Challenge Yourself

Its been another crazy week for me, but this time its not for business. I’ve got family and friends in town and I’ve been trying to spend as much time as I can with them in between meetings. Its a hard task, but the time I spend with them, I learn a lot from them and a common theme amongst them is that they all have faced and dealt with a lot of challenges in their lives.

Firstly, there’s my friends who are visiting from Melbourne. I went to uni with one of them and the other is one of her friends from Italy. Both of them have some amazing stories about their travels in Australia, and in typical tourist style they’ve got plenty of photos to back them up! My friend from uni has a unique challenge at hand. After living in Melbourne for the past few years, she is giving it all up to go back home to Singapore to be closer to her family. I’m a bit surprised at her decision but she’s an amazing person so I know that she’ll be just fine in dealing with this challenge, and if it doesn’t work out, she’ll just have another story to add to her collection! Good luck Sarah!

Then there’s my aunt who runs her own international school in Sri Lanka. I’ve never actually taken the time to understand what she does exactly but these past few days I’ve realised that she’s been through so many challenges in her life and she’s always come out on top. She used to be the Principal of a very prestigious girls school in Sri Lanka and the position alone attracts many challenges, but also had many rewards.

We were watching an old home movie that was taken 18 years ago and what totally amazes me was that she looks very much the same now as she did back then. I asked her what her secret was and she basically said that she was happy about life. All her children have settled down and she visits them quite frequently. Her school is doing well so there’s no dramas there. She’s essentially had all these challenges, faced and dealt with them and is now in a position to really continue to enjoy life. Somehow though, after everything I know about her, I think that for her happiness wasn’t really a destination, but more so a way of travelling through life. Good luck Aunty!

Next off the rank there’s my cousin Asanka from Sri Lanka. My god he is a high flyer! While most of the rich buy cars, and houses, and boats, this guy goes out and buys a hospital! I couldn’t believe it when I heard the news, but he’s got a very good reason for doing so. He runs his own medical supplies business and he’s spent the past 15 years travelling the world to buy medical supplies and he brings them back to sri lanka and sells them to the existing hospitals. He also purchases medical equipment such as x ray machines, ct scanners, endoscopy machines and leases these out to the poorer hospitals in the country. It’s an amazing business and he built it all by himself from scratch. He rarely comes to visit Darwin, but when he does I always manage to spend an hour or two with him and honestly what we talk about during those few precious hours, puts me miles ahead of my competition.

Having grown the business from scratch, I’m sure my cousin has had many challenges along the way but each time he’s risen up and faced those challenges which is why he’s been in business so long. He’s got an amazing attitude to succeed no matter what and that’s important because sometimes your passion to succeed will be the only thing to carry you through the hard times. Good luck Asanka Ayiah!

Finally there’s me. A friend of mine nominated me for NT Young Achiever awards and that required me to produce a list of my achievements over the past few years. I struggled to remember exactly what I’d done but eventually I managed to put together a pretty good list. I also had to smile because each item on my achievements list came with a lot of challenges, that I had to face and deal with effectively in order to achieve my goals.

Even if you’re not being nominated for an award, I recommend you listing your current achievements in life so far because at the end of it you really start to feel good about yourself and want to challenge yourself more and more. And each time that you face your challenge you start feeling extra great about yourself. Its a great cycle to get into, but make sure that you have a little fun along the way.

So having said that, I’ve decided to formally announce that my challenge for 2008 is to really step up and change the world. I’ll be creating a Technology Training Centre in Darwin so as to train Small business owners on how to use technology to enhance their business; provide a venue for the very successful IT Cadets program; and educate two aboriginal community champions on how to build and repair computers out in their respective communities (because its never been done before!).

I mentioned this to a fellow Young Professionals member and his comment was something along the lines of “gee you really set the bar high don’t you!” What can I say…its how I roll!

Challenge yourself and see where it takes you!

Dream, Build, Inspire, Lead!

AJ~

Author: AJ Kulatunga

Category:

challenges, motivation, inspiring