I think one of the problems many of us have – and I am certainly one who does have it from time to time – is to buy all sorts of things that you don’t end up using.  It does not necessarily mean expensive things, but it is often rubbish.  I don’t mind buying rubbish books, because I feel that even if they cost me R130 or R250, as long as I got one idea out of the book that I can use in my business or somewhere else, then it was worth the money.  It is very seldom that you get no ideas out of a book, so that type of purchase I can justify.  Not every book will be as good as The Four or as beautifully written as most of the books by Nassin Nicholas Taleb.  His latest book, which I am reading is his follow-up to The Black Swan and is called Skin In The Game.  

In any event, I digress.  I am talking more about the items when you open your drawer that you wonder why on earth you ever bought that fridge magnet that does not actually work or the pair of shoes that look so good in the shops, but now does not go with anything you own.  My wife in particular gives me a hard time about all of these types of purchases, because she is very sensitive about the way we damage the environment with plastic, plastic wrapping, bubble wrapping, cardboard, boxes and all of that that go around all the things we buy.  I think it is important if we are sensitive to that – we need to leave this world a better place than we come into it and part of that is by not contributing, in any negative way, to pollution and destruction of the environment.  

Half these materials don’t seem to break down at all and one gets horrified when one reads about some packaging and chemicals that end up flowing through our toilet systems into the ocean and before you know it are now being ingested by dolphins and tuna.  I mention the tuna, because we end up eating fish that are eating all the things we are polluting the environment with – I guess you could say that is karma or payback!  The point is we hurt ourselves when we abuse our environment and it is not just coming back at us in climate change, it is coming back at us in the various foodstuffs we eat, etc.  Try and reduce the packaging that you use, try and ensure that you recycle things and when you discard things they do go into the correct trashcan – so that they don’t just all end up on a smelly dump just off Turffontein racecourse.