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Africa Experience , Founders' Corner
In Africa Experience / Founders' Corner
A few years ago, a former colleague tremendously challenged my way of thinking. For purposes of this blog, I will refer to him as Jael. I worked with Jael on an assignment while on secondment in UK. A few months into the assignment, Jael got married and resigned to go to Thailand for a year.
I was intrigued. Who resigns from a perfectly good job to go live in Thailand for a year? “He must be from a wealthy family”. This was the only reasonable conclusion I could come up with. I needed to validate this conclusion and so I hangout with Jael for a few weeks, trying to understand his plans, how he would survive etc.
As I got to know Jael and his plans for the one year he would be in Thailand, I was very disappointed to realise that my theory was wrong. Jael was not going to Thailand because he was from a wealthy family. Infact, he was going to be backpacking and he had been saving for this trip for several years. As I interacted with him, I came to realisation that I would never be caught anywhere near some of the places that Jael and his wife were going to be staying, what with my fancy nails and image conscious self?
Over the next few days, I began to process what I had discovered about Jael. Here I was complaining about being away from home to everyone who cared to listen; here I was bad mouthing the Great Britain at every opportunity I got; here I was having a serious bout of a fixed mindset and here was a young man, over 7 years younger than me but who was willing to live his life fearlessly! Where had I gone wrong” I began to wonder? What had led us to have such different mindsets?
As I processed this, I began to see how Jael and I grew up in extremely different environments. It was not just that I was born in Africa and he in Europe, it was the impact of these environments that was more significant than I had ever thought about before. Jael grew up embracing risks, he grew up looking for challenges, he grew up alive to beauty of mistakes. On the other hand, I did everything in my power to avoid mistakes. I loved my risk-free life, heck I even thrived in it. Predictable was what my perfect life looked like. My environment had taught me to run away from poverty, and anything that looked like a risk was not welcome in my perfectly crafted plan.
A few years down the line, Jael landed back in Europe, and started running a start-up that I still drool over. As I looked at his choices up until the birth of this innovative venture, I saw how his life and his mindset had prepared for this kind of life. What had looked like a choice of youth towards backpacking in Thailand had been just a pod in the ocean to a lifestyle of innovation and problem solving.
So what?
That season changed how I thought. All of a sudden I wanted to change my perspectives to life. I was not as eager to embrace my risk-free life, I wanted a better way of thinking, I wanted to take risks, I wanted to break free from the fixed mindset that seemed to have held me captive. In the years to come, I began to challenge my way of thinking. I looked for ways to stretch my mind. I embraced risks and began to adopt a growth mindset . I became more interested in learning and growth, than in living a perfectly crafted life. If I got nothing else from the period I spent in UK, this would serve me well in the years to come.
Years later I introduced the Africa Experience to the program we run at Lapid Leaders Africa. Jael’s backpacking adventurous life had not only impacted me, but needed to impact many more youth in Africa, many more people life me.
My conviction is that, if we will change this Continent that we all love so much, we must change how we think. We must allow ourselves to be stretched beyond our comfort zones, this is still one of the ingredients to any success story (you can read more on this here ). We must embrace risks, we must look for ways to get the youth to be more innovative and yet structured in their way of thinking, we must get the youth to stretch their possibilities. This is the only way that we begin to build the kind of solutions that Africa needs.
Unfortunately this is not one of those that can be taught in class, this kind of skills and attitudes are only harnessed through Experiences, and that is what the Africa Experience presents to Lapid Leaders, an opportunity to organize and take part in a study trip in a country in the region. The current cohort of Lapid Leaders will be visiting Rwanda and Zambia in a few weeks. Even before we have commenced the actual study trip, it is evident that the process is already changing us; for me it is in the process of knocking on doors that I ordinarily would not knock, but now do so as to ensure that the Experience is extremely rich; for the students it is in stretching their thoughts, their worldviews. We are unknowingly embracing a growth mindset that will serve us even after this Experience. Here is a blog by one of them.
So yes, this Experience is a key component of the program. We invite you to support this initiative, invest in the mind of a future leader, help us become the kind of leaders that this Continent needs.
Proverbs 23:7a For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he
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