I was 12 years old on the 24th of June, 1995.
I don't remember much about being 12 - but I remember that day.
I remember seeing thousands of rainbow-coloured flags waiving enthusiastically on the screen of our small TV.
I remember my dad going quiet in a way he never did during a sporting event.
And I remember Madiba walking out in a Nr. 6 Springbok jersey — the same jersey that, a year earlier, was a symbol of what he and many others stood against.
I didn't have the words for it then. I just knew something enormous was happening, and that it had nothing to do with rugby.
Then the anthem started.
Not our national anthem but PJ Powers and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, trading verses over a swelling orchestra - The World in Union.
What I didn't know — what I only learned years later — is that the official anthem of the Rugby World Cup wasn't originally written for the tournament at all.
Its melody comes from Gustav Holst's The Planets, composed in 1917.
Each movement representing a different face of human experience: Mars is war. Venus is peace. And Jupiter — the movement World in Union borrows from — is Joy. Fitting. :)
Holst wasn't writing about sport though.
He was mapping the entire emotional range of being human onto the solar system. And decades later, without asking permission, that melody found its way onto a rugby pitch in Johannesburg, and did exactly what it was built to do.
It reached past the game, past the two teams, past even the politics of that particular Saturday — and tapped into something older and bigger than all of it.
Entrepreneurs I believe often look for this very same sacred power.
You didn't start your business because of a spreadsheet. Somewhere underneath the hustle, you know that the real fuel isn't logic.
It's something deeper.
So we go looking for it.
We read the books. We copy the routines. We wake up at 5am and take cold plunges because someone on a podcast told us that's what winners do.
But the problem was never knowing. It wasn't doing, either.
It was believing.
Capital on Tap - a financial services company (who are all about the spreadsheets remember) - surveyed 250 small business owners about their daily habits.
The results revealed a surprising gap that most empirically-inclined habit hacking entrepreneurs would be hard pressed to say out loud.
The survey found that 91% of business owners reflect on their day, every single day. A critical habit, no doubt.
Yet only 40% believe that the habit actually contributes to their success.
That's a 51-point gap.
Almost everyone is doing the ritual. but fewer than half trust that it's doing anything at all.
That's the quiet tragedy of most morning routines.
We've turned rituals into habits — measurable, trackable, endlessly optimisable — and in doing so, we've drained them of the one ingredient that made them powerful in the first place.
A habit is something you do.
A ritual is something you believe in.
That's really the whole difference between a habit and something sacred.
Sacred doesn't mean religious.
It means set apart — something bigger than you — protected from the ordinary rules of usefulness.
You don't ask whether something sacred is "working."
You just keep showing up to it, because some part of you has decided it matters more than proof.
Habits get adopted, optimised, eventually dropped when a better hack comes along.
Sacred things promise protection.
Rituals are simply the small, repeated acts we use to turn the ordinary into the sacred — a jersey into a symbol, a Saturday into a memory, a quiet ten minutes into something that holds you together before the hard work starts.
That's the difference between going through the motions and being moved by them.
That's the part most entrepreneurs skip.
We're taught to build habits. Nobody teaches us to make something sacred — to take one small, unremarkable act and quietly decide it's worth more than its results.
You don't need another morning routine copied from Instagram.
You need one ordinary thing, however small, that you've decided to stop measuring and rather do because it is a doorway to something that you know you need, to help carry you while you take on the burden of building your business.
The World In Union back in 1995 didn’t unite our nation; rather it represented a much bigger and truer story of the human condition — one that we treat as sacred — and made us better and stronger together for being open to it.
Best we find the sacred that steadies us now.
