I just thought to post this up. An interesting blogger suggested Orthoskepsis for the condition of thinking too much. It would be great to be the first to actually have that condition, or would it? Lemme get back to work. I really should blog more.

As all stories go, the plot thickens. I have decided to modify this blog to achieve a different, but related set of objectives. I have been receiving e-mails from people who wonder why posting has stopped. Well, I guess I, GRADUATED!
And since no undergraduates have answered my plea for continuity, I guess this is a road I have to travel alone for now.
This site is gonna have a new set of objectives, and an updated about section, but for now, lets start with the new banner… I will come with a few new ideas after a few discussions with the crew and watching The Great Debaters at least twice. Cheers.

hello readers,

I have to warn you to stop posting phone numbers on this site. You will only be setting yourself up for scammers and 419ers. if anyone contacts you as a result of a post you put up on this site, then sadly you are on your way to being scammed.

Read carefully the about page to let you know what this site is really about. I have added a warning in the top section of the browser. This is a personal blog NOT A SCHOLARSHIP AGENCY!

I think a word is enough for the wise! Cheers.

I2NEC got together in the last few days of graduating from the University to record an album that captures the spirit of life in Nigerian Universities. Comical, Witty and Insanely Addictive. The album is going out for free and will be up for download throughout the month of October.

Track List:
1.Graduate
(comical parody, contains samples from Warren G and Nate Dogg Regulate)

http://sharebee.com/93382dcc

2.Good time (The Youth Anthem)
(contains samples from Britney Spears ‘Break the Ice’)

http://sharebee.com/cabcd8b4

3.No kobo
(contains samples from Timbaland and James Flauntleroy – back together and Timbaland ft Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado – ‘give it to me’)

http://sharebee.com/dcc29be2

4.Hostel
(comical parody, contains samples from Cassidy and R Kelly – Hotel)

http://sharebee.com/e6e1a785

5.Stella
(comical parody, contains samples of Asa- Jailer)

http://sharebee.com/c6d746cf

6.Pressure = Force / Area
(Contains samples from Mylo – drop the pressure)

http://sharebee.com/31725f6f

7.Kwangida (no be Marriage)
(contains samples from Jazzy Jeff – music lounge)

http://sharebee.com/5a023452

8.Dreams
(contains music from The Game – dreams)

http://sharebee.com/b1f18ec8

9.Second chances
(contains music from Jay Z – song cry)

http://sharebee.com/997ca4e4

10.if i
(contains samples of Toni Tony Tone – lay your head on my pillow)

http://sharebee.com/e3f6a673

11.Bin thinking
(Contains samples from Taio Cruz – why i cant say go)

http://sharebee.com/347fc50d

I have barely hours before my final exams. Not surprising is the fact that I have very little motivation to read my half baked notes and ill prepared handouts. I realise that this exams are the crown of 5 years of effort to get a good degree. I realise that there are alot of people who would wish they were in my shoes, if only for the fact that they seek a degree, or that they seek a good degree in a prestigious course like Electrical / Computer Engineering.
As I prepare to write these exams, my mind is flooded by mixed emotions.
I am happy because this will mark the end of a phase of my life I have been working on for the past six years plus, minus the time i spent anticipating it.
I am happy because moving on will afford me the opportunity to invest my energies in pursuing my new set of goals without having to worry about skipping classes and all. it basically strikes off a big item on my priority list.
I am happy because I will be able to look back on the last couple of years and regard them as successful, as far as a first degree is concerned. But at the same time, I am saddened because there are so many people that I would have loved to be able to share this moment with me, some have been taken away by death, some have been taken away by choices they made, and choices I made, some are physically with me but incapable of sharing and understanding what i feel as a hausa man understanding ibo. I am saddened because I am not proud of the quality of education that I have gotten over the past 5 years. I am saddened because there is a great gap between where I am academically and where I wanted to be. Still I am challenged. I am challenged because I realise that the little I have achieved in the past six years, I had to take from a system that was always ready to sell me short. I am challenged because the dark side of humanity, the evil side of man is as present as it has been in the history of life. This means that I cannot rest on my oars to be a better person both for myself and for the people that sorround me. I am humbled because I see the future as a great leaning mountain ahead of me, and I dare not think I can make it on my own. I am humbled because I realise that my honours degree supposedly a testament to how much i know, will remain a gnawing pointer to how little I do know.
However, I am not saddened, because I believe, and I hope and I dare to declare that Baba God in heaven ‘no dey sleep’. And that He that began a great work in my life and in the life of my colleagues will bring it to a fruitous climax.
I bear these thoughts in my mind as I prepare for the last stand!

Well, hello the whichlevel community. Over the past few weeks I have become increasingly engaged in ‘life as i know it’ which has made posting to this blog rather irregular. I realise that all such projects often encounter a period of lag. What I also know is that the long term success of any endeavour can only be guaranteed by consistent and committed action. In my mind I decided to go over the last few months of whichlevel with the purpose of charting a course into the future. one thing that is particularly important to me is the issue of continuity. I would like to see young african students who are interested in becoming contributors to this blog. This is a challenge I am throwing at all visitors to this blog. Where can I find these individuals that are willing to share of themselves – their experiences, their knowledge for the benefit of a generation?

I stumbled into my inbox this evening to find a very interesting and encouraging e-mail from Dr. Peter Cullen. Just at a time that much of the traffic on this blog was shy of sharing. I must thank Dr. Cullen for stopping by and leaving pearls of wisdom. It is pretty self explanatory – read on.

Hello! This looks like a fantastic blog!

I tried to leave this message as a comment, but it was discarded, it seems, so I’m sending it to you as an e-mail.

I am Peter Cullen – an instructor in English Language and Culture for Business at the University of Uribno, Italy. I remember my professor of Economics at Dalhousie University in Canada was Nigerian, and he lost patience with us so often! He was very good though.
I have received a couple of e-mails of interest in studying abroad from people who linked to my blog from yours. That is good. I will do anything in my power to help. The first thing I can do is give some basic guidelines for people looking to study abroad – with a bit of particular reference to Italy.

1. The current academic situation in Italy is difficult – so most of our services are oriented to helping Italians study abroad.  That said, we do have about 300 international students each year, mostly from the European Community supported Erasmus academic integration programme.  The web-site for the office in charge of international students at the University of Urbino may be found at www.uniurb.it – the link is on the left-hand side of the page under “Relazioni Internazionali”.

2. If Nigerian students are interested in coming to study in Italy, they will find two things difficult:
   a) a good level of Italian language is imperative;
   b) Italy is not an administratively easy country, and has only recently become a destination country for newcomer settlement (at least in modern times!) This means that it may be more difficult for non-Europeans to integrate socially, although Italian people themselves are quite helpful and warm. My suggestion is that students who are interested specifically in Italian subjects should consider studying in an Italian university (including economics, biology, environmental sciences, etc. – if the student’s interest is specific to this country or the Mediterranean).

I will be honest. It is easier and probably qualitatively better, considering the whole picture, for Nigerian students to look at American or Canadian universities. I am Canadian and immediately promote Canadian universities, particularly at the undergraduate level. That said, I am not necessarily right. American universities are also very good.
[The Following are the steps to follow]

1. Look at the university web-sites.
2. Identify the area of study that interests you.
3. Contact the relevant professors in that discipline to ask about their programmes.
4. Contact the university’s International Students Office – they will be able to assist you in application, visas, scholarships, etc. with specific reference to their university.
   

The web-sites are very good, it is their job to provide information.
Much of this identification and application work can be done by the individual student. North Americans tend to be individually motivated, and our services are designed to provide a great deal of information to the individual who asks for it, but are not necessarily designed to help you directly to find that information. Use the internet as much as humanly possible!
Here are some links to some good universities in Canada.

www.dal.ca  
Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia: largest university in Atlantic Canada, offers a wide variety of programmes at the undergraduate and graduate level. Oceanography and marine biology are very good, as is engineering, business, medicine and law.

www.stmarys.ca  
Saint Mary’s University, Halifax Nova Scotia: small university, very good with international students: specialties include business and socio-anthropology.

www.mcgill.ca  
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec. Large university in the largest city in Quebec (one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Canada – beautiful and interesting, even if winters are very cold!) McGill offers excellent science programmes as well as communications (Marshall McCluhan was a prof. there) and humanities.

www.utoronto.ca 
University of Toronto, Toronto Ontario.  U of T is Canada’s premier university. It is the biggest in the biggest city in Canada (although the capital city is Ottawa!)  It is very good in humanities as well as sciences and technology.  We work with people in their language programmes and one of our students is doing a doctorate there now.  Like McGill, it offers many programmes at a very high level and is immediately recognised internationally.

www.ubc.ca 
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia.  UBC is another university oriented towards social sciences and natural sciences. It is Canada’s pacific coast university – so it is also specialised in marine sciences. That said, it is also close to the Rocky Mountains and has good environmental sciences programmes. Vancouver is relatively wealthy city with a relatively mild climate during both summer and winter.

So, there are also many other universities to choose from. These are only a very few. North America contains about 4500 universities and colleges. Do hunt around on internet as much as you can and DO contact the international offices at these universities for information!

For students who are directly interested in studying Italian topics do not hesitate to contact me at peterlcullen2[at]yahoo[dot]it.  I am not in a position of power, nor influence here, and I am only one person, but I have been a graduate student and professor in Italy and will help in any way I reasonably can.

It would be very interesting to have an exchange with a Nigerian university – our language and culture for business students could certainly benefit!

All the best to everyone – and good luck!

The Chevening Scholarship program (Post Graduate Only) is currently running. Check the British Council Website for more information. Submissions close in September. I have been trying to get information to build up my post on scholarships, but a lot of the information cannot be confirmed. The best bet is to give chips of advice as valid information comes.

I have recieved several emails from persons seeking scholarships for undergraduate study and the like. The truth is that I do not have any godfather that leaks info to me. Any information that is posted on this site is shared with me by friends or blogs etc. If anyone has information, please feel free to post it up here so that others can benefit. If new information about scholarships does not pop up often on this blog, it is only because I have not gotten any new information. Besides, there are countless sites that are up specifically for the purpose of giving information about scholarships.

Anyway, The British Council are an important source of information on scholarships for Nigerians planning to study abroad. You can get information about currently running programs from there as well as links to other organisations. As information trickles in, I assure you, this blog community will be served.

It pains me that I will not have the pleasure of being addressed by someone I respect on my graduation. Maybe my class should arrange a lecture, instead of the dumb ankara they want to get. just a thot.

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination
J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series,
delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and
the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard
Alumni Association.

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of
Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I’ve experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world’s best-educated Harry Potter convention.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations,and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I’ve used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.

I have been visibly absent from the world of blogging for 2 weeks, busy working on a million things, as usual, while trying to fight the pervasive apathy that always seems to haunt me… and my generation. I can only hope that others fare better than I have, though on the whole, I did not do so bad.
This post has been long overdue. A post about the true meaning of knowledge. I had a little discussion this afternoon that awakened the desire to write this.
I met someone today who took me up when I said all I wanted to do was graduate and make money. This fellow, who obviously was not used to my habit of embellishment and over expression took it that I meant exactly what I said i.e graduate and make money alone. In his words, knowledge was more important than money. We ended up reaching a compromise on our perspectives on the issue, however the discourse uncovered a few common myths about knowledge, which I address in this post.

1. Knowledge is more important than money
   First of all, knowledge, as well as money are not an end in themselves, except for insecure and shallow individuals who require ammunition to wave in the faces of others. They are a means to an end. As a result, they are neither as important individually or collectively, as the end to which their quest is aimed. It is like saying a hammer is more important than a saw in a wood workshop. They are distinct items, which belong to different categories. A hammer may be used to straighten or create a saw, and a saw may be used to carve the wooden handle of the hammer, but essentially such a relationship as might exist between them does not necessarily become a harbinger of superiority, no matter how compelling the argument might be.
2. Knowledge brings money
   This is an offshoot of the first myth, and it is usually a popular argument for proponents of the first. Fact: knowledge has been known to bring money. Countless individuals have had the fortune of their next five generations secured on the winds of the knowledge they had or uncovered. Today, discoveries are a powerful back bone of the world’s most successful enterprises. However, at the same time, so much that has been deemed as knowledge has lost individuals and corporations loads of cash, time and respect. I need not say more. Therefore, knowledge can bring money, but acquisition of additional knowledge does not guaranty a windfall of naira notes or foreign currency. What is however TRUE is that The right kind of knowledge brings money. Now, classifying knowledge is both limiting and liberating. How? It is left to the individual to determine what knowledge is capable of bringing in money. Thus, define knowledge. Go figure.
3. No knowledge is wasted
   This might have been true 50 years ago, but today, I hardly see the logic. With the rise of the internet, proliferation of TV, Radio, and other forms of media, one thing that is no longer lacking today is information. Data Smog or Information overload is the new cause of brain drain. Our brains cannot handle the barrage of data so we experience what David Lewis, PhD calls a paralysis of analysis. In today’s world, not only can knowledge be wasted, it can harm your ability to function effectively. The challenge now is to tune out material and information sources that seem unnecessary or to narrow down to seeking only the information that you need. Without an understanding of what your life goals, your strengths, your weaknesses are, you will be forced to compromise and eventually overly engage yourself in irrelevant pursuits.
4. The more you know the better off you are
   This is a much more difficult one to disprove. This is because the human mind is naturally wired towards acquisition and achievement. The notion that physical increase means growth, and acquiring more means improvement is atavistic. In the African context, this concept is even more difficult to grasp. The richer the man, the bigger the house, the bigger the car. For some, the more wives, the more kids etc. In reality, such increase might correlate to greater achievement but sometimes, it only shows greater need, greater depravity and greater need! In Blink… The Power of Thinking without Thinking by Malcom Gladwell, one of my favorite authors, he outlines that sometimes the less we know about a certain topic, the better of we are at making a good decision. Additional information often tends to only distract us from the core issue we have interest in. It works thesame way with the pareto principle, commonly called the 80/20 rule. It states that 80 percent of the results are determined by 20 percent of the action / causes.
5. Experts can know everything
   I am of the opinion that there are two kinds of people: those who dont know, and those who dont know that they dont know.This was posted on the Anecdotes blog (www.anecdotes.com.au) :
   The guy who has done this job for 20 years rates himself as good. But the guy doing it for two years rates themselves as expert.
   This is a very common trend in todays world. All it takes is a little additonal information to let a person know how little he really knows. What a paradox. This is not to say that some individuals do not have the priviledge and gift of being thoroughly knowledgeable in a specific field. Of course, by all means, but the truth is that there is always more ‘knowledge’ being uncovered from the least likely or most unexpected places capable of disproving the knowledge that you expertly cling to. Think about it, the world was believed to be flat for thousands of years, till Pythagoras or Erastothenes or whoever, discovered that the world was a sphere.

So there you have it, my little take on knowledge. I would like to add that this has been written to the current limit of my knowledge! De javu huh!