Just a few weeks before giving this speech, I was in Zambia, and visiting the border town of Livingstone with the specific purpose of reading the missionary David Livingstone’s letters in the local museum. The opportunity chanced on me to do something that I had been wanting to do all my life, but somehow never did — bungee jumping.
The fact that this was one of the most iconic locations in the world was poignant. I was on the Cecil Rhodes bridge staring down into the raging Zambesi river gorge at Victoria Falls. It was a moment, which if I missed, I would be spending the rest of my life saying to myself that I was there but did not do it. I would not have been able to live with myself, and in olde age, if you don’t do one thing, it becomes easier to say to yourself it is okay not to do the next thing and the thing after that. That’s how old age creeps up on us and over time, nothing would matter enough. So I wasn’t going to start now
So, I had to just summon all my courage to force myself to walk from my lovely Avani hotel room near the Victoria Falls Park to the bridge. The way in which I summon courage is not by supressing fear. It was by confronting cold hard facts. The data clearly shows that bungee jumping is twice as safe as flying in an aeroplane and 10,000 times safer than every day driving in downtown traffic. I just had to believe that the data was fact. Secondy, I had to trust the equipment. Thirdly, I had to want to do it, and that was driven by the fact that I did not want to spend the rest of my life saying that this was yet another thing in my life that I didn’t do.
So when the day came for my speech, speaking to an audience of the top bankers, at least eight CEOs and three regulators, from across the region, I did wonder if the message would go down well with them. Banking was all about being safe, and the mindset has a way to infiltrating our thinking and dismantling our sense of dare. For bankers, dare was something other people did.
But banking is also about trusting the numbers. Banking is about equipment the industry can rely on. Leaders in banking are also called on to make memorable decisions in their lives. So the future belongs to those who want it for themselves. I am glad to say that the message was not lost on my audience that evening. Do tell me what you think.
