Dreaming...

One unfinished talk I had the other day with some people was about dreaming. They were just preparing a seminar to estimulate young people to be entrepreneur, a priority in a country with more than 10% unemployment.

However, I had some experience with that. In fact, I've worked with one of the first universities to create a proper entrepreneurship program in an arrangement with the Instituto Técnico de Monterrey. And my experience stated that people don't dream much nowadays.

The theory I heard is that old people do not dream, but young people, YES, they are full of enthusiasm! That was not what I saw.

One of these lectures given in that university was during the day and I saw an elder person there. She was not sitting where professors were supposed to sit, so I asked someone if she was a new member of staff. They told me she was in fact a student. After two or three people whose dreams were to finish that course, I called her in front. She told us how she used to work in a small hotel in a small town, whilst bringing up her children. At some point, she bought the hotel and then she decided she needed to study to perform better, and there she was. Her dream was to have a top hotel for the region, something I am sure she has reached.

Another theory - and my friends told me that - was that rich young people don't dream, people need to lack something in their lives for dreaming. However, I had two different experiences which told me the opposite.

The first one was in Chile. I lived in Santiago for two years, and I had the chance to meet many young people as I was myself much younger than today (yes, I am still young!). What I noticed there was the abundance of dreams. Most of these boys and girls had parents who trained them to work early, in fact one of them, Eduardo Soler, good friend and president of a company in Chile now, told me as his parents cut his allowance and he was obliged to work, even though he had his university fees, transportation, food and etc. all covered.

The second experience was to give a lecture for a group of 13-year old students in Medellin. It was a mixture of people with few finantial resources and people who used to have a good finantial situation. Again, I was facing a group of young and very skilled people, with lots of potential but no real dream there, except getting married...

Dream, as the hability of imagining a new situation, is probably a human feature. Dream is the thing that made many of our heroes to challenge their own status quo and brave themselves into new worlds. Columbus, the MayFlower and Marco Polo are a few of many people or group of people who dreamed with a new order.

But, look, they didn't only imagine a new order, they went to look for it, they built it and they changed the world as it was at that time. If we stop dreamming, we are cutting that same possibility of a new world which perhaps is at our arm reach.

In fact, theories apart, I think the main reason people are stopping to dream is the fact they have been unable to put that wonderful imagination of theirs into practise, but that is for another post.

Thinking...

Do you know the feeling when you feel something is "after" you? For instance, a book?

That happened to me: I kept on seeing this book. Its white cover, very simple design appealed to me. Its thickeness did not appeal to me. But after seeing it about, what, four times in different cities in the world, I decided to take it.

I am sure its long writing will make my process to read it pretty slow, but I am starting to get benefit from it. Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman is more than a book, it is a manual for living. Click here for a review which looks like a small summary.

It contains many points and ideas that explained to me several things, and I am in the first chapters. But, beyond that, there is this person who wrote (or co-wrote) this whole magnificient book on how humans think.

2002 was a great year for him, as he got a Nobel Prize in Economics, even so he himself is a psychologist... After purchasing it and reading it is that I realised one of the big reasons for me to admire, appreciate or study and research someone else's book was there: he overcame a limit.

If you read The Economist, you will realise the economists are a different kind within the human species - even though it is a magazine, they call it a newspaper... Well, the same applies for ITC engineers or taxi-drivers, I know, but I just wondered how is it that a person with an inclination for the subtle aspects of mind could be attracted to numbers, so much, that they gave him a Nobel Prize.

Kahneman, whom I don't have the pleasure to haver personally met, is one of those rare people who are able to use both capacities, the intuition and logic, the human view and the stadistical approach.

Most of people are used to live in just one half of his or her potential, spending their lives by thinking the world is a rose garden or a bunch of numbers. It is wonderful to see someone who sees the world as a rose garden AND a bunch of numbers, depending on the moment, integrating both possibilities.

That is the depth of thinking, when you are able to not be restrained, not even by your own tendencies, so that you can see beyond the present horizons. Because it is only then that you can really understand and assimilate a situation fully. How to do it?

For Kahneman, his story is told in the link I've shared before. For myself, whom I like to think I am a balanced guy even though I am still in the process, it was meditation and a spiritual life that enabled me to see the rose garden without leaving the bunch of numbers behind.

What about you?