Overcome the human condition. Look past the noise and be handsomely rewarded.

By Alec Hogg

I was in Durban last week for a presentation to a couple hundred entrepreneurs, my favourite audience because these risk-taking, employment creating folk carry a disproportionate load of any country’s future. Especially in a developing nation.

My message to them was one of hope. For almost a decade, South Africa suffered under a leadership cadre whose defining characteristic was ignorant arrogance. That destructive path was reversed in mid-December. Those who care to look will see how greenshoots of the “Cyril Spring” are beginning to take hold.

Seeking out positives to balance the bad news is always a challenge for homo sapiens. We’re hard wired to pay more attention to the potentially dangerous than the peaceful – to invest nine times more energy in negative news than positive.

But among the secrets of a successful life is knowing we are what we think. And then to realise 80% of what we worry about never happens. It is never easy to be a rational being in the kind of irrational society that South Africa has become. But seeing past the noise is always rewarded. Handsomely.