Your story matters

Clint Davis was born in South Africa but, after living in Dubai and Australia, he and his wife realised a decades-long dream of living in the USA when they won the Green Card Lottery, a 0.73% chance. He and his wife then moved to Los Angeles, and eventually settled in Austin, Texas.

Clint considers resilience to be one of our greatest characteristics. Living in different countries is not as glamorous as it sounds. Growing up in South Africa he learned about adversity quickly particularly because of the dynamic change from the apartheid system and the racial healing that had to take place over a number of years. Clint and his wife developed a mindset that helped them deal with the different changes and challenges that played out as they moved from country to country. Whether it was budgetary issues or fitting into different communities, their approach became ‘this is where we are’ ‘this is the decision we made’ ‘lets see this through’ and ‘how do we do it’ rather than ‘can we do it’.

Moving gives you the opportunity to reinvent yourself but it also allows you to leave things behind. The more you mature the more you want to leave certain things behind. In your youth, when you move from a country you want to hang on to every nostalgic artifact and relationship but the truth of ‘out of sight out of mind’ is a human fact when you live it and over several moves you can lose many relationships. The reinvention of self is hard to translate back to people if you don't see them face-to-face. When you move countries you have to reinvent yourself and Clint feels the expats who don't make it are the ones who wanted to hang on to their homeland ideologies and didn’t recognise that a new country and culture require them to change. If you can find the balance of your roots and pair it with where you are now you can become an interesting tapestry of a person.

Holding on to your past is important in terms of resilience as its part of who you are. You need to adapt it for the future though rather than simply preserving it. There is a constant battle about what you hang on to and what you let go. Nostalgia actually holds you back when it come s to engaging with a new culture and will hold relational growth back.

Different structures, careers, countries, environments, types of jobs and the entrepreneurial world all need resilience to know you are going to get things wrong so failure needs to be factored in as part of the build process. People define failure differently but Clint feels that if you need to look at each failure as a learning environment , to approach it with a willingness to fail and learn from it and the humility that comes with it. If you are emotionally healthy and stable, you know that what others see as failures, you recognise as lessons and you don’t see failure but growth.

Clint spent seventeen years in radio, broadcasting to four different countries and was also a high performance driving instructor at racetracks and skidpans. Additionally he was involved with freelance podcasting and interviewing and event management. Now with his company Capsil App, the biggest difference is that instead of just doing it and taking the risk for himself, he now has a team of co-founders so needs to keep them and their families in mind as well as the product users and their families.  He feels you need to make a shift from yourself to how your decision making, emotional intelligence and communication plays out not just to keep things pure but to make sure things are communicated correctly - the heartbeat that everything you created as this entrepreneurial version of yourself is actually relayed and received in the correct light of what you are trying to do.

Clint feels that while we live in a digital age, we have done a poor job in passing our personal histories on generationally because there isn’t a stable platform to keep them on. Capsil App is a new platform where users can gather their memories and life stories into digital time capsules with full user control so it can be shared privately with future generations or on an optional public feed to inspire others. It can also provide users with coached storytelling expertise who can help remember all the details and create a meaningful recount of your life events and memories.

For more about Clint or information about Capsil.App visit www.capsll.app/

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.