how to break bad habits. The lessons from these books have had a strong influence into how I structure my life and how I build consistency into anything I do.

I am not going to go into much detail about the books. The purpose of this post is to highlight that these books exist and are the ones I would highly recommend to anyone looking to have better control of their daily habits.

Atomic Habits by James Clear

This book reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviours that lead to remarkable results. The book is an easy read with many example stories that help make the concepts being taught easier to understand. It was the best selling book on Amazon last year which says a lot.

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

This book takes you to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. The book flows really well and uses research throughout to substantiate the concepts presented.

Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg

This book shows how you can have a happier, healthier life: by starting small. Change can be easy, once it starts, it grows. When it comes to change, tiny is mighty. As an example, start with two pushups a day, not a two-hour workout. In Tiny Habits, B.J. Fogg brings his experience coaching more than 40,000 people to help you lose weight, de-stress, sleep better, or achieve any goal of your choice. You just need Fogg’s behavior formula: make it easy, make it fit your life, and make it rewarding.

Final thoughts

Most things that you do are influenced by your habits. The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work.

I hope this article inspires you to pick up one of these books and start your journey to taking control of your habits.

#NoDaysOff

Today is my 31st birthday. I have always found writing to be a great way to leave a snapshot of my thoughts at any point in time.

Given that a birthday is a great reflection point I have decided to write an article every year on my birthday. I hope to come back to these articles in the future and see what my thoughts were on each transition into a new age.

This year my birthday falls at a time the world is going through uncertain times. A time of the COVID-19 outbreak. The virus has spread to almost every country, infecting a large number of people. It has crashed economies and broken health-care systems, filled hospitals and emptied public spaces. It has separated people from their workplaces and their friends. It has led to people losing their loved ones. It has disrupted modern society on a scale that most living people have never witnessed.

As I write this article my residential country South Africa has just gone into a lockdown period for 21 days in order to slow down the spread of the virus.

Everyone has been affected. We are all uncertain about what our future will look like. In times like this it is hard to not view the world with a negative outlook.

About 6 years ago when I was 25 I read a book titled “The Obstacle Is The Way” written by Ryan Holiday. The book is based on some stoic principles. I have always turned to the lessons from that book when I’ve faced some challenges or in times of uncertainty.

In the book Ryan Holiday reframes a forgotten formula for success: “What stands in the way becomes the way.”

He shares countless stories of great men and women who succeeded in their lives because they lived by this formula. Holiday says, “Whatever we face, we have a choice: Will we be blocked by obstacles, or will we advance through and over them?”

The book is about mindsets that help us face adversity effectively. It teaches us how to master our emotions, how to build emotional resilience, develop persistence, and how to resist what’s so hard to resist. It helps us live in the present moment and to accept reality as it is, and yet not to resign but always try our very best.

Given the global pandemic we are facing as a world, I thought for my birthday article this year I would share some of the lessons I learnt from reading “The Obstacle Is The Way” as a reminder of how to face challenging times in our lives.

Overcoming obstacles is a discipline of three critical steps.

The discipline of perception

Perception is how we see and understand what occurs around us and what we decide those events will mean. Our perceptions can be a source of strength or of great weakness. If we are emotional, subjective and shortsighted, we only add to our troubles. To prevent becoming overwhelmed by the world around us, we must learn how to limit our passions and their control over our lives.

It takes skill and discipline to take control of bad perceptions, to separate reliable signals from deceptive ones, to filter out prejudice, expectation, and fear. But it’s worth it, for what’s left is truth. While others are excited or afraid, we will remain calm. We will see things simply and straightforwardly, as they truly are neither good nor bad. This will be an incredible advantage for us in the fight against obstacles.

The discipline of action

Action is commonplace, right action is not. As a discipline, it’s not any kind of action that will do, but directed action. Everything must be done in the service of the whole. Step by step, action by action, we can dismantle the obstacles in front of us. With persistence and flexibility, we can act in the best interest of our goals.

Action requires courage not flashiness, creative application and not brute force. Our movements and decisions define us. We must be sure to act with deliberation, boldness, and persistence. Those are the attributes of right and effective action. Nothing else, not thinking or evasion or aid from others. Action is the solution and the cure to our predicaments.

The discipline of will

Will is our internal power, which can never be affected by the outside world. It is our final trump card. If action is what we do when we still have some agency over our situation, the will is what we depend on when agency has all but disappeared.

Placed in some situation that seems unchangeable and undeniably negative, we can turn it into a learning experience, a humbling experience, a chance to provide comfort to others. That’s will power. But that needs to be cultivated.

We must prepare for adversity and turmoil and practice cheerfulness even in dark times. Too often people think that will is how bad we want something. In actuality, the will has a lot more to do with surrender than with strength. True will is quiet humility, resilience, and flexibility; the other kind of will is weakness disguised by ambition. See which lasts longer under the hardest of obstacles.

You will come across obstacles in life – fair or unfair. And you will discover, time and time again, that what matters most is not what these obstacles are but how we see them, how we react to them, and whether we keep our composure. You will learn that this reaction determines how successful we will be in overcoming – or possibly thriving because of – them.

I hope these lessons will be useful for you in these uncertain times. They have certainly been useful reminders for me as I wrote this article.

I am confident we will get past this challenge as a world. The world is facing one common enemy that does not discriminate against any criteria. We will get over this together. Everyone has their part to play.

See things for what they are. Do what we can. Endure and bear what we must.

Who knows, after all this is gone, humanity might come out with some important positive learnings on how we should work together and how the world should be structured. There is potential for a much better world after all this.

Stay safe. Stay at home. Check up on your family and friends frequently. Flatten the curve!

Along with Benny Ou and Ruberto Paulo, I am excited to share that we will be starting a tech leadership meetup in Cape Town.

The idea is to build a community of longtime, new, and aspiring technology leaders. Our mission is for the community to help each other learn through conversation and sharing of ideas.

We will host a monthly meetup in Cape Town on the last Thursday of every month.

The first event will be hosted at the Prodigy Finance offices on the 29th of August at 6pm.

I am excited to see what this meetup will grow into over time.

Leadership is a learnable skill, however learning about leadership in the technology industry is often left to chance. This often leads to frustration for both leaders and those being led.

Many technology leaders get the job by default. They are the best or most senior technologist and suddenly find themselves leading meetings, negotiating for resources, making strategic decisions, participating in hiring, and a whole range of other mission-critical activities that fall outside of the technical toolbox. The world of leading / managing talented technologists can be messy.

We have many leaders practicing different leadership / management approaches from various companies around us. We can all learn from each other by coming together and sharing our experiences.

We aim to create an open community of people managers and technology leaders to exchange regularly about managing teams, solving difficult organisational topics, discovering new ways of working with the people we are allowed to mentor and all other aspects.

Just like in the core of tech, managing people and teams is never “done” and there is always new things to learn, impulses to follow, old practices to discard or revive. This is the place to help each other and move forward, become more professional and grow for ourselves and for the people and organisations we lead.

The hypothesis being that sharing our experiences will grow us into better leaders which over the long term will make the technology industry a better place for everyone.

You can access our pages below for more details:

Website – http://techleadership.co.za/

Meetup page – https://www.meetup.com/Tech-Leadership-Meetup-Cape-Town/

I’m excited to announce that I will be taking on the VP of Engineering role at Names & Faces starting today.

Names & Faces aims to offer any growing company a simple and fast directory of employees built specifically for that purpose alone.

Names & Faces solves a problem experienced by everyone from the CEO to the intern. How do I get to know the people around me, get context for where they fit in & get in touch when I need to?

I’m joining an exciting startup with a team based in a number of cities across the world – Palo Alto, Cape Town and London.

Names & Faces was one of the startups selected to be part of the Y Combinator Summer 2018 batch of startups. I have followed and admired the Y Combinator program for a long time now, with companies such as AirBnb, Dropbox and Stripe having gone through the same program in their early stages.

About the VP of Engineering role

In my new role I will be expected to be a great manager and team builder.

My job will be to make everyone in the engineering organisation successful by influencing architectural decisions, establishing best practises, setting work cadences and cultural norms and overcoming the issues that get in the way of the team’s success.

I’m looking forward to helping engineers grow and develop their skills. Identifying potential in people, supporting them, seeing them grow and succeed is something I enjoy doing and I find it personally fulfilling.

I’m also looking forward to applying my experience from my working career to help Names & Faces succeed. At the same time I expect to learn and grow both personally and professionally. The constant pursuit of learning being something I value incredibly.

What will be different?

After spending 8.5 years building software in the finance industry (Allan Gray – 4 years and Prodigy Finance – 4.5 years). I’m finally going to be working in a different industry. I’ve learnt a lot of interesting things about the finance world in my career, however I am also glad to move on from some of the complexities that come with building software in the finance world.

At both companies I’ve worked for in the past I built software to support the main business operations of the company. Now I will be building software for clients (other companies) to use. This may seem like a subtle change but I’m sure it will give me a different outlook into how to decide what to build, how to release software and how to scale as the client base grows.

I will still write code, also operating as a software engineer in the team, which is something I enjoy doing and I believe every leader in the technology space should try hold on to as long as they can. My career has mostly been in the web development space and at Names & Faces I will be exposed to building and releasing software for mobile apps too. The technology stack is modern and will be exciting to learn, with all the niceties that come with React, React Native, GraphQL, Typescript and Node.js.

Finally Names & Faces is a remote-first company. Remote-first means working remote is the default. It means making sure your remote employees are as much a part of the team as those in the office. For most of my career I’ve worked in an office with my co-workers. I believe the future of work will be mostly remote for knowledge workers. So I’m looking forward to learning the different ways of working and flexibility working for a remote-first company will bring.

In case you can’t tell, I’m really delighted to be joining the startup world again. The Names & Faces team has already accomplished a lot so far, and I look forward to working with the team to do even more.

I’m still based in Cape Town and I continue to enjoy living in the city.

If you would like to know more about Names & Faces you can watch our demo video below.

I started at Prodigy Finance as a Software Engineer in January 2015.

When I started there were a total of 28 employees across the whole company and we had funded 1875 students in total. Today as I leave there are over 200 employees across the company and we have funded over 14500 students.

It has been an incredible journey to say the least.

When I left Allan Gray to join Prodigy Finance a number of people asked me what I was thinking leaving an established place like Allan Gray and going to a small startup like Prodigy Finance. They assumed I was making a mistake, moving my career backwards.

I responded by telling them that at Prodigy Finance I saw opportunity. The opportunity to join a small company early on and be part of its growth journey.

I had joined Allan Gray when it was already established and I learnt a lot while I was there but it was like being born an adult, everything already in place, constantly wondering what it is like to be young and grow up on your own terms. I wanted to learn how a small company grows and becomes an established company. As I leave Prodigy Finance today I am certain this goal has been fulfilled.

Now, my path is heading in a different direction. I take with me many fond memories, many wonderful new friends and acquaintances, and a wealth of experiences. I have grown through working on projects across the company’s product workflow (onboarding, credit risk, verification, and disbursements) and playing multiple roles (full stack software engineer and being a line manager for software engineers).

I’m particularly grateful to have benefited from learning from others, watching others grow, and helping others grow. I also learned that these are not mutually exclusive options!

Where to now?

An opportunity landed on my doorstep, taking me back to the startup world, which means I’m off to start a new cycle again. I feel excited about my new opportunity (more on that to come in a future blog post!) but also excited to watch Prodigy Finance continue to grow, evolve, and have a positive impact on the world.