1. Why this, why now

As of 2023, I’ve been postponing writing for over 15 years and I’ve just reached a point where I can no longer prolong this.

I believe writing is a requirement in order for me to be able to live a life aligned with who I truly want to be.

Who I truly want to be is driven by my personal vision:
To help create a world where many live a life closely aligned to who they truly want to be and inspire others to do the same - i.e. for individuals & the organisations they work for

As indicated by the name of this site, the question I’m starting to ask myself more often and recommend others also ask themselves is: Am I Aligned?
Here, I’ll be sharing thoughts and ideas related to how we can answer that very question.

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2. What can you expect to find here

I believe there’s two intertwined items you will find here:

• Conversations I’ve been having with myself that I would like to see expanded

• Documentation of self-experiments as I apply ideas that I write about

Conversations With Myself

Back in 2016, as I was thinking of how to categories what makes up my life, the following five themes came up - I have since noticed very similar themes by others.

So you can expect to find these as topics of interest with their various levels of subcategories.

How I define each theme:

1. Spirituality - this is the foundation, I see this as taking care of own core beliefs which guide own sense of morality; i.e. what I will do and more importantly what I will not do when it comes to all other themes

2. Health - consciously taking care of own physical, emotional, mental health

3. Relationships - investment with wife & kids, extending to parents and siblings, some extended family and friends

4. Self-development - this is knowledge and skill that no one can take away; it has the broadest scope and is intertwined with other themes as it’s about the continued learning and implementation to enable own personal growth in both personal and career life

5. Meeting material needs - don’t quite have the perfect description yet, what I know is that this may mostly be dependent on money today, but this does not necessarily need to be limited to money; whatever enables us to have healthy food, comfortable shelter, and contentment while I’m still willing to tradeoff the time lost to gain these things
   

Self-experiments

The experiments I’ll be documenting are related to the themes above, stuff I’ve been meaning to try for my health, stuff with the kids, and a whole lot around self-development.

Take as an example this website itself - I now have plenty of opportunities to practice writing.
Firstly, writing itself is an act of creating which is something I want to do more of.
Secondly, I see writing as a critical foundation to communication which in turn will help me realise my vision of helping create alignment for individuals and the organisations they work for.
That also means from this one experiment, I can also improve in how I fulfil my role with my current employer where I am responsible for guiding Technology/Architecture strategy which requires a lot of alignment.
Lastly, I believe with a bit more practice, this writing skill will open up even greater opportunities in the future.

3. About Me - Can you relate?

Sometimes we look at someone sharing and implementing some ideas and we think; I could never implement that, that person doesn’t have family responsibilities like I do, that person has all the time in the world to be doing that stuff…this is just not in line with my reality, I can’t relate to this person, our backgrounds are just not the same.

While I don’t believe it is necessary for our backgrounds to be similar to be able to learn from each other, I’ve given the below context to show that I’m just a regular guy, nothing extra special.

My name is Mahlatse Makalancheche, I also answer to the last names Ramaila and Mathenda - story for another post.

I’m a husband - married a friend in 2013 and I’m a father of two.
Our first child is a boy born in 2017 while second is a girl born in 2019 - so as you can tell, at the time of writing, those are small and very demanding kids growing up too slow and too fast on the same time.
The kids have very different personalities, the boy is also autistic, and the girl, well she’s…something else.
I’m always searching for and chasing for the time to build great relationships with the kids while having fun and hopefully also getting to instil some habits that will be helpful for the rest of their lives.

I’m originally from a tiny rural village you’ve likely never heard of where we speak an unwritten dialect you’ve never heard of called khetswapo.
As locals, we call our village Metsi, but you’ll find it as Metz on a map, located in the Limpopo province of South Africa.
I spent most of my teenage years in Polokwane where I had many challenges, but also spent a lot of time in deep thought of the person I want to become.

I’ve done fairly okay career wise.
I’m generally the least formally qualified in a room, I don’t hold a degree or diploma, I’ve done some industry relevant certificates but most of the work has been the self-learning without any form of formal credit.
I’ve always been an avid learner since a young age - I did not need to be told to learn and learning with a specific practical intention has always been easier than a formal approach for me and this has done me really well for someone this “uneducated”.

I now live in one of the suburbs of Johannesburg, having been fortunate enough to economically afford a life very different from where I come from, vastly different to those I grew up with in both okayish and not so great ways.
One of the things that fascinates me about life is how everything, and I mean absolutely everything has a tax - it’s all about tradeoffs, and for as long as we are alive, each of us gets to at any moment choose what tradeoffs we are most willing to live or even die with.

That was a lot, I hope it paints an okay enough picture for what to expect from amialigned.com, looking forward to engaging, thanks for stopping by.