Knowing what you want to publicly profess about yourself doesn’t mean you have to have your life or LIFE all figured out, it just means you get to spend sometime thinking about what you accept as being of ultimate importance.

If all you could leave your children is one document about your life and who you are/dream to be, what do you want to say?

Sample this:

In the months leading up to the summer of 2009, Holstee was just a small side project. We had sold a hundred or so shirts, mostly to family and close friends looking to support us. Having just quit our jobs without a plan or idea of how we would spend our days, we were filled with a ton of raw energy, emotion, and ideas – a feeling that we never wanted to forget. So the first thing Holstee’s three founders -Mike, Fabian and Dave- did was sit together on the steps of Union Square and write down exactly what was on their minds and the tips of their tongues. It wasn’t about shirts and it wasn’t about their old jobs. It was about what they wanted from life and how to create a company that breathes that passion into the world everyday. It was a reminder of what we live for. The result became known as the Holstee Manifesto.

A message that has since been shared over 500,000 times and viewed over 60 million times online. Years later it is encouraging and inspiring to see how many people the words of The Holstee Manifesto resonate with. Above all else, it has confirmed for us that with genuine positive intentions, anything is possible.

Okay, you get the idea, now it’s time to put it to use. Grab a cup of something delicious, get cosy, and get writing. Declare the things you’ve always wanted to be so bold to declare.  THIS IS YOUR LIFE.

~ Inspired by The Holstee Manifesto and Morgan Day Cecil

PS/

We’d love it if you’d share some lines of your own manifesto with us here! I know we all will be energized from hearing them.

Happy New Year 2012, God bless you.

Quick question, don’t answer back, just think about it: who are you?

Have you ever wondered: ‘What is the meaning of my life?’ or ‘Who am I?’ If you have, you are not the only one, most people have. But think they just don’t have the time to find the answer or don’t know where to look.

Over the past few weeks, been having unplanned yet uber-intensive personal conversations with good friends and a few strangers – and the one common joiner – WHO AM I?

More often than not, in grief tragedy and adversity, do we get pushed to think about such heart-wrenching questions but shouldn’t it be the other way around?

All men should strive to learn before they die
what they are running from, and to, and why.
~ James Thurber

Forget your career, the title on your business card, how much money you make or how successful you are; forget your social circle standing or your speed dial list – WHO ARE YOU? Can you answer without making reference to possessions, gender, nationality, and personal appearance?

Once you seek to find out who you are, you want to dig deeper; you want to find out more. You start asking other questions such as what is the meaning of life? What do I really want out life? How can I find Happiness?

So food for thought…

The say there is power in the tongue,what are you saying about yourself?

Breast cancer is one of the leading killers of women today. Yet with early detection and treatment gives a 99% chance of recovery. Yes, 99%. So for breast cancer month this year, I invite you to give your time, talents and influence to help reduce the burden of cancer in Africa, by:

1. Talking about breast cancer: the causes, the interventions to prevent and manage the disease, and…
2. Getting every woman to go out and get a breast examination.

Again, with early detection, breast cancer is 99% curable. So save your best friend, your sister, your neighbour, your mother or your daughter.

Please go to www.thepinkproject.org and save a woman you care about. We invite you to blog, tweet (#ThePinkProject), or just tell your friends. The more women we can get to have a breast examination, the more powerful our efforts will be. Thank you.

Start here: http://www.thepinkproject.org

In honour of this great man, here’s his now infamous 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech:

You might be interested to read through the full text of his speech, learn about Albert Watson experience creating the iconic Steve Jobs portrait (above), browse through Steve Jobs on magazine covers or pay tribute to a great man over at Apple.com.

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.

A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.

Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

~ Via NoFilmSchool

Every year, I’m honoured to create still and motion imagery for clients all over the African continent, and around the World. Working on commercial campaigns is so much fun and the challenges these projects bring are very rewarding, but more important to me are my personal projects. I’m constantly finding, developing and working on creative ways to use my camera to make an impact, and this year we are honoured to work on a very important project. Quoting one of Africa’s illustrous daughters,

“We’re constantly being bombarded by problems that we face and sometimes we can get completely overwhelmed. [But] we should always feel like a hummingbird. I may feel insignificant, but I don’t want to be like the other animals watching the planet go down the drain. I’ll be a hummingbird, I’ll do the best I can.”

~ Wangari Maathai

Would you like to join me on this? More details shortly….

 We’ve taken the past couple of months to work on improvements, new features, faster loading pages, better laid-out portfolios and the immense feedback we received. I am very happy about this one - of course the previous one was great too and it got us named as part of the 25 Best Kenyan Web Designs but going forward we figured to make it even better – and we’re very excited about what we got.

"Mama Mboga" - Africa Portfolio

Please have a look at the site as well as some of the new work.  There maybe a few bugs here and there, we’ll clean them up as we go along. Id love to hear your feedback, please leave us your comments below, good or bad.  Thanks.

// Update: Sorry for the numerous spelling mistakes, thanks for the corrections.

Client : Nice shot. You got it in 15 minutes. But isn’t 1,000 bucks for that a robbery?
Photographer : Yes, you are right, but to get it done correctly in 15 minutes it took me 15 years of hard work and dedication to master this art of “robbery”.

When people see photographers at work, they often assume that the results must not be worth as much as other forms of art, since pressing the shutter to capture an image seems so much faster and easier than painting a photograph.

There’s a similar story that’s told about Picasso:

Picasso was in a park when a woman approached him and asked him to draw a portrait of her. Picasso agreed and quickly sketches her. After handing the sketch to her, she is pleased with the likeness and asks how much she owed to him. Picasso replies $5,000. The woman screamed, “but it took you only five minutes!”.

“No, Madam, it took me all my life”, replied Picasso.

Almost everywhere you look today there’s an inspiring story with a happy ending – usually a-rags-to-riches narrative of sheer human determination, pristine perseverance, and a drive to overcome adversity. We all love those stories. I dare say sometimes we live for them – secretly hoping and dreaming that our own lives would one day miraculously transform.

Three life stories, three worlds apart – same happy ending, hope!

The thing though about fairy tales is that it is hard to fully understand the true measure of sacrifice before the moments of glory. Unmentioned many times are the trying moments, like when Gardner’s girlfriend left him and his young son just after he’d spent 10 days in jail; or when a victim of sexual abuse, Winfrey gave birth at the age of 14, to a boy who died shortly after; or even when Juliani struggled to find an audience for his music when everyone told him he couldn’t get out of the ghetto.

True hope dwells on the possible, even when life seems to be a plot written by someone who wants to see how much adversity we can overcome True hope responds to the real world, to real life; it is an active effort.
~ Walter Anderson

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson