Changing the World--Entry 12

This week I had the opportunity to read a talk given by Muhammad Yunus about changing the world.  In his short talk, he was very inspirational through speaking about trusting those first so that they can trust you.  Also that we are all creative and need to be given that opportunity to show our creativity.  Sometimes that means we need loans and every person should be given that opportunity to even have access to money.  Through his own studies, he found that banks would not give loans to those living in poverty because they didn't trust them to pay back the loans.  However, he trusted these people.  He knew their dreams.  He wanted to help them achieve these dreams.  So, he created the Grameen Bank which gives loans to those who otherwise would not have access to that money.  I'm so impressed by his trusting nature and reporting back that 97% of the loans are paid back and most of the people borrowing money are women.

In reading his talk this week, I was sad to hear about fast food workers wanting to raise the minimum wage in the state of Illinois to $15/hour.  I understand that minimum wage is $8.25/hour right now and is in talks to be raised to $11/hour by 2016.  I have worked minimum wage jobs and those are jobs that are great for teenagers to learn financial responsibility and integrity.  Sadly there are some of the people wanting this minimum wage that don't accept the responsibility of working while at work.  There are hard workers that would want to move up into management to make more money, but that's the reason there is a minimum wage--to get people to move up and work hard for what they earn.

My husband is an airline pilot and he made less than $15/hour equivalent in his first year of becoming a professional airline pilot.  Many people we came across those first couple of years of him being a pilot were hard to talk to because they were, "Oh, the money must be great!"  Sadly it wasn't.  I had to work a job that paid no more than $10/hour because that is what my skills gave me at the time, and half of my paycheck each month would go towards care for my oldest daughter (who was 2 at that time).  Now when people comment on the money with his job, we say, "Yes, it's nice, but the schedule is crappy."  We would like to make our cake and eat it too, but you can never have both sometimes in our lives.

What Muhammad Yunus did for me that I think I will learn to instill in my children is trust.  Learn to trust others in a way that you know that it is a good thing to trust them.  If you do not feel it a good thing to trust in, then don't, but because you won't get the trust in return.  We need to follow our dreams and trust in ourselves as well, and that is the first step in learning to trust others in our paths as well.

Go After Your Dreams--Entry 2

This week has been very enlightening for me.  I was able to study some wonderful lectures about finding my calling, following my dreams, and even created my fifty item bucket list.  There were a few things that stood out to me during my videos and readings to study this week.  One was from the talk by Jeffrey A. Thompson called, What is Your Calling in Life, “Think back on your childhood.  It may bring to mind something that you are good at.  To help you find your spiritual gifts.”  This stuck out to me because when I heard it I immediately started to think of the things that I realized I was good at as a kid.  Some examples of these were: I was good at bossing my siblings around, I was and still am a quick learner in hands on work, I loved and still do love to read, and I loved to make up stories.  When I thought of these things, it helped me reevaluate what I want to do with my life.

Another thing that popped out to me was from the eCorner video with Tom Kelley called, “Using Your Whole Brain” and he spoke about the Tortoise Brain.  I liked this a lot because it helped explain to me why I have the strangest dreams with amazing ideas coming out of them frequently.  I’m sure there is more going on than my “tortoise brain” working in the background of my mind and revealing things in story form in a dream.  However, this really enticed me to look again at the dreams I have kept record of and decide if there are any that are worthy ideas for a story of some sort for my dream of becoming an author. 

The last thing that I really think helped me is a reaffirmation of failing and being willing to fail.  I’ve heard of people who have framed their first failed business license or their first rejection letter from an agent or publisher because it helps them to remember that failure is only one step into achieving their dreams.  In the eCorner video with Tom Kelley called, “Treating Life as an Experiment”, he says, “You have to be prepared for some stuff to fail.”  This is my reaffirmation that it is always okay to fail at things in life.  I don’t want to be a failure at everything I try, but I really am willing to fail or be rejected in some things because I can learn what I did wrong.  As I start to work on my bucket list of fifty items, I know that some of those things will possibly end in many failures.  I will just have to get up, dust off, and move through the failure to succeed.

Video Clips: What is Your Calling in Life? by Jeffrey Thompson
                      Treat Life as an Experiment by Tom Kelley
                     Using Your Whole Brain by Tom Kelley