This entry was posted on Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Change, Economic Crisis, Free Stuff (PDF's etc.), Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Sitting now in a house – that was build by my grand-grand father – on an African island. Having lunch with my ex nanny Zohra (the flower).
I ask her: how old are you?
She answers: I don’t know.
Amel: Why not? How can you not know how old you are?
Zohra: Why should it matter? I am living my life and one day I will die, why should knowing my age matters anyway? Others will come after me and live their life, it’s a circle.
This conversation made me contemplative for some moments …
In western countries people tend to “hide” their age because being young is the desired state. You should never ask – especially women – about their age! In the Arab world it is even desired for a woman to become old. You get more respect the older you are! Personally I enjoy that. Everything is getting better so far. I am more experienced, more mature, have fewer complexes, better s… and so one. I definitely do not want to be 18 again.
We can also ask this question for companies. The common understanding is that the older a company gets the better. Why actually? Steve Jobs said in a speech in Stanford: Death is the change agent of life. Perhaps it is time nowadays for some companies to die and leave space for new ones to emerge.
Perhaps it is nicer for people to be old and for companies to be young! Or even to forget about age, it does not matter after all ☺
Common sense but not common practice!