By imagining all the obstacles in your way, you may start to feel powerless to achieve your dream.
But you have the skills and potential to make your dreams come true. You have infinite potential to be, create and achieve whatever you want.
Have you ever heard of William Kamkwamba? When severe famine hit his village in the Republic of Malawi in southeastern Africa, left his family unable to pay his tuition and forced him to drop out of school, he could have concluded that it would be impossible to obtain an education and a future profession.
Instead, he persisted in his quest for knowledge and a better life, and began frequenting the local library. It was there that young William discovered his love for electronics and began to consider how it could create a better life for himself and his family.
Instead of focusing on the money and access to school he didn't have, he thought about the things he had to work with: a bicycle, his experience repairing radios, and the constant wind in his house. At age 14, he decided to create an improvised windmill and ended up building a model that worked with pieces of a junkyard, a bicycle frame, pulleys, plastic cables, wires and batteries he built a windmill and turned wind energy into useful energy.
This feat caught the attention of local farmers and journalists, then international news agencies.
The boy became internationally famous when his extraordinary invention made the cover story of the Wall Street Journal, chronicling the modest research he carried out in the old books of his impoverished village library, as well as the formidable intuitive intelligence and determination spurred on by help, even if at times. sometimes reluctantly, from education agents in his country and from his progressive father who was torn between ancestral religious beliefs and values and modern Africa.
His fame skyrocketed and he was invited to speak as a guest at TEDGlobal 2007. He accepted the invitation and the audience was so moved by his speech that several businessmen pledged to help finance his high school education.
Thanks to William's tenacity and resourcefulness, an event that could have doomed him to a life of menial toil and scarcity became the catalyst that helped him become a well-known innovator, engineer, and author.
There are two important lessons to be learned from this story:
One is that, no matter how little you have to get your project done, you can always get started. You can focus on what you have at your disposal and do what you can with what you have.
The second is that when you start taking those first steps with faith and commitment to the pursuit of your dream, things start to fall into place. I've seen this happen several times in my family's history, and I've learned that in a dispute between a determined human being and a bad circumstance, one must ALWAYS bet on the person.
There is a potential within you that is greater than any problem or obstacle you can imagine. You have access to that potential, which means you have the ability to fulfill your dream and a life you would like to live.
Now you might be thinking, "That's easy to say, but if I have all this 'power,' why have I never been able to get over this fear, circumstances, or the urge to always put it off?"
It doesn't matter who you are, how old you are, what your education or even your education, gender, location or past history.
THE POTENTIAL lies in the conviction that in the dispute between YOU and a bad circumstance, you will ALWAYS win.
BECAUSE GOD HAS NOT GIVEN US A SPIRIT OF FEAR AND STIMIDITY, BUT A SPIRIT OF POWER, LOVE AND SELF-CONTROL.
2 Timothy 1:7
P.S. Currently, William Kamkwamba is an environmental engineer graduated from the famous American University of Dartmouth, in New Hampshire, and a character in the book The boy who harnessed the wind, by New York journalist Bryan Mealer, on which the 2018 film of the same name was based.
Daniel Luz is Human Resources Director at Miranos and a columnist at Gente Mais Portal.
Comments