This archive report was first published on 6 October 2019.
On a Sunday morning in October 2019, Seraphine Ruligirwa-Kamara shared a thought-provoking article in Business Daily Africa titled 'Realise your potential by standing out in the crowd.'
She began by recounting a personal experience where she used honey to sweeten her coffee at a breakfast meeting. What seemed like a simple act sparked a 5-10 minute discussion about how most people use honey in their tea, not coffee.
This anecdote led Ruligirwa-Kamara to reflect on how quickly people spot anything out of the norm and how our societal conditioning trains us to follow certain paths. She noted that any deviation from what is generally accepted as normal is immediately questioned and seen as unusual.
She drew parallels with the popular 'spot the difference' exercise in children's newspapers, where the goal is to identify what's different between two nearly similar picture settings. Ruligirwa-Kamara argued that this exercise is not just a simple part of the weekend paper, but rather a reflection of our life systems conditioning us to pick out what's different and reject it as a standard.
She emphasized that our societal systems are designed to have us spot 'different' as undesirable, uncomfortable, and not to be accommodated or tolerated. Ruligirwa-Kamara urged readers to dare to be different and not fall for the system's requirement to conform.
She concluded by saying that life is too short to be average and that readers should act, talk, and work differently to rise onto their pedestal and achieve their full potential.
