JDV On Air is a vodcast on leadership, risk and the people who take it on. Host Johan de Villiers talks to entrepreneurs and adventurers about what they’ve learnt the hard way. He then breaks it down into lessons for business leaders.
Sam Manicom joined me on JDV On Air, and one three-letter word he uses has stayed with me since.
The man who could not ride
Sam Manicom could not ride a motorcycle. That was the small flaw in his plan, which was to ride a BMW R80GS the length of Africa.
He had a steady job with a pension waiting at the end of it if he kept his head down for 30 years. There is a voice that runs the numbers on a life like that, and it is a reasonable voice. It says: “You have a good thing here. You cannot even ride a motorcycle. Sit down.”
Sam did not sit down. He learnt to ride, badly at first, and left the job. The bike he learnt on did not care that he was a beginner. It taught him the way Africa teaches everyone, by consequence.
What followed, he told me, was not a gap year. It was decades. He crossed the Sahara. In Namibia a crash nearly finished the whole enterprise and him with it. In Tanzania he was arrested and spent time in a cell. For a while he lived in a remote Tanzanian village. A crash is a natural full stop. A cell is a natural full stop. Sam kept refusing the punctuation.
The word ‘yet’
The word is “yet”. When Sam talks about the things that stopped him, and plenty did, he does not say he failed. He says he has not managed it yet.
It sounds like a small thing. It is not. “I failed” closes a file. “I have not done it yet” leaves the file open on the desk, which means you keep looking at it, which means one morning you pick it up again.
Business runs on the other word. We are trained to call things. The launch that flopped goes in the drawer marked “failed launch”. There is a boardroom version of that reasonable voice, and when a project stalls it leans across the table and says: “Call it. It’s dead. Move the budget.” Most of the time it’s right. That’s exactly why it is dangerous.
I know that voice well. It is mine. My instinct across 30 years in business has been to cut the deadweight early and not look back, and most of the time it has paid off. But I can name more than one thing I killed that was only stalled, and then watched someone with more patience make it run.
A stalled engine is not a broken engine. It is an engine waiting for you to work out why it stopped. Sam’s setbacks were not proof that the plan was wrong. They were bills the plan had to pay to keep moving.
Then the largest bill arrived. His kidneys failed. He needed a transplant, and someone he can never repay gave him one. He calls what he has now gifted time. A man who had spent his life turning full stops into commas was handed the biggest full stop there is, and someone else reached in and did the same thing for him.
Where ‘yet’ goes wrong
Now let me argue against my own guest, because I have watched “yet” do real damage.
“Yet” is also the favourite word of the founder who will not let go. The one still pouring money into a business that died two years ago, telling everyone it simply hasn’t turned the corner yet. Sometimes a plan is not paused. Sometimes it is genuinely dead, and “yet” is only the noise you make while you bleed out.
There is a second consideration. Sam is telling this story because he made it through. The Sahara did not keep him. His own body, in the end, did not keep him down. That is a survivor explaining his survival, and a survivor is the least reliable witness there is, because all those who used the same word but did not survive are not around to warn you off.
So the honest reading is not “never quit”; it is that “yet” is a tool, and like a high-lift jack it will either recover your vehicle or take your fingers off, depending entirely on whether you know what you are doing with it.
Reach for “yet” when the thing that stopped you is a problem you have not solved, not a verdict on whether it can be solved. Sam could not ride a motorcycle. That was a gap, not a wall.
Do not reach for “yet” to dodge an honest funeral. If the money is gone and the market has moved, and the only thing keeping the project breathing is your unwillingness to be the one who called it, that is not resilience. And do not spend other people’s security on your “yet”. Sam gambled his own salary and his own skin. Betting your staff’s jobs on a dead plan is a different thing entirely.
Sam Manicom still could not ride a motorcycle the day he set off across a continent. He treated that as the first “yet” of many, and the man who could not ride is now the one the rest of us ask how it is done. There is a plan on your desk that has stalled, and you have been sitting with a pen, deciding whether to sign it off as dead. Before you do, make sure you are not confusing “no” with “not yet”.
Listen to the full episode on your preferred platform here.
Johan de Villiers is the author of ‘Overlanding Through the Boardroom: Using Adventure Principles for Success in Business’, published by Rockhopper Books.
