A name is a very powerful thing.

A name can really shape your identity and determine how you live your life.

In my case, the name Alistair is a Scottish version of the name Alexander, the Greek name

Alexander, which means defender of men, protector of people.

And my middle name, Khaupalelui, is a Tswana name that means invincible, too strong to be defeated.

And my surname, Mukwena, comes from the Tswana word, kwena, for crocodile, which is a surname given to the Bakwena clan, the people of the crocodile.

And legend has it that these strong animals used to stand on the riverbanks and help the

Bakwena people cross rivers.

Now with these kind of names, my purpose was sealed for me.

I've never struggled to understand my purpose and my reason for existence.

I exist because of other people.

The connective tissue that brings us all together as a people is love for each other, respect for each other.

This notion of live and let live.

Now many of us are students of economics who have become quite familiar with the concept of scarcity, but we do have an opportunity today to rewrite that and live a life of abundance and believe in abundance and believe that there's indeed enough for all of us.

For us to do away with inequality and any kind of inequity, we have to create space for other people to thrive.

That's my life purpose.

That's where my joy comes from.

When a famous English poet and the dean of St. Paul Cathedral in London wrote a poem called Us Not For Whom The Bell Tolls, It Tolls For Thee, what James Dorn was trying to remind us of is that Aristotle pointed out the distinction between moment to moment pleasure versus deeper satisfaction.

Deeper satisfaction comes from a life well lived.

A life well lived comes from not feeling good, but doing good.

This notion that it's not about you, it's about being each other's keepers.

It's about being concerned about the welfare of everybody around us.

It's about understanding that we have to champion diversity, equity and inclusion, that we have to practice inclusive growth, that everything that we do must serve and feel and manifest like a tide that lifts all boats.

When I was a young boy growing up in Pretoria, everybody around me was a teacher.

I was surrounded by teachers.

My father was a teacher, my mother was a teacher, my grandparents were teachers, my aunts and uncles were teachers, my neighbors were teachers.

The last thing I wanted to do was to be a teacher because all they did was work.

They would teach during the day, they would prepare lectures at night.

If they were not marking tests, assignments, they would be marking exams during our holidays.

Or even worse, they'd be studying further.

And they kept telling me that you have to be a student of life and a student for life.

And I said, what does that mean?

Student of life is participate in life, suspend judgment, be a sponge, absorb it all.

Student for life, never stop learning.

Continuous development is a responsibility we have to each other.

The duty of care that we have to create a much better world for each other requires us to be the well that feeds other people.

Now, a well should not run dry, so you can't pour from an empty cup.

Hence the notion to constantly pour and learn so that you can impart your knowledge to other people.

I thought that was interesting.

But what struck me was how they spoke about their students and their learners.

They call them our children.

So I said to my mother, we're your children.

What do you mean these are your children?

And she said to me, it takes a village to raise a child.

All of us have a land, have a hand to land, have a responsibility to support the development of other people.

And we have to impart knowledge to those that seek it.

And we have to capacitate the next generation to really seize the day.

And those words stayed in my head for a long time.

And when my father's teaching career came to an end, he became an entrepreneur.

And knowing how tough entrepreneurship can be, I asked him, Daddy, why do you want to be an entrepreneur?

He said, look around you.

There is so much poverty and unemployment.

Somebody has to create jobs.

So he started a licensed restaurant and a pub in Pretoria so that the people of Harangua north of Pretoria could have a decent place to hang out and to come together and socialize and connect with each other.

But also so that they wouldn't have to put up with being harassed by the police for drinking in illegal shebeens.

So he saw a gap, and he cared deeply about bringing people together in a way that lifted the social experience of people in our community, that he went and did this, despite how tough the economic environment was, despite how tough the trading environment was, because he decided to care about a need that propelled him to do what he needed to do.

And that was another lesson for me.

And then my brothers and I were shipped to boarding school.

When I arrived at boarding school, I found that seniors were making juniors wash their sneakers as some form of initiation.

And luckily for me, the initiation didn't last very long.

But when the initiation ended, the need for clean sneakers didn't die.

That was a business opportunity.

So I very quickly turned this lemon into lemonade and started a sneaker washing business in boarding school with very little overheads, the sun and water and a scrubbing brush.

Made some nice pocket money.

Incidentally, this was in the 80s when MC Hammer was a big trend and a big favorite of ours.

He was a big rapper that we all loved, made famous by his song, Can't Touch This.

And his famous MC Hammer pants.

We were all excited about immersing ourselves into this very alluring American culture.

But we decided to own the culture and Africanize it.

So my friends and I decided that we will make our own African version of MC Hammer diaper pants.

So one of my friends, Gilbert, he had inherited an old sewing machine from his mom because when he left for boarding school, she gave him a sewing machine and said, you are now your own seamstress.

So we took the sewing machine, bought lots of material, personalized diaper pants, did a roaring trade, and it was lots of fun.

But what we did there was we taught the youth in our school that as much as it's great to be inspired by foreign culture, own it, localize it, and don't lose who you are.

And then I arrived at university in the early 90s at the dawn of South Africa's democracy.

I arrived at a predominantly white university where I found that the entertainment landscape didn't cater for all music tastes.

And it was quite disappointing.

We would go to a party, very diverse, we were great in diversity, but we lacked inclusion.

So my friends and I could not be deterred.

We couldn't pass up an opportunity to turn lemonade, I mean, lemons into more lemonade.

So we started an entertainment business that created an equitable and inclusive entertainment offering for our students.

We brought students together.

We drove inclusivity.

We lifted the average experience of campus life.

And that was lots of fun.

And then I started thinking about planning for my career.

I'm now at the end of university, and I took a leaf out of the life of Andrew Carnegie.

Andrew Carnegie is a famous Scottish-American steel industrialist who in his heyday was the wealthiest man in the world, but also the biggest philanthropist in America and the British Kingdom.

When he died, they found a piece of paper where he had written the following words, spend the first third of your life accumulating as much education as possible.

Spend the second third of your life making as much money as possible.

And the last third of your life, give it all away to a worthy cause.

So armed with this, I started planning my career 27 years ago.

I made a vow to myself that I would dedicate the first half of my career to accumulating as much knowledge, education, resources as possible, and that I would spend the second half of my career giving it all back for the betterment of society.

So in June this year, at the age of 48, I retired from corporate life.

I walked away from what I thought was the best job in the world to become a teacher, the thing that I didn't want to be, to speak on global stages, to write books.

I wrote a book on self-mastery and to solve problems in society that I care deeply about.

I started an education fund across a few South African universities to help students that are deserving but are unable to meet their financial obligations.

And I'm a few months away from finishing my second doctorate because, you know, you can't pour for an empty cup.

And if I can have the privilege of an education, it is my responsibility to ensure that I bring others with me and open doors for them.

So having tasted the freedom of pursuing a life of purpose and doing that which I care about, I now know that I didn't walk away from the best job in the world.

I was being prepared for the best job in the world, which is being a teacher.

So my prayer for you tonight is that you will find the freedom to pursue a life of purpose and that purpose may be your daily lived experience.

Thank you.