SNAKE IN YOUR SNAKESKIN HANDBAG

I was asked a question:

… retain a Friend or start a Business and loose said friend?

Compound eyes…or for those of you who don’t understand, my eyes popped and opened so wide they looked like VW Beetle lights.

Frankly, let’s be selfish.

Men wouldn’t bat an eye over this question, but women were born with the innate desire to be ‘people pleasers’ and to keep friendships long after the banana is rotten to the core. Most women have a yearning to be constantly and consistently appreciated and affirmed as they complete each stage in their lives, whether by a close friend or by family. And most women don’t get it.

Because it’s a damn selfish world. Very few people really  care.

Power Suit!

And the business minded woman may bat an eye at the beginning of her career, then decide it’s simply easier to buy mascara and have wicked looking eyelashes rather than sit around a coffee table making ‘galfriends’ and drinking tea. Her speech pattern changes and begins to succulently dribble words like ‘goal orientation’ and ‘product sustainability’ and ‘assets’ and ‘profit margins’ and ‘bottom line’.

It took me all of 14 years to learn this bitter truth and since then I have rarely looked back. Men are goal oriented full stop. Even if it’s a simple task such as ‘making a baby cot’, that man will be focused and single-minded. If you don’t want him to make a baby cot – then that’s your problem. His goal is to make the cot, full stop. He will not ask you if you will be his friend if he makes the cot.

It simply doesn’t apply.

He will not cry and whine and weep and mope and ask you why you don’t want him to make the cot. His goal, I repeat, is to make the cot.

Consequently, I realized that if I have a dream and the dream becomes my goal – then I study. I buy books and research, I go online and ask people in that field the stupidest questions, then set out to achieve the desired goal. Many times my language has changed depending on the goal. If I’m making a cot, it becomes all about the different types of wood, about wood wart, about cot sizes and paint and cot designs.

If I’m making babies, it’s all about fertility charts and ovulation and sex positions that will provide deeper penetration and types of food diets for him and her.

If my goal happens to be forming a company, then I will look at the risks and begin to learn about how much goes back into it, about investments and taxes, about what my personal costs are vs company costs.

I really don’t ask my girl friends if they will talk to me if I want to make a cot, or make babies or start a company.

It simply doesn’t make rational sense. To me. I don’t know about you who is reading this, but if we look at the word BUSINESS dead.straight.in.the.face. it means just that. Whose BUSINESS is it? How often do we reply when questioned about our personal lives and we feel that the person is overstepping into our private space – ‘it’s none of your business?’

So why does the same woman who will sit and discuss brilliant ideas about her wedding concepts – about colours and hues and tones, about materials and textures, about venues, about cakes and invited guests, why does this same Cat Woman slash(/) Cougar recoil at the simple idea of ‘going it on her own’ in a business world? If you told this same woman, ‘I won’t talk to you if you get married’,  she’d laugh in-your-face and drop your friendship faster than you would drop your mouth if you found a cobra in your snakeskin Gucci handbag?

Woman holding expensive handbag

No. Friendships should never be put in the same Vitz as business and/or careers. And the only affirmation we receive that we’re doing the right thing should come from our personal sense of achievement. Yes, we’re told that money won’t bury you, friends will; but while I’m alive I’d rather be buried in real money than false friendships. Because a real friend is one who will help you ‘step up’, not shoot you down like you’re a gangster in a bloody Quentin Tarantino movie. The same nano-second that he/she begins to discuss friendship vs career, drop that snake. It WILL bite you if you let it sojourn in your handbag.

So the question is not, should I keep my friendship over my desire to step out, but that the said ‘friend’ has even hinted at disapproval.  Only the Mafia and hoodlums in the British underworld and drug lords the world over own ‘territorial’ rights over who does business where. They negate all ‘competition’ and muscle them out forcefully. Read ‘rolled alive in wet cement and dropped in a river’.  Personally I’d give you a startup loan and invest in your damn idea if it makes good business sense (after signing a stupendous contract). The question should be – are you in the business idea, or are you out?

Jackie Chan bullied in High School

Since when should a bully be a friend? In school we used to call such friends ‘bully beef’ and there was the constant edgy sensation about them that hovered on a certain admiration for the bully, but liberally sprinkled with fear - sometimes drenched in the stark sweaty smell of terror - that the beef may turn to us. So we’d do everything and anything to keep on the good side of the bully. Literally. If the bully stated, ‘give me your lunch,’ you’d give up your meat sandwich quicker than marathon runner Catherine Ndereba to avoid the beef.

And women do this throughout their lives. They give up their sandwiches to remain on the good side of their bully friends.

Who wins in the end? The bully of course. They always win. Always. But the question here again, I repeat, isn’t about them - but about careers and friendships and support and edification and women’s needy needs. Business is not an emotional vacuuming of dust – while you can afford to sweep your carpet with rollers and curlers in your hair – the business minded woman will sport her ‘dreadlocks’ without dread and hold her head high while battling it out with sharp minds and cunning thieves. She will have an edge on her that if honed well, can slice through the thickest part of bone like a Japanese Samurai Sword and sever the necks of those who stand in her way. It takes years to make a Samurai Sword and it takes a hell of a lot of research and practice to make a good business woman, and it certainly doesn’t begin with, ‘will I loose friendships or not?’ but more like, ‘who should I woo so they may INVEST in my idea?’.

I recently read a status by a Facebook friend who wrote that ‘Refusing to pursue your goal is pre-meditating and committing spiritual suicide’. (thanks I.N.) I tend to agree. You can escape your friend but how on Earth do we escape the pain of our own spirits and souls? Are dreams not the vapours and figments of imaginations of our physical brain? So how does one escape ‘the unseen desires of our hearts’.  We can’t - unless we depress or drown our souls in a spirit or smoke or crack addiction  -  we shall forever regret not running after that dream.

Again, when we come up with questions that deter us from our path it’s also called procrastination, which in plain old English means that we can, and often do,  ‘put off today what we can do tomorrow’.

Despite years of my parents spending money on my ‘elocution’ lessons I was still an appallingly shy pupil in school and wrote rather than spoke and if I spoke at all  I did so in breathy whispers. I developed a love of the written word and came across the adage ‘Tomorrow Never Comes’ which I promptly scribbled on the bottom right hand side of the class blackboard – a spot allocated for ‘words of wisdom’ from any student. But my newly found ingenious phrase didn’t make sense to anyone least of all my English teacher. So the next day, when asked to hand in my assignment, I boldly informed my teacher, via speech, that it wasn’t due in ‘today’. She mumbled her disagreement and verbalized loudly and firmly, “Nyakio, I told you that I wanted this assignment handed in today.” Whereupon I firmly shook my head, my overly large spectacles almost falling off my nose, and I told her, “No Miss, you said you wanted the assignment by tomorrow.” And I proceeded to point to the adage on the black board.

Until today I am not sure what shocked her more and had me standing outside the classroom in the corridor for 2 full lessons (junior high punishment back-then) :the audacity of the statement, or that I spoke loudly and lucidly.

But it’s true is it not, that if we wish to procrastinate, we will, and will use any excuse to deter the fear of ‘starting out in a different direction’. Any excuse including demonizing those who may help us.  While I honestly believe that the bully beef in school is a very close incestuous relative of the Cobra snake in your Gucci snakeskin handbag who drops venom on your ideas, understand that you’re also out to escape the over-crowded school yard of ‘miss nice, let’s have tea’ and project yourself into the very real jungle world of cut-throat business types. She Cobra may very well save our lives, because, after all, what are the active ingredients of a good anti-venom for snake bite? Drops of venom. And how do we get venom from a snake? We milk it for all it’s worth.

But we never ever kill the damn snake and neither do we let it stray too far away from us. A good snake charmer knows how to keep his snakes satisfied with live rats in order to make a good living and understands that you can’t get venom from a dead snake.

Hence killing our friendships won’t answer the question either.

It’s more of a directional movement, steering the friendship into a controllable area while you concentrate on your dream.

No, the question is not friend over career.

It never really was.

Finally. Even Joseph in the Bible learnt the bitter truth of regurgitating his dreams to unconcerned and jealous family and some friends are like family.  The only persons who really care about your business are those who are IN your business. Full stop. Like investors. Or your staff. All the rest simply don’t give a hoot about your business. Plus honestly I think it’s a deplorable concept to talk about your germination or ‘seed ideas’ to those in a position to kill them. Business is not a game. It’s life. And it’s real.

As real as the REAL question that is being asked here – the question is about life and manipulation and being manipulated. It’s about control and who’s the boss. It’s about assertiveness and being happy in our status in life and being satisfied in ourselves and in what we’re doing - whether you’re male or female -  although women are more prone to seeking for affirmation - if you’re not careful while ‘dismantling’ this particular atomic bomb you’re liable to blow yourself up into tiny little maimed pieces and who wins? Definitely not you. So members of the fairer sex, are you off into the business world? Career world? Then follow instructions and get real and learn that reality bites. Either bite reality back and chew that bitter chunk, or run back into your Alice in Wonderland ‘tea world’.

. . . the famous tea party, based on director Tim Burton's vision of the scene.

© Nyakio Munyinyi for The xPenSieve Report

January 2014