The Meaning is in the Struggle

I post a lot about the success that DigsConnect, and by extension I, have been experiencing lately. I believe it is important to share good news stories about how startups, particularly in our struggling South African economy, can grow and do incredible things. Especially startups founded by young, normal, relatively inexperienced South Africans. I hope more than anything that everything I share about my journey shows that you don’t need to be anything more than resilient to do something big. That you are capable, because all you have to do is just keep trying. 

I also realise though that it can be a bit disheartening to read about others’ success when you could be struggling yourself. Perhaps you’re going through a tough time, and you feel like things just aren’t working out for you and it just isn’t your day, or your year. And I guess I wanted to talk about that a bit, and I wanted to say that truly the meaning is in the struggle. Because as long as you’re taking whatever it is you’re going through as a lesson to be learnt, as an obstacle to make you stronger, as a crucial part of the story of your life and duty on Earth - then you’re on the right path.

What’s become clear to me is that there’s no such thing as an overnight success. Momentum takes time to accumulate, and failure along the way is inevitable. What I’ve never really spoken about before, is that when I first ran for the SRC at UCT, I didn’t get on. I didn’t want to join a political party or student organisation, I believed so strongly in myself, that I could do it alone. There’s a fine line between delusion and confidence and I while I walk the tightrope between the two, I think this was one of those case when I veered to one side. People spend months, if not years building their SRC campaign, and run with coalitions or parties. I ran alone, self-nominating pretty much mere hours before the deadline.

I’ve always been fighting from my own corner, even from when I was a little girl, and at the time of my SRC campaign I still hadn’t learnt that you need a team to get anywhere meaningful. Almost from birth and unholy defiance has lined my stomach and spine and jaw and authority, espeically illogical and unearned authority, makes me bite. This led to social isolation, which in turn made me a fighter for my own survival. I applied those same traits in my campaign. I decided on the night when I would run that I could do it alone, and I would campaign alone, write my own speeches, practice alone, and with that I would go for the SRC presidency, the ultimate win and nothing less. There are 27 000 students at UCT and I was convinced that I could speak to every one of them, win their hearts and minds, and secure their vote. 

How the SRC works, is that the top 17 candidates (out of the 40 or so nominees in terms of number of votes get on, and when the election results came out, I was candidate number 18. 

I missed it by a couple of votes. 

At the time, I was devastated. I had failed. I thought it was the end of the road. 

However, just two months later I got a call from the SRC sec-gen, informing me that one of the candidates had been asked to leave, meaning that I was up. 

And here’s the funny thing about life: the position that was available was the one for off-campus accommodation, and it was that position that led me to start DigsConnect. 

Sometimes in the moments when you feel most defeated, there is a greater happening at play. There are process in the works that create such serendipity, it’s enough to make a cynic like myself believe in destiny. I thought I had failed, but instead I had ended up exactly where I needed to be. That is in a place where I can help hundreds of thousands of people across this country and continent, where I can enable access to education and democratise the student housing sector; my small addition to our collective project in civilisation and bettering the human experience.

The first hurdle was cleared but it certainly wasn’t the last. I began the website by myself, and after realising its potential, I dropped out of my postgrad to do it full time. The plan was to launch the world’s most successful student housing platform in a month. I failed of course, miserably. My early partnerships failed one after the other, I lost focus several times, and I just couldn’t get it right. Launching a startup and getting it right is really, really, really hard. Ideas are a dime a dozen, and without the right execution you’re dead in the water. And by this point, I was pretty much belly up.

And then one day Greg Keal gave me a call, and said we should meet up. I had known Greg from the SRC where we had worked on a couple projects together. Greg had several other very successful ventures on the go, and also saw what DigsConnect could become with the right team backing it. He left those other ventures, left his degree, his career, his thousand and one job offers from everyone and the queen, and threw his considerable talent into DigsConnect. At this point DigsConnect wasn’t even teetering, it was halfway down the cliff, and Greg wrenched it back on course. Shortly thereafter we sat down with Brendan Ardagh, an extraordinary engineer with the biggest heart, who should honesty be heading up NASA, and he joined us, completely our founding team. 

There is a depth of loyalty that is difficult to put into words. There is a profundity in throwing your lot in with others, of tying your destiny together with theirs and spending every waking hour with people that you have decided to either soar with, or die with. 

The fights we have can be brutal, but they are as a result of an intense commitment to honesty, integrity, competence and bloody hard work. Soldiers often speak about what really mattered to them under fire was the loyalty they had for their comrades, their brothers-in-arms, how they’d die for the people next to them. I guess that sums up how I feel about Greg and Brendan. 

Running a company often means hard choices, and it often means being under the hammer with a degree of pressure that can be almost crushing at times. On a particularly bad day, I was out walking through the city to clear my head, and I ended up at the Grand Parade, looking up at the Cape Town City Hall. I remembered seeing a video from history class of Mandela standing on the balcony giving a speech after he had just been released from Robben Island.

I started thinking about that again, imagine 27 years in a cell. 27 years. That’s longer than I’ve been alive. Imagine being locked up not for doing anything wrong, but for standing up for what’s right. Imagine having your youth, life, family, beliefs taken from you, year after year, by an unjust system. Imagine the pain of that, and the anger, the rage, the fury.

And then imagine finally coming out of prison, and saying: “forgiveness”.

It gives me chills every time I think of it. It’s giving me chills right now as I type this and my throat feels tight with the emotion of it.

In that moment I knew that what really counts is how you behave when things are at their most dire, most desperate. When you feel at your worst, at your most defeated, where you feel like it would be permissible to act unethically or to give up - in this state, where you feel like this, but when you choose instead to do the Right Thing, when you choose Good, when you choose to keep trying, when you get back up again - that’s the stuff of life right there. That defines what you are made of. That is your mettle. That is every particle of you, and that is what sets your destiny. 

Any joker can be “good” when life’s lekker. But when you have every reason to choose the wrong thing, and you still choose to do the right thing - that is what counts more than anything.

I think of this often. And that’s what brings me to my final point. 

Self worth is a tricky one. A lot is said about how much it takes to build a company. Insane hours, sacrifice, risk, stress, responsibility, premature aging (legit), little to no personal relationships outside of work, pressure, uncertainty. But what we don’t often speak about is what you gain from the process and from the challenge, and how infinitely rewarding it is. 

One part of this has been a growing awareness of my worth. A growing sense of self-respect. For as long as I can remember I’ve really struggled with self worth. It’s heartbreaking to think about how little respect I’ve had for myself. I certainly didn’t take myself seriously at all, so naturally no one else really did. 

It was in this state, truthfully a bit of a mess, that I started working on the project that was to become DigsConnect. I didn’t notice it, but bit by bit as this project grew, I started taking myself a bit more seriously. Started finding a little bit of worth in my existence. It’s been an act of co-creation: you build a company, and it builds you. 

You look back and there’s the proof - you are capable. You are worthy. You don’t wake up one day and suddenly you’re this bastion of Zen, but slowly slowly, inch by inch, we claim our selves.

So that is what I wanted to say. You are responsible for the future of humanity and consciousness in our expanding universe. The future is nothing more than what we build it to be today. You have to decide what you want that future to be, and then you have to do it. A tiny step each day takes you miles, I promise you.