Fallacies

If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. – Misattributed to Joseph Goebbels (See what I did there?)

And that is the truth of the matter. People will believe anything as long as you keep on repeating it to them. Maybe I am tired of that and so I want to say it here. Before my kids get to learn of the lie(s) and spread it around the world.

• Month X has 5 Sundays. This happens once in every 823 years.

Yes, the first time you heard of it, you were wowed. Your eyes popped out. You believed you were part of history. You were the type that were stupid enough to forward the message that if it won’t get around to 5 people you will get good bad luck in the next twenty minutes. You knew that this was an impossibility but you still did it.

But the one for months with 5 Sundays in 823 years is true. It has been tested and it is actually known to be true.

Well, son. Grab a pencil, some A4 paper and a calculator and I take you to class for a minute. We say that an year has 52 weeks, 12 months and a month has 4 weeks. Right or wrong?

Right. Good, simple mathematics will tell you that 12 months multiplied by 4 weeks per month will give you 48 weeks. Those are then the number of weeks that we will have in an year if we were to partially take the above definition. That then leaves us with 4 weeks that are unaccounted for. Let us leave that pending and we go to the next thing; days in a month.

The number of days in a month vary from a minimum of 28 to a maximum of 31. But a week has 7 days. And if a month has 4 weeks, there will be at least 11 months in an year that have days that are unaccounted for. Do they fall in an imaginary week or what? That is where the 5th week comes in. If I have lost you so far, go back up and then leave a comment if you still don’t understand.

That then means that at least 4 months in any calendar year will have ’5 weeks’. And if a week starts on Sunday and ends on Monday, how many Sundays will we then have? 5 Sundays in any month.

By the same workings although with careful substitutions for days with weeks and all those other things, a leap year has 5 months that have 5 Sundays each.

And for any month to have the 5 Sundays, that means that month has to come around once in every 823 years (if we take that the months happen just once). If we take it that they require after every other 11 months, then we have an even smaller probability of about once in every 69 years. That is two and a half generations.

Next time you write that nonsense on Facebook, Twitter or G+, get your head checked. And as you move from the left to the right of the social networks list, get more psychiatrists.

• False Representation

We have taken social media to new heights. Good heights. We can promote anything there and it will gain the traction it needs. But don’t get it confused, traction here depends on how you define traction but we all know what it can do. So when you tell us that you are going to the bundus to have a camp on WordPress, trust me we will respond. And we will pay to attend it. And bring our clandes and side-projects. But read what you tell us first:

The real subject of the trip is WordCamp – and we have just the perfect WordCamp this weekend. With sessions covering a wide scope of topics and discussions, everyone is bound to leave the venue a word brighter and having known something new they did not know about WordPress.

And I will repeat that last part.

…..everyone is bound to leave the venue a word brighter and having known something new they did not know about WordPress.

Then what is that you were discussing about how to optimize your blog while using social media? That is not WordPress exclusive. I have a Posterous blog (no shameless promotion here) and it is something anyone on any platform can be able to talk about. I expected to see people saying how they now know about how to use widgets and plugins for WordPress and how they have discovered a richer way of posting. Tell me how the paid version of WordPress is better than the free version (what I am currently using). But what was actually discussed was a total fallacy from what had been promised. If someone does that next time, just tell them as it is; You LIED!!!!

• Reading from a Presentation

If I was paying to attend meetings/seminars/conferences that had presentations, I would charge the person who made the presentation and read from it. And I will one day ensure that I unplug the mains power to see someone make an a$$ of themselves as they fail to make a presentation that they prepared. How does one read something that they worked on for so long? Either that or they were totally in another universe while their virtual assistant (Iris) came up with the presentation with the dog barking in the house.

The presentation is meant to guide you as you go about with YOUR presentation. Own it. Don’t let the laptop and the projector throw you off tangent by reading. What even makes it worse is if you have a more than 10 slides presentation and you read from all of them. And should I ever read from a presentation, may the good Lord help me to start stoning myself before everyone is asleep in the room.

We now go into our commercial break. Stay tuned for more after this short break.

• Professional Multi-tasking

Specialisation is meant to make people good at what they do and they do it well. That is why your general practitioner is not the same person who fixes your plumbing or even drives your MP around. So when you have started your company and you want to impress the client, don’t do everything that the job entails when you know you only have grasping Project Management knowledge on the details. You will embarass yourself. Get someone to help you. Walk around with an intern who can do something.

Don’t try to pick the cloth’s colour, decide what thread will be used, cut the cloth, stitch it and fitting it onto the client. No that won’t work. Get people who can cut well according to measurements and body size. Get people who can stitch it without exposing the knotted thread. Get people who will fit it onto the client. If you can do any part of that, concentrate on that. I know it will take a beating on your expected profit but you would rather deliver something that can lead to business in future rather than a once-off thing.

Also, maybe unrelated to the above, before you start your company, have the following:

1. Proper Research: Know what your competition is charging and then price accordingly. I have been told of people who are undercutting themselves in business by offering such low rates that clients don’t want to work with them. My pal is quoting jobs for at least KShs 500 000 and you come ahead and quote KShs 150 000. Clients will not simply work with you on the basis of such huge ‘savings’ that you are giving them. They have to reason things out before anything happens.
2. Working Capital: If you go into business without this, then you are jumping around on a one-ply sheet of paper up 1080feet in the sky. And when you undercut yourself and you don’t have working capital, you are screwed.

• Is Your Business Only Legal or Is It a Legitimate Business?

Anyone can register a business. It is not that hard to do it. But what makes your business legitimate is when there are people who are behind the business. People who are known what they do and are not afraid of saying that it is what they do.

Businesses in Kenya used to launch and not have websites or they would just have a Yahoo! Mail address. That has all changed and people/businesses now have websites. For KShs 50 000, I can have someone put me up in a nice corner of the web. But I know for one thing, some people would never take that business seriously if there is no face behind that business. Especially when I am a start-up. Just give a brief indication of the leading three (if available) people in the business. That makes it easy to be identified and people will always trust a human being rather than someone else.

And if you doubt it, look at all the companies that are being launched and have been launched anywhere else in the world. There is always a page on the website that you can get some information on who runs the business. Additionally, if your company has two people in it, there is no Chief/Lead/Head of/Director, Blalalalalalala. You are just two people in it. Print out a business card and write Partner. When you get people who report directly to you and are employed there full-time, change that stuff to whatever fanciness you choose to call yourself. Julie Waters said:

I didn’t come into the business to get awards or titles.

NOTE OF THE DAY

When Steve Jobs died and you were all “iWeep, iSad, iCry, iDieALittle” then you later learn that Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy had died and you say how we can idolize a guy who copied from Xerox, you might be struck repeatedly by a blind seagull.

PS: Sorry for the rather long blog-post but when it rains, it pours.

Disclaimer: The only business I have been engaged in, is giving out worthless advice for free and selling my time to a company. Also, if you are self-employed but you were once employed, stop hating on those who are employed. They do not have a simple mentality as you say. You were there at one point.

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