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Introducing Jack

I’ll be turning thirty this year. I know I barely look twenty but that’s the truth. Some people will tell you that age is just a number and I have a term for such kind of people; I call them liars. Yes, Age is a number but age is not just a number. In fact, numbers are everything. Numbers are the reason behind, me appearing less appealing compared to Bill Gates, ten digits of them to be exact. But don’t get me wrong, I ain’t here to cry about the past days and the lost times. In fact, I am here to tell you about who I’ve been for the last 10900 something days.

We can summarize this persona standing in-front of you as a fusion of two characters, Neo from the Matrix and Jack from all the movies that have a Jack character in them. Like, He’s been on the losing side of love like Jack from the Titanic, He’s been the go-to guy for his family and friends like Jack from Jack and the Fat Man… my Dad being the Fat Man. But most of all I’ve been Jack the Pirate Mr. Sparrow without the eye-patch. I’ve been a pirate in the sense that

  • I’ve been everywhere but never to the same place twice
  • I’m been a friend to all and yet a friend to none
  • I’m been the guy with the solution for everyone except for himself
  • I’ve been the guy who knows everything and yet knows nothing….

Now, If you look closer to know how this persona came to be you may need to go back four decades and witness the making of the Neo version.

In the 80s a woman with a broken marriage and four kids, all girls, had a prophecy. She prophesied that she’ll give birth to a boy and he will save the day and restore peace to the world, vis-a-vis her world. And like all prophesies, a hero was born and what made this particular hero special was that he had already fulfilled his destiny the very first moment he set foot on this world and all He had to do was come to being with male body parts. And that’s usually the end of the story, the happily ever after but what people don’t understand is what happens to the hero after the happy ending.

This hero grew up to be an omnipresent boy, He was everywhere with everyone. On Saturdays, His father would take him to a bar he and his friends owned and he would play dominoes with drunks and smokers while Marvin Gay played in the background. Then, On Sundays, his mother would take him to church and he would take part in all the sermons, prayers and rituals. On the other days he would play marble with his classmates, video games with his neighbors, his sisters would wake him up in the middle of the night to watch Pink Panter, Sesame Street, and the Aristocats. And this kid continued to practice everything he came across. He took tennis classes, swimming classes, salsa classes, French classes, cooking classes, movie making classes…. and ended up becoming all the Jacks and most of all he became Jack of all trades… master of none.

Now, this might sound like a sad story but it’s by far, far from being sad. This boy became a perfect generalist. He saw life in all sort of ways. He studied everything he encountered and everyone he came across and understood everything… like

  • Why fathers drink
  • Why mother cry
  • Why house made’s fool around with security guards

He understood that life wasn’t about being someone but rather about being everyone. For him, life was too rich and too beautiful to live as only someone. He said

“Why be one when one can be everyone!!!”

but from all the wisdom he gathered he understood one important thing. He understood why numbers matter.

“If my Maker came to me and asked me if I wanted to live a million years I would say ‘Hell No, I want to live a thousand years…. a thousand times;
Ones as a healer, ones as a lover, ones as a thinker, ones as a maker, ones as a savior…'”

That’s why I and my friend decided to celebrate our 30th year anniversary, our 30th year of life, the entire year by doing thirty special deeds that we haven’t done before in memory of the number thirty. Starting a personal blog site being one of it.
So, I would like to ask your permission to take a selfie in commemoration of this particular, special day. So before I give the floor back to the Toastmaster I would like to put forward my last remark.

Forget what those people told you about age being just a number. Numbers are everything and I say celebrate every number, everyday. I tell you

“Count each of your numbers,
Count each of your days,
but most of all,
Make each of your days Count”

Dagmawi Bedilu

Dagmawi Bedilu is an aspiring Entrepreneur, Software Engineer, Game Designer and a Game-Thinking Activist with an appetite for both, Science and Arts. He has worked as a Senior Software Architect for Ethiopia’s biggest IT Company, designing and developing Location-Based Systems. As an entrepreneur, he has founded the social enterprise gursha.org and co-founded the game-thinking company Chewata Awaqi. In 2017 and in 2019 , he was a speaker at the Gamescom in Cologne and A Maze in Berlin, Germany. He is now a Project Coordinator and Game Thinking Lead for the ambitions Afro-futuristic project, EnterAfrica, where 15 Teams from 15 African Countries with 15 Visions come together to reimagine their Cities’ future through 15 Games, thus planting the seed for the start of an African Creative Gaming Industry. Dagmawi has one vision “Selling Joy in Jars”. He describes himself the real jack of all trades, an observer and traveler of time. A true believer of Love, Light, Luck, Life and… Laughter :)

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