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One of Africa’s top entrepreneurs Dr. Strive Masiyiwa answered this questing in form of a narrative. He told us a story about a professional hunter who had a friend who always wanted to go with him on one of his hunts. So one day he said to his friend, "I have a permit to go into the Zambezi Valley and hunt for a buffalo. Would you like to come with me?"The friend was ecstatic at the opportunity."When do we go?" he asked."In about six months time, but before then I have to train you about hunting."For the next six months, the two men met every day, and they discussed and planned for the trip. The hunter's friend was surprised by how meticulous the hunter was about everything.He taught him about the bush, and how to survive in it. He taught him everything about buffaloes.“You must respect the buffalo,” he said, “because it's a very intelligent animal, and it is also extremely dangerous."He gave him lots of books to read, about hunting and buffaloes.During that time, the friend also trained every day at the shooting range. He understood by then the different types of guns used to hunt buffalo. He also had to do fitness training, which surprised him."You can die out there if you are not fit," his friend explained.He was totally astounded by what he was learning about hunting."Until now, I thought all you do is just go out and shoot, but now I know there’s more to this than meets the eye!" he exclaimed.When the day came, the two men set out into the wild bush of the Zambezi Valley, one of the most beautiful places on the earth. It is also inhospitably hot, and the terrain is tough.They'd been tracking one single animal for 5 days, and the hunter's friend was totally exhausted. He watched as his friend patiently made meticulous plans every single day. The hunter seamed to take forever, from the point of view of his friend. Sometimes they would walk, and sometimes they would sit for hours. The hunter was always looking around, scanning the bushes, not even (it appeared) always paying attention to the surrounding areas more than the buffalo."Why can't he just shoot and we go home!?"He was getting tired of this, as they walked almost 50 miles a day. He was also hungry most of the time, as they only ate rations of dried meat and fruit, most of the time. The hunter looked at the animal through his gun sight over and over every day, but wouldn’t take a shot. Sometimes they appeared so close, but he still did not do anything.It was the fifth day: The animal was in sight again, but the hunter was going through his routine again. The friend sat in the bushes, when suddenly a rabbit appeared in front of him and he thought to himself, "At least if I shoot this rabbit, we can have meat tonight. I'm tired of dry rations." So he pulled out his gun and fired once. The rabbit disappeared, as he had missed anyway, but so did the buffalo, and with it, the entire herd.The hunter looked at him in total horror and disbelief!Then he shouted, "Run, or you die!" as he took off.They almost got stampeded by an entire herd that seemed to appear from nowhere. Also, suddenly there were lions everywhere that he had not seen before! But for the skills of the hunter, who led them both to safety, they could have died.The buffalo was gone. The hunt was over.They had to return home, empty-handed.From this story I listed 10 critical lessons:1. Draw a plan- prepare like you're going to the moon.2. Set a target and stick to it3. start execution and don't forget the plan.4. A single distraction may cost you the entire opportunity5. Have an exit strategy when you sense unfavorable environment6. Realize you aren't the only one who has spotted the opportunity.7. You may not see the competitors but they are present,real, crafty and dangerous.8. Spread your resources to enable you accomplish your goal9. You may have lost the profit but try and salvage the business/source10. It takes much more patience and tenacity to net a large and elusive opportunity

Very nearly got my ass kicked, to stand between a sexual predator and his prey.This story is about how my best friendship of a decade originally began. Buckle up, followers all. I aim to tell a proper tale this time around (it’s a longer one than my Quoran usual).The night in question was Halloween, and the event was the holiday swing dance. Both of us were members of the James Madison University Swing Dance Club, and though we had met before that we had only ever talked in an acquaintance capacity.The day of the dance I dressed up as Indiana Jones, and went to work at my job at the campus library. I actually worked the entire day as Indy, though I didn't wear my pistol (fake, airsoft, but rather real-looking black metal, a thoroughly unwise decision overall) until the evening. I got a lot of compliments on my costume and the reasonable facsimile of abdominal muscles I was sporting underneath it, so I was in pretty high spirits around dance time that evening. I was young, I was single, I looked and felt good, and I was ready to go and work some charisma on some very nice young ladies that I knew. It was, overall, a very good day.Here's one of the very few surviving photos of me dressed as Indy, taken in the gym where the dance was held that night:I think it was a fair effort overall, don't you?When I arrived at the dance I launched into full extrovert mode, a skill I'd learned in recent years that I'd finally gotten a handle on but which exhausted me quickly. I could laugh, tell jokes, and be the relative life of a party for a few solid hours before I began to run dry and have to return to my pod back at home to recharge my mental and emotional batteries. Most dangerously, I had discovered that whilst in this mode, I had a newfound and frankly devastating effect on some of the ladies around me; it turned out that I was actually somewhat charming, once I got over the barrier of feeling all emo and misunderstood all the time as I had during my first four years of college.It wasn't too long into the dance, however, that I noticed Kathleen was upset. I was not close with her, and did not notice for any particular individual reason; the sheepish truth of the matter was I was aware of the presence, name, and evolving disposition of every female at that dance, because I had very little intention of going home alone and a fisherman should know the population of his pond if he hopes to, ah... have dinner. *coughs*Kathleen wasn't really my type, though. She was quiet to the point of being paralytic when I was nearby and in full social mode; there were times when I felt like I might need to take her pulse to make sure she hadn't gone into shock or something. What it really came down to was that she was a small-town girl who'd only been in college a year and some change by then, and was wholly unprepared for a fellow with a personality of the sledgehammer variety like the fake-but-functional extrovert me that existed as my metaphorical fishing rod at that time. It was a prototype, of sorts; this was over half a decade before I’d learn about my Asperger’s and the many actual reasons for my often overcomplicated functionality.There was something about Kathleen regardless that had caught my attention beyond attraction (which is saying something, as my list of "things that concern me beyond sex and attraction" was not exactly long at that stage of my life). She was so ridiculously innocent... it was like meeting a doll that had magically come to life, and had no real experiences yet with actual human people and how violently dangerous some of them can be. I had for some time felt an odd scratching in the back of my mind when I looked at her during the meetings and such, a strange impulse to find and gather and approach and attach pieces of medieval armor to her, without explanation, just to sort of casually encase her in protective steel instead of saying hello. I never had, but had always quietly wanted, a little sister growing up, and I think some part of me even in that primitive development recognized an independent, non-romantic urge to find someone worth guarding and then guard her until she told me to go away.I asked her what was wrong, and received no concrete answer, so I cheerfully pressed her with the fact that she could either tell me or I could just stare at the side of her head until she changed her mind. She responded by getting up and going outside, but not as if fleeing from me, exactly; it was more of a combination surrender and invitation to follow, which I did shortly thereafter. I found her outside the gym, sitting on the curb, and it was clear she had been crying. I sat down, all Indiana and whatnot, and asked her what was going on. And she still wouldn't answer me at first. So I just stared at her for a little while until it was clear I wasn't going to go anyplace until she lowered the gate and answered my question, and I think she must have had the alarmed thought that I would have quite contentedly just skipped the rest of the dance entirely if that's what it took to out-patience her on this one (I am skilled at projecting an attitude of infinite patience when I sense another person's impatience or time-sensitivity as a barrier; it's kind of a hilarious subtle aggressive tactic, when you think about it a little bit, as it isn't actually passive-aggressive as it might seem but directly, if weaponlessly, combative). So she finally cracked and started to tell me a story, and that story went something like this:A guy had come into town, an acquaintance of her dorm-roommate's. Subtext told me that this male was not entirely unattractive to her, or at least that he had not been at first. This fellow, who was named Adam, was a Navy cadet and a wrestler from some academy someplace who was on a trip and had stopped by JMU to visit, had met Kathleen through her roommate, had followed her about like a puppy for the past day or so, and then had spent the night in her dorm the night before. The short-form version she gave me then and there was that he had been offered the couch in her suite's common room to sleep on, but at some time in the night had come into her room to see if there might not be more to her kind offer of room than just "room." She didn't go into great detail, and I didn't waste her time asking stupid questions: the gist of it went that he put his hand in her pants after a short conversation, she freaked out in a mild-to-moderate way, and he left before her roommate could wake up and things could get even less comfortable. Kathleen had then had to put up with him following her around all day that day as well, and was worried about what else might happen when he was going to be sleeping there the next night. Beyond that, he had all but convinced her to loan him $700 to fix his car, apparently one of the reasons he was still staying in town at all. She was, for her part, completely unarmed. She had no idea what to do, no idea how to say no, no idea what sex was all about with anybody at that point (much less some guy she had known for a total of hours barely into the double-digits), and no idea what she was going to do since he was at the dance right now and seemed to have pegged her as his landside "girlfriend" while the storms kept his aspiring-sailor self trapped in this particular port.I didn't have the perspective then that I have now, but I did recognize that the scratching sense of need to armor this girl that had been living in the back of my mind was more of an insistent clawed paw-swipe now, pushing me to act. She was in trouble, and had no clue what to do. I had no clue what to do either, but felt that someone needed to do something, and I was the only soldier on the field.I am not a confrontational person by nature. I'm not even a competitive person by nature. I derive slim joy or sense of triumph from defeating or hurting or besting another in pretty much any scenario, and what little enjoyment I do get is easily dwarfed by the sense of accomplishment and goodwill I get from cooperatively accomplishing something with another person. So I know that you, heroic Quoran, might be thinking masculine thoughts about exactly what would have come naturally to you in this situation: find guy, beat guy, explain to him the general basics of gentlemanly conduct, perhaps. In that order, probably.I am not built for conflict resolution in this fashion, however.My greatest weapons lie in the areas of effective social espionage and strategic intelligence application: I can look at a person and tell you his or her greatest fears, their weaknesses, the areas in which they experience doubt and dismay. I can tell you where they would be weakest, I can undercut their egos with a single comment if need be, and I can drive a person from calm to rage in two sentences when and if I choose to poke them in the right (or deliberately wrong, more accurately) relevant nerve that way (all functions I would later realize were a part of my aspie superpower hyperception). Physical confrontation, however, has never been my primary area of expertise, and I've never found too much benefit to be gained from pretending as though it is. So it was with something of a disadvantage and no real plan that I found myself turning to face Adam the Navy cadet wrestler when he came outside to find out where Kathleen had gone, much as I had done mere minutes before.Adam was not pleased by this state of affairs, my very first glance told me. I turned the full force of my abnormal perception on him and took a rapid-fire readout of all of the hidden information I could gather, which read (from his perspective, then from mine in parentheses) approximately like this:- He is not supposed to be out here alone with her (note: possessive intent)- Who the hell is this guy (advantage: surprise)- What did she tell him (note: body tension / subnote: something to hide / inference: ill intent)- We're alone out here for now (warning: tactical disadvantage, overmatched physically)This wasn't much to go on, but it was better than nothing. And I have something of a talent and a history of being able to make do with relatively little in social settings; I can MacGyver verbally, is what I mean to say. The problem was that this particular situation was outside of my sphere. My plan was no plan at all. Instead what I had come to realize was that my intentions were not coming from the usual place, where my intellect made choices which fueled my capabilities and created a cohesive and potentially successful plan of action. Instead I suddenly noticed that what I was feeling was not a plan, but a conviction: this situation was not going to end the way it started, the way it was slated to end had I not gotten involved. It did not matter what I had to do in order to make that true. Adam was not going to leave with her tonight.I am not commonly ruled by conviction alone. This was a startling realization for me, that I was capable of such a departure from logic and the comfort of its predictable probability matrices. I can remember my passive mental processes calmly pondering this even as I stood and faced off with him in the coming minutes. My brain is a strange and multilayered thing. I stood up and turned around, but paused. I drew the metal pistol out of my holster and handed it to Kathleen barrel-first. I asked her to hold onto it for me, and keep it safe. I did not tell her that I wanted the fight that might be coming to not involve a too-realistic looking firearm even as a blunt force weapon in case the police should arrive and become involved. I might have been better able to defend myself with the heavy fake gun, but logic dictated that I not complicate the situation any more than necessary; it was a judgment call, and the first sign that I was less concerned about my own safety than I was about other factors in the situation, another new realization that had not previously ever been tested or revealed to be the case.Adam asked Kathleen what was going on.Kathleen said nothing, staring into my pistol as if it could answer for her. Since it belonged to me, I took that for a transfer of executive privilege.I responded that I was being told a fascinating tale about a lost boy who seemed to think he was on a hunt of some kind in someone else's forest.He asked me what the hell that meant.I told him it meant that he needed to find another place to sleep tonight.He told me that his sleeping arrangements were none of my goddamn business.I assured him I could care less about his "business," whatever he considered it to be, but that Kathleen was not and would not fall into that category.Kathleen said nothing, but made a funny sound like a whistling intake of breath. It was very poignant.Adam informed me that he had both the power and an increasing desire to kick my ass.I responded quite calmly that it didn't much matter if he did or not at this point, because either way someone else already knew he was hitting her up for hundreds of dollars and had tried to force himself on her the night before, and beating me up wasn't about to change the fact that his plan to try it again tonight was already ruined. In ten minutes everybody else would know, too.He stared at me, working that out in his mind. I am quite sure that he was methodically on his way to the conclusion that if he was going to lose his chance for sex and relative anonymity in manipulation all at once, he might as well kick my ass and at least have that. My spider sense was well tingling, the same feeling I used to get when I knew that my brother was charging at me from behind to hit me when I turned my back after a scathing comment as children. I didn't move, though, just hooked my thumbs into my belt loops and rocked back on my heels a bit, a completely fabricated picture of purest calm, as if we were just discussing the temperature.And that is when a small group of five fellows, friends from the club, wandered out the front doors ten feet away and saw the three of us there. Me, dressed as Indiana Jones, standing calm as one can make himself appear to be in the street in front of the gym. Adam, dressed as a Navy cadet dressed as a normal guy disguised as an angry person standing on the curb in front of me (which put him at head height to me; he was actually quite short, but very stocky and powerful-looking, as a wrestler should probably be). And Kathleen, sitting on that same curb about six feet to my left, still staring as hard as she could into the metal slide of my airsoft pistol. She probably doesn't remember that her knuckles were white, gripping it.My buddy Andrew was one of those fellows who came outside to find me that night. I wonder sometimes if he remembers that night at all, or that moment. The rest of them were all friends of varying degrees of closeness from the club. The guys, some of them at least, detected the tension in the air, but had no idea who Adam was nor what had been about to happen. Adam himself looked as though someone had just put a bare unwashed toe in his pudding cup right in front of his face as a way to tell him he couldn't have any now.I looked into his eyes and made mine as hard as they can get, intense like agates when I do it just right. I told him, "It would be a good idea to walk away right now." He waited and looked back at me for a long moment.Then he turned and walked off, and I watched him all the way down the long drive, up the hill on the other side and out of sight. Something inside me uncoiled, but only slightly. I was out of immediate danger. Kathleen, however, was not.Where things became complicated was that she did not seem to realize this fact. Her shame and embarrassment at having just been a part of such a scene were overpowering; there was not at that time room in her head for further thoughts, such as that Adam was completely unlikely to feel comfortable being so anticlimactically defeated by being outnumbered, or that he actually did not have anyplace else to go except back to her dorm, which was where he was most likely to be heading right now. She was overloaded, and I took my pistol out of her hand gingerly and just let her spin for a minute.I was still thinking, however, and both of these facts had occurred to me. As Kathleen fought my strong suggestions that she accept a ride home, that she be alert for him to show up again, my sublevels were rapidly forming two counterplans: one in which I could protect her myself, and a second in which I could arrange for her to be protected. Weighing the two even while I was still talking, I found the second one to be far more effective.I told the five fellows who had come out a very basic, detail-less version of what had happened, basically amounting to that the guy had been bothering Kathleen and I had asked him to leave, and thanked them for coming to find me when they did as they'd likely prevented my being rendered into a different shape and I was sort of fond of the one I had now. The guys laughed and blustered a bit, and asked me if she was going to okay, etc. I asked if one of them could give her a lift home, and Kathleen flat out refused. Then she walked off, the same way that Adam had gone. I weighed following her and fighting her into understanding the situation, deemed it quickly improbable and messy even if it succeeded, and pulled out my phone instead.JMU's campus cadets are a non-police, student-staffed safety option that goes a long way toward making girls feel they have a safe middle option to not be overreacting but still be reacting to the threats that shitty guys can and do represent on many college campuses, and I utilized them that evening for that precise service. That Kathleen had no idea they were coming and would be watching her, I reasoned, wasn't actually a betrayal of our newly-minted trust, since she'd chosen to walk off before I could ask her permission. So I called them, informed them that there was likely a suspicious and potentially dangerous male individual on his way to or outside of her dorm hall right now who looked like a tall pudding-less dwarf with a stormcloud where his face should be, and also gave them Kathleen's description and her likely range of location. The cadet dispatch fellow stayed on the line with me and I actually heard in the background within five minutes that two cadets had found and intercepted Adam outside of that dorm and forcibly removed him from campus entirely. He assured me that a cadet would find Kathleen and make sure she got home okay and in company. I thanked him for his help. Then I went back into the dance and danced with attractive women for awhile, because "dinner" still sounded good. Would you believe I did end up going home alone that night, though? It was a real shame, all things considered. I'd have written the ending a bit differently, myself.I never told Kathleen that Adam had been there waiting for her, until the first time I told this story in writing, seven years after the fact. She was already scared and mortified; it wasn't the right time for an I-told-you-so, and I wasn't exactly thrilled at having been correct. But I did have the brand new notion that I had done something selfless for another person, a young vulnerable woman at that, and hadn't once had the thought that maybe I deserved some base gratitude in return. I was wrestling internally with the new idea of my invisible, irreversible sense of obligation to this girl I barely knew.Our friendship has spanned many heights and valleys since that night. She's gentled me even as I've steeled her over years of experiences, and through it all I held my tongue about the way it all began because Kathleen was better, safer inside never having to know that she had almost walked directly into a predator's claws. I've met and truly come to know over a dozen women in my lifetime who, good and beautiful and undeserving though they were, were subject to some form of sexual assault at some point in their lives, and I knew that the irreversible realization of that dark potentiality forever changes the woman it happens to. She becomes wary, colder, harder inside or out. Her definitions change, her guard rises to a new and rusted-in-place minimum base level above zero. And Kathleen was innocent, pure and complete. I thought... I guess I thought she deserved the chance to grow and develop without having to have that shock of icy water thrown over her all at once. She could learn caution, she could develop better instincts and a more reasonably realistic view of the threats of the world without having to form them as scar tissue over trauma like that, and I could prevent that from being necessary.And she wouldn't, in the meantime, need that scarred flesh to armor her, because instead she would have me. I would stay near, I would keep watch over her, and I would protect her from anything and everything that might try to do her harm until she had grown into a woman who could defend herself, and at the pace her innocence and unique beauty deserved to be permitted. I could do that.So I did. I have.And through the thousand crests and troughs we’ve weathered as friends and allies since then, and in terms of things I’ve done that I’m proud of, this is right up there. And in terms of choices I’ve made which could actually be called heroic by someone else, this is definitely at the top of my list. The fact that she’s ended up with a guy of the caliber and kindness as her current beau… I seriously couldn’t be happier. He’s exactly the man I always felt she deserved. And I get to say without exaggeration or embellishment, I’m pretty sure I prevented my best friend from an attempted rape this one time, by being unexpectedly willing to get my ass kicked on her behalf.And also, since this story is about a real, live person I am extremely close with and who will in all likelihood be reading these words and reliving these events alongside me, it behooves me to point out just how much can, and does, and has changed in the past nine and a half years. She really has. The girl I met back then who couldn’t finish a sentence without swallowing a few of the words has evolved so completely and remarkably it’s hard for me to put sufficient words to it. I’m proud, of course, but that’s mostly just my ego talking; she gives me a great deal of credit semi-regularly as a catalyst for the hardening of her shell and separation from much of the fear that so defined the innocent little hobbit lass I first met. Now this is the woman who will sit at the dinner table with my family and volley jokes back and forth with my father, who once slapped the glasses off a pleading-to-get-back-together boyfriend for attempting to shame her in public, and who has very nearly finished a full playthrough of Dark Souls 2! If that isn’t genuine bravery, I don’t know what is.Thanks for bearing with me for storytime, neighbor.

Some 70,000 years ago Modern Man (Homo Sapiens) engaged in an incredible journey out of Africa. It is unclear if this was simply the result of a basic human spirit of exploration, but given the difficulties of such a journey, it seems reasonable to believe that he was somehow seeking better living conditions.Recent genetic studies show that most of humanity comes from such a small pool of individuals that scientist consider the possibility of these explorers having gone through such hardship that their numbers possibly fell to less than 10,000 individuals, as humanity came dangeroudly close to extinction.Shared and passed on human genetic mutations, from one generation to the next, serve as evidence that Modern Humans are decendents of this extremely tight group.As these explorers made it accross the Sahara, they dispatched into different groups, going east, then south to populate the Australian continent some 50,000 years ago, as well as East, then North all the way to the Americas by crossing the northern ice.Other groups pushed north straight to Europe, at which point they realized that they were not alone, but that in fact another group of men lived and had been living long before them. Neanderthal.It is unclear exactly how genetically compatible the two groups were, but one thing is for sure, it took about 20,000 years for Homo Sapiens (Modern Man) to dominate, hunt down and completely eradicate Neanderthal.Initially, Neanderthal was much more adapted to his environment and to winter conditions, as he was bigger, stronger and faster.But, Homo Sapiens had a crucial competitive advantage: Language.Language permitted Homo Sapiens to engage in much more elaborate forms of collaboration, which was crucial for hunting, communicating information, passing on skills, surviving in general, and later for developing Art, as an elaborate expression of self awareness.Thanks to these skills, he invented tools like the needle (out of bones), which enabled him to survive the ice age that occurred some 20,000 years ago.It is the melting of this ice age that created the fertile valleys of the rivers Tiger & Euphrates, in modern day Iraq, and which is possibly the lost mythical paradise that the Bible speaks about.With this fertility came the birth of Agriculture, some 8,000 years ago, and the first important human settlements found in Anatolia (modern day Turkey).So, while archeologists, historian and geneticists are continuously comparing and updating historical data, this is the prevailing theory about how modern humans all share the same African ancestry.