Life lessons: How to fail and win by Alan Knott-Craig (Tafelberg, 2024)
This reader impression was written and sent to LitNet on the writer's own initiative.
Title: Life lessons: How to fail and win
Author: Alan Knott-Craig
ISBN: 9780624095460
Publisher: Tafelberg
How to fail and win! Goodness! Who gives a book a subtitle like that?
Alan Knott-Craig is a businessman like no other. He is a best-selling author and serial entrepreneur. He has founded, funded and/or run 21 companies, including Cellfind, iBurst, Mxit and Herotel. In Life lessons, he tells us what he has learned – mostly by losing: “Maybe that’s why I only spoke my first words at age four. Up till that point, my parents were a little uncomfortable with my IQ. They probably still are” (15).
Alan qualified as a CA before he became a serial entrepreneur. He takes us through all his highs and lows from his childhood, which is a very interesting read. Then, chapter 12 hit me: “Be a quitter”. He says: “My whole life I was a quitter. When the going got tough, I’d quit. Rather than struggle, I made up some excuse and bailed out”.
How many of us have started things we didn’t finish? I have quite a list. No, I am not sharing it here on the world wide web. No! Alan was a quitter until the day he found purpose: to connect the unconnected. Then he started to dream bigger and planned for it. He would still quit, “but only if my path towards the destination turned out to be a dead end” (143). The different paths he took were World of Avatar, Mxit, Project Isizwe, Hero Telecoms – all different paths he needed to take in reaching the same outcome: connecting the unconnected.
My favourite chapter is chapter 13: “Lessons learnt”. Reading through that, one realises that we all can look at some of those lessons and learn something valuable. Don’t sweat the small stuff, but also don’t think that something big can’t be overcome.
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What part of the book did I like most? The knowledge that you can still win, even if you sometimes lose. Losing isn’t always losing; sometimes it is merely something not working out now, and you need to move on to the next step.
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Who is Alan Knott-Craig? He qualified as a chartered accountant with Deloitte in 2002. Then he started a wild ride until he founded Fibertime™ to bring pay-as-you-go fibre internet to townships. He has also published ten books since 2008, including the national bestseller Don’t panic. He was nominated as one of the top 11 entrepreneurs changing the African landscape by the magazine Entrepreneur. He has also written several viral articles, which include “Reasons for optimism” and “Entrepreneurs will save the world”. He now writes a daily blog for entrepreneurs, which you can follow and read on www.alanknottcraig.com.
What part of the book did I like most? The knowledge that you can still win, even if you sometimes lose. Losing isn’t always losing; sometimes it is merely something not working out now, and you need to move on to the next step. Find a purpose that you work towards and you can never fail, because you are a failure only when you stop trying.
I definitely recommend Life lessons by Alan Knott-Craig for all wannabe entrepreneurs, as well as those entrepreneurs who need a little push forward and encouragement.
Also read:
Slaying the dragon by Antonio Iozzo: The bravest book you’ll read this year
Bemarker, skrywer, pa, tweedekansgryper: ’n onderhoud met Stefaans Coetzee