The strong and the weak

YOUR role in your life’s movie…Imagine that you have been invited to be an actor in a popular movie shooting on site in Kigali soon. Already feeling like special celebrity and superstar combined? Then you find that your role will not be some high octane action role with stunts to boot and dream of being the next James Bond, Rambo and Tom Cruise all rolled into one. Neither will it be the gripping courtroom lawyer in a legal drama. You will be honoured to act number 12,467 in a crowd scene depicting a Kimironko market scene and they will need you for three minutes. Does it feel satisfying?The journey of the entrepreneur is somewhat the same, as is life itself. There are a lot of crowd scenes but only a small group of ‘stars’. We all start from pretty much the same pedestal, more or less. Differences that result in privilege or lack of it are rarely key contributors to one’s success. To make an impact, you must step out and think and act differently from the crowd. This involves some ‘toughness of spirit’. You must step out with faith.More often than not, the idea will develop a life of its own. There are so many environmental factors that affect our endeavors. This is so much so that things do not go according to plan. Remember that famous quote about war? That wars begin as we wish but rarely end as we please? That is applicable here. The end result might just be so much bigger and better than hitherto envisaged. You have to hang in there!The power enthusiasm and team work is key. There will be rough patches but you will also get help (sometimes from unexpected quarters). This enthusiasm, perhaps more than anything else, will win you friends and support (both material and otherwise) from near and far. It is also infectious and will motivate your team.Attempt the impossible; it is how you make new possibilities. Look at it this way, the worst that can happen is, as Thomas Edison would put it you will find out combination does not work. Look around you and just from modern technology you will realise that its impossibilities have been overcome before, again and again.Each one needs to show leadership and innovation in their daily roles. Each of us needs to dream and think big. Each of us needs to stay awake and turn visions into reality. We need to have more stars among us, gutsy and enthusiastically attempting the impossible. We need to dare to be different, to think different as they did. Else we each remain actor number 12,647 or even worse in a crowd scene. It is difficult to make a significant impact when you are always part of a crowd. You don’t have to be in a mob to have mob psychology; you get the mentality the moment you stop thinking for yourself in order to ‘fit in’. Don’t work too hard to be seen as ‘one of us’. Think for yourself; try to do something different, something special. Make your dream happen. Be unreasonable if you have to because as George Bernard Shaw said, the reasonable man adapts himself to conditions that surround him. The unreasonable man adapts the surrounding conditions to himself…all progress depends on the unreasonable man. Be inspired to be your very own superstar!