As an ADD entrepreneur with a background in cognitive psychology, when I stumbled onto Mike Stopforth's bio which says "I am a social media entrepreneur, writer and professional speaker based in Johannesburg, South Africa. My projects include social media consultancy Cerebra, Afrigator and the 27dinners. " something clicked for me.

I'm a great believer in the power of play, of getting sucked into the zone where you're creating for the sake of creating, instead of pulling in artificial responsibilities. Letting go and learning for the sake of learning allows us to access our less unconscious competence. You know, that state of being that lets us access creativity, good ideas, and is mostly pretty zen. I've recently found myself being pulled into the overly serious world of business, where urgency takes precedence over quality, getting stuff done is more important than doing the right thing, and flat cash is more important than people or communities.

I've been watching closely how we are fundamentally flawed in the way that we attach value to tiny pieces of paper (now plastic) and instead of valuing humans, or the task for the sake of the task, we value the outcome and what it gives us. Essentially we are stifling and choking the creativity and relationships that we hold sacred in exchange for shiny trinkets and bauble.

The way we symbolise things brings with them a shared social meaning.Viktor Frankl's insights into the human mind pushes through this further to show that we are essentially meaning making machines. We assign meaning, and then appropriate a pattern to this meaning.

So, with the meaning of business and companies being so severe, I read Mike's bio, and the one word that popped out at me was "projects". Projects are light, they're fun, they're meaningful, and they have the opportunity to become something that they did not start out as. Projects create the freedom to experiment and play, they invite learning and opportunity.

I have no idea if Mike went through a similar conscious stream or not, but I want to thank him for adding that bit of meaning to my life.

This does however mean that I now need to change all my signatures and bio's.

I was fortunate enough to be involved with the TedX Johannesburg event from close to its inception. A large part of this was in watching a rather remarkable woman in Alicia-Thomas Woolf.

Alicia has always been a women that acknowledges those that give back, and I think it's only appropriate to acknowledge the amount of effort that she went into, in a completely voluntary state in order to put together a production that made me feel not only proudly South African, also proudly human. In fact I don't recall being in a room packed full of individuals as eager to give back to their various communities, across divergent background, despite race, gender or education as I did yesterday.

My own company, Telamenta, in which Alicia is strongly involved, has always taken a large involvement in community give back. I had always written this off to the fact that we're a bunch of geeks, that were welcomed into the age of digital enlightenment through open source software (OSS), an intrinsically communal development. Yesterday these, I know realise cynical, blinkers were lifted To see individuals from incredibly colourful backgrounds, from nursing to technology, from biology to biomimicry (to alchemy) showing the fundamentally human trait of caring.

I strongly suggest those that want to give back read through Ivo Vegter's Live Blog of the event.

My small 2c is simply to say Alicia, well done, it was an idea that was worth spreading and you use just the butter knife for the job.