I must say that I am very proud of the work that my staff do in representing injured people.  Yes, we make money doing it, but I believe strongly that my staff members are passionate about this and passionate about helping people.  In that regard, I don’t think one needs to look further than the testimonials de Broglio Attorneys receive. We have literally hundreds of testimonials on our website, even though they have only been collected over two years – in other words, we never used to collect them and keep them – and you can read them at accidentclaim.co.za/testimonials/.  

They are a testimony to the passion and efforts of my staff and a top team of which I am very proud.  It is not just that we lead, when it comes to technology or keeping our clients advised or in terms of the results we get – and in all of those instances I genuinely believe we are the premier firm in this field in South Africa.  I think more than that we really do make it our mission to do the very best we can for every client we represent. 

I was speaking to a 42 year old guy recently who told me he takes half a pill of Ritalin a day.  He was diagnosed with ADHD because he cannot really focus fully on things and has all sorts of problems with concentration.  I know many people swear by a supplement called DMAE which is used for sagging skin but also promotes concentration.  I cannot say I have problems with concentration, but I can say that I have never really been able to concentrate on one thing at a time and I think, to a large extent, that is why I have been successful.  The truth of the matter is I could never run the business I do if I did focus on only one thing at a time.  

In this day and age you are expected to work on multiple things, deal with a phone calls, an e-mail and all sorts of things.  I think in some respects you need to have the ability to be able to multitask and jump all over the place.  I don’t think it is ideal and that is not always the way I would like to work, but one is left with no option.  While you are working on documents on your computer the bottom right on your screen indicates e-mails coming through, your phone is making noises etc.  I do think one useful feature of many phone apps is the ability to switch off notifications from that app.  For example I switch off all WhatsApp notifications.  When I want to see something I will turn on the app and get 10 messages but I am not going to have my phone individually notify me of every message on WhatsApp or Instagram etc. If you didn’t know that about me, well now you know now – sounds like the Black Eyed Peas?  I strongly recommend to anyone who wants more peace in their lives, and less anxiety, to switch off the notifications.  See the messages when you want to.  If its life and death your friend can call you.  If they don’t have your number you were probably not planning to help them.

To carry on the discussion from the previous blog, we know that most businesses don’t end up being successful.  People’s hopes in restaurants go up in smoke, people’s home businesses flop and attorneys involved in the same field of law as me either steal money and run overseas or end up committing suicide – or so the newspapers report quite consistently every 6 months or so.  It is just funny to think sometimes that we are all within the same system – in other words, the owner of the business and the employees have the same laws that govern them, but no owner of a business will work out how to take 15 days’ leave plus 10 days’ sick leave plus three days’ responsibility leave and then ask for a half day for a family emergency, a bit of time off for this or that, etc – because if they do their children will not have food to eat at home.  

I am actually quite fair in my views and sometimes I am quite torn between where I see countries have laws that are too harsh on employees that don’t give any benefits at all and no protection, but on the other hand when I look at the labour laws that we have in South Africa now for the last 20 years or so, nobody can say that they are working.  You can argue that you like them, you can argue that the benefits are great if you have a job, you can say all of those things, but you cannot say that they have stimulated the economy, you cannot say that it has made a dent in the unemployment rate – you have to be honest and say, whether you like it or not, they have been a complete disaster for all those who do not have jobs.  Those who do have jobs forget, quite often, that you pay in many ways for those who do not have jobs.  You pay for a struggling economy in ways you may not think of.

You pay higher and higher taxes for social security for people who don’t have jobs, you pay security companies to protect your house because ultimately in countries with high unemployment you get much more crime.  You have to pay for healthcare for all and a variety of benefits and services have to be spread across a relatively small percentage of a countries people if there is high unemployment – so those that do pay taxes, pay more than they would if there were more employed people and more people paying tax to begin with. It is a pity that business cannot get together with Government and say what needs to be done to try and change this vicious circle, to try and ensure when somebody is useless they can just be shown the door and not have to meet with advocates, have discussions, warnings, final warnings and then run off to the CCMA, etc, etc.   

I have always said one thing, and it is something I believe in, and that is no good employee, other than in unusual circumstances such as sexual harassment, will ever need to go to the CCMA.  I don’t believe that any of the top employees of my firm have ever even been inside the CCMA, let alone filled in any papers for a CCMA claim against anyone, because when you are good at what you do the boss will always look after you and if he does not, somebody else will steal you away.  The best protection you can ever have, against unfair treatment, minus those freak situations, where there is discrimination or harassment, is to be competent because competence will always be your passport to anywhere.

Having spent a lot of time in seeing how other countries and successful countries work, I often think about our labour laws.  Big foreign companies stopped investing in South Africa years ago and in a more frightening way many of the companies we consider South African are not really truly considered South African by people in other countries.  De Beer’s, Anglo American and SAB all have their head office in London.  Yes, they are listed on Johannesburg Stock Exchange also with a secondary listing and yes, they make most of their money in South Africa, but effectively they are British companies and they form part of the top 100 companies on the FTSE – the British Stock Exchange.  We are still proud of them, but they are not actually South African from an international perspective at all – they are British.  

I don’t think most Americans, who have heard of SAB, would ever have any idea that the SA stands for South Africa!  The company is known as SAB and people don’t know it as South African Breweries and would be stunned to discover that a company that started in South Africa is such a major player all over the world owning major beer brands in numerous countries and not just the brands that are sold in South Africa.

In any event, I digress.  I was having a conversation with one of my staff members recently who was explaining to me that she cannot help it that she is one of the staff who is sick the most often in the office and she basically referred to her 30 day sick leave, over a three year period, as an amount of leave she is “entitled to take”.  In other words, she thinks it is normal to take 30 days sick leave over three years and to space it out nicely, as opposed to only taking sick leave when you are actually sick!  Naturally people, who on the one hand criticise the ANC and their policies all the time, need to understand they are in fact embracing ANC policy.  A policy that has not worked for the economy, a policy that frightens foreign companies away, but the truth is most people who have jobs are quite happy to embrace ANC policy when it suits them.  At that point they don’t care that it helps cause a high unemployment rate, the poverty we have which indirectly affects the crime, etc.  It does not mean anything to them and every time I write a blog like this I get somebody who has to criticise me – although if the people who wrote those comments read business newspapers they would read the same thoughts and criticisms I have, on a regular basis.  Anyway, our economy is floundering and our labour laws are ridiculous.  I do think that employees need more protection than employers.  Employers at least, when things go right, make more money and that is why, when things go wrong, they are expected to take the loss themselves and suffer alone.   Employees simply move on to other jobs at other companies and the person who risked his or her capital invariably goes bankrupt, has their house sold and their kids moved out of the private school, etc.  That is business and that is a risk reward ratio that is involved in owning a business.   More to come in my next blog….

Eclipses don’t come around often and so there is a lot of noise being made about the eclipse that is going to happen in North America crossing Oregon at 10.21am pacific time on 21 August 2017.  That will be 7.21pm our time in South Africa, although the eclipse will begin at approximately 6pm South African time and finish at approximately 9pm.  Obviously, during that time the day will progress from sunlight to complete darkness, or almost complete darkness and then back eventually to sunlight again – something quite dramatic.  NASA will have live-streaming video of the total solar eclipse and they have even set up a website just for the eclipse.  One of course can travel to Oregon, just below Washington State (remember that Washington D.C. and Washington State are two entirely different places) and you can see that website at https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov.

There is not going to be another eclipse like this for a long time, and so it is going to be a major media event later today. Remember, for those of you who don’t, that an eclipse is caused when the moon completely covers the sun and at certain points, and this time it is on a route from South Carolina to Oregon, across America, you will get a total eclipse and then other places, let’s say 400km away, will get a 92% eclipse and the further away they get from it, the less of an eclipse they will have.  Ancient Chinese history describes these eclipses as the sun being eaten away, which they thought has been eaten away by dragons and some of the emperor’s astronomers who failed to predict the eclipse were apparently beheaded for this “mistake”! 

I recently went on a two full day Photoshop course.  I have been planning to do so for a long time, although actually I wanted to go on an Adobe Premiere Pro course for video editing.  The Adobe Premiere Pro course was not available and I thought that instead of forever trying to fiddle around with books and save the money a course costs, I should try the course instead.  I was quite apprehensive about it, thinking that I would endure some poor quality lecturing or some Mickey Mouse training college, etc.  I was very relieved to discover that the course was in fact excellently taught by a man who clearly knows Photoshop better than most Priests know the Bible, and has extensively lectured on the topic, and is also the author of a published book on Photoshop and Lightroom.  

It has certainly given me the green light to start going on more courses again because, although at times I felt really mentally drained, I realised that I am just somebody who loves being a student.  In other words, I love learning from people who know more than me on a variety of subjects.  There is no quicker way to expand your knowledge and to have the benefit of somebody who knows more than you to teach or lecture you and there are so many areas in which all of us, unless you are a “know-it-all”, can learn.  

It does not mean you have to pay the person to learn something from them.  It might well be that you know somebody who is good in a particular field or particular type of thing and who is effectively mentoring you for free with advice anyway.  I am sure that I will forget many of the things I have learned, despite the notes I took, but I certainly plan to take more courses going forward – and not just in computer software. For example, I would love to go on a cooking course for example just to try that – not learning how to cook everything, but maybe just one or two meals.  To be able to cook them superbly and make the sauces yourself as opposed to buying them is a skill and it is something I wish I had learnt when I was younger.

What I did realise, while sitting in class for two days, is that when you work on things that you understand and know, you don’t strain your brain that much.  Some of you who for example study a second language in your spare time will know how good that is for the brain - and I have not been doing anything like that for years.  I would literally stagger away from the lectures, feeling almost like a moron who could not remember anything.  Things I could do in class that seemed so simple I could not repeat at home an hour later on Photoshop, although after the second day I was a lot better.  The lessons I learnt in that regard could be a host of blog topics including: to keep your brain working you need to stretch your brain and not just read things that interest you all the time; taking your own notes, even if you are supplied with notes, will always make it easier for you to remember things, keep you more focused and sharp.  Another thing that interests me, and maybe it is something I will explore in another blog later, was that there was a 42 year old man on the course with me who is a web developer and he told me that he takes half a pill of Ritalin each day and then he focuses much better!

I recently treated myself to a spotting scope as my birthday present.  It is something you would use to look at objects from a long distance, particularly animals or birds, and it really allows you to see clearly over considerably longer distances than a pair of binoculars would.  It differs from a telescope, which is more suited to see things at night, but you could if you wanted, use it to look at the moon and stars, etc – but that is not what it is designed for.  There is even a form of photography now where people specialise in taking those types of long distance photographs and attaching their cameras to the spotting scopes.  That type of photography is known as digiscoping and what was surprising for me, and I know quite a bit about cameras and photography, is that many of those close-up photographs that you see of birds and small animals are not actually taken with zoom lenses – they are taken by attaching the camera to a spotting scope – or in other words, a super powered pair of binoculars.  

The detail you can see, on something a mile away, is quite dramatic but not exactly the stuff that top photographs are made of.  Training it on a tree, about 100 metres away, will give you stunning clarity of the pines, bark, cones and any bird sitting on the tree as well.  Obviously, to use something like this, as with good photography, requires a tripod.  You cannot possibly train something over such a distance on an object and keep it as still as you need to without a tripod. 

When I was younger and more people knew that I did a lot of running, I often used to get questions about running.  One of the most common was, “I run all the time, but I don’t really lose weight”.  It is hard to find a polite way to tell somebody that instead of running they are just trotting along.  

I was reminded of this recently when I spent a bit of time on an athletics track and decided to run some 50 metre sprints as well as 400 metre times.  I was shocked to discover that the 57.5 seconds that I could run 400 metres in, and I was not truly fit at that time when I was 16 or 17, has suddenly become 80 seconds – in other words, I am almost half a minute slower.  When you do run like that however, you very quickly realise how sore that type of running actually is.  Your legs ache, your lungs burn and you collapse as you go over the finish line because you have given it your all.  It is exercise where you give it your all, where you push yourself, where you hurt yourself and it leads to progress and development and if you merely trot along you will not achieve very much at all.  

I think trotting along is better than doing nothing – maybe it will improve your lung function by 20%, but you are not going to ever get the benefits that everyone talks about that you get when you run.  I don’t think that is different though to anything – if you go and lift weights, the only way your muscles will get stronger and certainly bigger, is if you lift a high enough weight to tear your muscle.  I am sure that is where the expression, “No pain, no gain” comes from – but it is absolutely true.  If the exercise you are doing is something that is not hurting you very much at all, then it means you are not really challenging yourself and you are not really achieving anything.  Yes, I think it is better to trot than to just walk and it is better to walk than just to sit, but if you want to try and see what it feels like to run, go to a track and try and run 400 metres as fast as you can, so that when you finish it you, as I did, lie down on your back on the track before you recover and then you will know what it is truly like to actually run!

I love the weird and wonderful socks designed by Stance.  In this particular article I have included a copy of the image of that of the Stance rugby sock, which is designed by Mark Gonzales.  You will see they don’t match and Stance have no regard to traditional patterns in that regard!

I really do find the whole look fascinating and Stance has numerous socks of different designs – not always consistent and some of them are extremely arty or related to different Universities.  They also have a range of Disney socks, Star Wars socks with all sorts of different characters and you might have the one character on the one sock and another character on another sock.  Strangely enough, I started wearing these socks because their golf socks have a grip on the bottom of the sock that allows it to keep its position in your show a way that very few socks do – in other words, they don’t slide as much within the shoe while you are wearing them as other socks would.

It’s a very big day in South Africa today with the secret vote taking place in parliament. I personally didn’t think that a secret vote would be allowed, and so that’s the first surprise. Is that a sign of extreme confidence that very few ANC members will actually vote against the President? I don’t know, and given that almost all the media predicted that the vote would not be secret, it seems even those in the "know" didn't know!

 Whether approximately 50 members of the ANC are going to vote against the president remains to be seen but either way, it’s a big day in South Africa.

I’d love to know your prediction, as to how the vote is going to go today and whether or not the motion of no-confidence in the state president will succeed?

I was reminded recently of two of my pet peeves, namely moving and setting up new computers.  I recently got myself a new computer, which is more suitable for some of the photographs and video editing that I work on, because my last computer was not strong enough to process even short family videos.  It is not just plugging in the new computer and setting it up – it is the fact that suddenly you don’t actually have Microsoft Word, you don’t have Outlook, etc and all of them have to first be downloaded and when you are finished downloading them, then they need to be set up.  Just going on to another computer and eventually working out all the settings on my e-mail account and setting that up took 30 minutes alone.  Then I had to download the rest of the Microsoft package and the Adobe programmes that I use, including Photoshop and Premiere Pro.  

When you leave all of that aside, every time you go onto any website, you now have to enter in all your passwords again and set your computer to remember some of those sites and so all in all it is a mountain of work to do.  I have resolved not to upgrade or change a computer for at least another 3 or 4 years – maybe 5 – until I have forgotten about how painful it has been this time!

No sooner did I finish reading my book about Mark Cuban, than I listened to a podcast about some American vendors who sell snacks at baseball games.  Mark Cuban had emphasised how he felt he simply put in more hours than other people and the podcast I listened to, which was extremely interesting, pretty much said the same thing.  You can download the podcast here: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/05/06/477082513/episode-700-peanuts-and-cracker-jack

It is something you can listen to on the way to or from work and it is about guys that work at a baseball stadium, which would be no different to the guys selling at the cricket or rugby stadiums in South Africa, and features a new young guy who has just started together with the guy who is meant to be the main sales person – the best guy.  They wanted to see what the best guy’s secret to making the most money was and they eventually realised that it was not actually about some amazing sales ability he had.  At the end of the night, by the time the young guy had already gone home and most of the other 50 odd vendors have given up, the number one success basically ran around the whole stadium selling things – being the last guy in the stadium from who you could buy anything.  In other words, just like Mark Cuban’s book, they said that really, it got down to the guy who was working the longest hours and putting in the most effort.  

That of course does not suit everybody, and various things that happen in our lives, such as having children, other responsibilities, or sick parents that one has to care for, ultimately determine the kind of hours you can put in.  It does however serve to remind all of us, and indeed me, that one of the ingredients to success is not that complicated – it is just hard work.  People want to believe there is some other secret recipe, there is something you can read that will let you cut the hours down, but I can tell you from my own experience and in my own offices that invariably the most successful people in my firm are those that work the longest hours.  Over the years if anybody has ever asked me about the hours I put in my answer has always been quite constant – I work longer hours than anybody who works for me.  That is absolutely the truth.  There are times now, in my 22nd year of practice, where I don’t put in the hours that I used to, which was at least 60 hours a week, but invariably, and even if I fall behind during the week or because I am managing other businesses and investments of mine, I put in the hours on a weekend.  I have always prided myself on the fact that, just like my mother, hard work has never ever frightened me.  

For example, you would never hear me say that I don’t work on Saturday or Sunday or that the weekend is not for working – because I don’t believe that.  

It is interesting to hear, whether it is the billionaire Mark Cuban, or it is the guy selling at the baseball stadium, that often the secret recipe to success that so many people are looking for is simply just putting in the extra hours.  That is not an answer that many people want to hear, but it is so true.