BORROW FROM OTHERS

Welcome!  It is another week and it is a great thing to be alive and have a dream to pursue isn’t it?  My daughter left for College yesterday, and I feel like a part of me was taken away.  Like I had told her a long time ago, growth is not always comfortable or pleasant, but it is absolutely necessary!  So after about three months of heart to heart talk on how what leaving home might be all about and how to conduct herself when she gets there, she finally left yesterday.

What stood out for me during the whole trip and even when we got to school was how prepared she was for this new phase.  Unlike when my son left for school, there were no tears and my daughter actually did a very great job of packing her stuff.  In one sentence ‘she was ready.’

This morning as I woke up, and started to meditate on a new week and what we should talk about on this post, I realized that part of what made it so easy for my daughter to transition was that she was actually prepared.  I remember that each month these last three years that we visited her brother in school; we used to have to look for her. Once we get in, she goes into the hostel and tries to fraternize with the other children. She would ask a lot of questions of them about their experience in the school.

She made it a point of duty to try and connect with others on each trip and she didn’t just do it for the fun of it, she always had a question that she needed answered.  So over time she had actually made for herself a number of friends that were not necessarily her brother’s friends.  What this did for her was that she had an idea how the school worked and she also had friends waiting for her to join them.

How can we translate this principle to working our dream you may ask, well, I guess I am doing this post to debunk the myth that there is any idea so novel or new that no one else had worked before.  It has been proven that for an individual to become an expert in any field at all, he will require to invest at least 10,000 hours in gathering information and knowledge in that field.  Now I know you do not have 10,000 hours at a go but at least you have the window of opportunity where you can approach those who already know to be able to enrich your dream using their own experiences. 

What my daughter did was borrow from the experience of the other children in the school, while taking every opportunity to familiarize herself with the environment.  Even though your dream will be strange territory to you, it is not strange to anyone who might have worked a similar dream before.  The first investment you need to be making right now, is identifying and connecting with those who have succeeded therein, so you can borrow from the benefit of their own experience.  

 

Let’s look at the steps again:

1. Identify the dream you want to pursue
2. Familiarise yourself with the working of that dream
3. Connect with other people working the dream
4. Make the effort to spend time with them and ask questions on what you don’t quite understand
5. Keep the relationship going.  Make sure you come back whenever you have the opportunity
6. Make the leap when the time comes.

Just like my daughter was able to transition into the college environment without friction, you can begin to work your dream from scratch too, if you will ride on the wings of what others have done within similar dreams.

You will make it NeverTheLess, just remember that expertise is available to you, if you will make the investment of reaching out to others.

God bless you

Sistar B