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.

The past 6 months have flown by, and until the beginning of last week, I had thought nothing had happened in this year, I was wrong, in this year I became a different person, and through the last week I've been reeling to get my personality back.

Somehow in the last 6 months I became delusional, I saw my dream of Telamenta flying nicely, the work I was doing for Cycan was high level, complex and intricate, and my name seems to be ploughing through what I considered influential social circles. I was hanging out with "The cool crowd" of entrepreneurs in the South African scene, and somehow I decided that I was cool by proxy. Acceptance has always been a bit of an issue for me, standing off to the outside is my default mode of behaviour, separating myself somewhat from the inner circle of black leather jackets, and suddenly being accepted into this was seductive, intoxicating, addictive, and I lost myself. I deluded myself into thinking that the entrepreneurial rockstar lifestyle was sustainable, hell I deluded myself into thinking it was something I wanted.

Here I sit, on a Sunday morning, about to go off to a family lunch for my aunt's birthday, trying to find the person I was before the parties, before the cool, trying to remember what it was that the T-Bird's originally saw in me, before I came one myself. It was the fact that I was real, for a long time integrity was all that I had, I was down to earth, prepared to do the work, prepared to put in the extra hours (all day, all night, all weekend) and prepared to help, listen and support.

I've been reading Joseph Jaworski's "Synchronicity: the inner path of leadership" noticing patterns, and pulling out the deeper importance. Life is about relationships, deep and meaningful ones, it's about stories and people, relatedness, not things or fulfilling childish needs for the acceptance of the world.

I have moved from my worldview that the entrepreneur is a rockstar, where the pay off is superficial adoration from the thousands that have no idea who you are. Entrepreneurialism is about serving, creating something better, doing something better, or developing your community for your community, not for yourself but for the liberation, freedom and betterment of those around you, selflessly.

I don't pretend for a second that my new view is going to be easy, or that the behaviours are simple ones to change, but the pay off is bigger and the game itself is more fulfilling.

Panta rhei - Everything flows

Specification -

Name: Guy Taylor
Birthdate: 24 October, 1979
Geo-Location: Nomadic, generally between Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa
Company Alliances: Cognasium, Telamenta and Cycan
Email: guy at cognasium dot com
Jabber: guy at jabber dot co dot za
Twitter:http://twitter.com/xsyn

Output -

I help find the functional elements in a company by listening to the people who work there. I provide a valuable feedback loop to their issues by understanding them and their complexities

I am a behavioural theorist, analyst and change agent. The crux of it is I'm a people person, I like to understand the patterns around how and why people interact the way they do, and establish how to optimize people for their own lives.

I'm a great believer in human systems as fractal networks, so as we shift our perspectives and frames to view interactions at different levels, we see the same behaviours playing out in culture, and as we shift meta to that sub-cultural behaviour playing out in larger frameworks.

My influences are eclectic, though some of my biggest influences are the following:

* Neuro-Semantics
* Neuro-Linguistic Programming
* Open Source Cultures and Technologies
* Sports Psychology
* Business Management Methodology