I'm sharing you an e-mail I got several months ago from a friend. I think he's told it ALL!!

Dear Slim,

I read your thoughts with a lot of interest. I understand that you feel you're not in the right place, that the world around us (our country and all the related stuff) is far from perfect, etc.

"If I were elsewhere, I would have been ...": This sounds like a grammar exercise "à la Bouaïcha” [ Mr. Bouaicha is our dear English professor and whom I greet warmly by the way! ]

But seriously, who could you be if you were not the Slim with all this background and all these [stupid/obsolete/...] cultural references you have?

You're Slim (the Slim I know) because of all this junk. If you were born in the U.S., you'd probably be an average troll living to save some dollars and to enjoy an empty life.

There are a lot of smart people here that do not have enough courage or self-esteem to refactor their world. They only need some smarter people to coach them. But smarter people are obviously too ignorant when it comes to the laws of mechanics.

How much does it take to start moving a heavy object by a foot? How much does it take to move it a foot further? Less than for the first! (Assuming you're constantly spending the same effort.)

I admit that there is a lot of inertia here. But if you choose to observe facts only, you'll be doing no better than Ibn Khaldoun or other imminent Arab scholars: they wrote lengthy books describing the society. None of them wrote a book explaining how to fix the inefficient rules and how to improve things.

If you want to bring change and to stop the mediocrity, you'll have to protect yourself from this same mediocrity. The elite is usually living far from the stupid crowd (even in developed countries, even in the antique Greece.) This preserves it from low level problems and common sense (which is always closer to wrong!).

We're in a freshly created country. Everything is still under construction. So why let mediocre people do the work for us? Our parents’ generation got corrupted by the social customs and habits. Where are they today? Certainly not where I want to be in 20 years.

Have a nice day :-)

--M.