“When like minded people come together, magic happens; instantly”

This phrase you hear quite a bit. But really, are you lucky or is it something else?

I realized this today when I was doing the debriefing for our first ever event in our new centre; Neoone Centre for Accelerated Learning. We as a team will do a debrief to acknowledge and share our important learning from any event that we are involved in.

When it came to my turn, I shared about how when like minded people come together, magic happens, regardless whether we come from the same school or not.

As I was sharing this, it dawned on me what my AL mentor; Gail Heidenhain, said about luck a few days back on the way bringing her here from Singapore. I shared with her about how lucky we were to have so many supportive friends and biz partners that are putting in as much time and effort as we are getting the centre ready. She said; the the effect that it is not luck but investment that is paying back dividend due to our support and unconditional contribution to others combined with our commitment and believe that is shared by those around us.

This brought back to me my very first lesson from my very first marketing guru; Tom Peter that says “The harder you work, the luckier you get”.

Both echoes that there is no such thing as luck in the world. It is about what you put in is what you will harvest. From now on, harvesting is a new term for me to use in my work.

There are many tradeoffs that we make in our life. This is becomes more and more pronounce as we grow into adulthood and miraculously reduced as we grow into mature-hood.

One of tradeoffs that I made years ago which on hindsight was one that could have been avoided is the tradeoff of money quantity-time quality. Is it worth it? If I had the wisdom of hindsight or I had stumbled upon it earlier experientially or visually (which what actually happened. Txs Razak & Intan), I would not have made that tradeoff! Then again, the wisdom I have right now could also have been due to all those hours stuck in a jam with nothing much to do but think and read, just so that I can make some extra money.

As they say, life has a funny way of making you wise and that particular tradeoff for sure is one of many corpus of moments that has made me wise. So seeing it that was, is it really such a bad tradeoff?

The surest way of failure is to give up. The surest way to not arrive at anywhere is to not start. By just taking a step and continuing to do so will increase you chances of success dramatically.

Recently, my son’s handphone went dead. He requested for a replacement which I will gladly do. I then asked him what he wanted. His reply is an iPhone 5!

I then saw an opportunity to coach him on wants vs. needs. I asked him what does he value most in his old phone. He said the frequent texting, the once every so often call and the indispensable alarm. I then said, “If that is the case, why do you want an iPhone 5 if that is all you need?”

He then pondered and said, “Because I saw Kak Tasha had one.”

It got me to wonder how many of our teenagers actually are conditioned to see want as a need automatically when choosing what to buy due to ‘indirect peer pressure’ or a sense of wanting to conform. This decision I see as the basic of critical thinking.

I now have the task to find an analogy that he can appreciate on how we tend to overbuy technology which happens due our inability to distinguish between needs and wants; collapsing the two as one.

I had an idea. I said, “Buying the iPhone5 is equivalent to buying a book when you only need to read 1 chapter of the book. Would you buy a whole book or would you just read a chapter?”

He thought for a bit and said, “What if I need to read the other chapters later?”.

This is another myth that is strongly encouraged in the overbuy technology scheme where the fear of needing something sometime in the unforetold future. This is a very strong smoke screen because it masked a want as a need. In this myth, what you actually want is a sense a security of a strong need. It is still a want, see?

To this my answer is, “When you need it, only then we will buy it. For now, you only need a phone that serves your needs.”

I sweeten the argument with another perspective for him to think about. I said, “With the price of the iPhone5, I could get you a phone and a laptop. Now, which one do you see a pressing need, an iPhone or and laptop?”. To this he says, a laptop for all the obvious reasons.

And with that, it is settled… a laptop and not an iPhone.

The point is we don’t have the answers. We just have to live with the question and find our way.

“As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world as being able to remake ourselves”. Thank you Mahatma.