First of all, please accept my apologies that I cruelly neglected this blog for a while. It's just that classes started again and I had some other stuff to attend to. However, I promise that I will keep more discipline with updating this blog in the future. As it is still 119 long days to go, I am pretty sure that I'll find the time for another article.
Today, my fellow ambassador and dear friend Fergus shared an incredible video for the Singapore 2010 YOG with us. I embedded it at the end of this article so you have instant access to it and see how awesome it is. Apart from being a very fine piece of artwork (being a student of advertising, I really appreciate such stuff ;)), it really succeeds in telling what the YOG are about in a mere 60 seconds.
Through my different activities, I have the chance and privilege to meet with a lot of people. A thing I like to ask people I just met is what their dreams and visions in life are. It's a very simple question, yet there are so many different answers to it - ranging from "I want to be an Olympic Champion" to "I want to graduate from college". However, after telling me about their dreams, most people start saying stuff like "...but that's never gonna work out" or "Unfortunately, it will always remain a dream". And that really disappoints me. At this time, I always quote Henry Ford, who said:
"Far more people give up rather than they fail"
Social psychology has a theory calling this behavior self-handicapping - the process of giving a reason for failure before you even took up a task or challenge. And that's exactly why I think this is so sad: Because normally the only person preventing you from succeeding is yourself!
So I think it's another great initiative to actively tell the YOG athletes at a young age: You can! You might can't do other fancy things yet like driving a car, going to a club or getting a tattoo (which are not much of a deal anyways!) - but there are millions of things you can do. For instance: Do you think that Michael Phelps only discovered the day before the Olympics in Athens started that he can swim? Probably not. He rather knew that he can swim like a fish in a pool and that nobody will care how old he is. A couple of days ago, I also wrote about Thomas Geierspichler and told his incredible story. Those two are just one of the thousands of examples of what people can reach, when they believe in themselves.
Of course I know what it feels like to be a teenager and thinking of all the cool things there are in this world, but that you have to be at least 30, hold an MBA and tons of live experience to do those things. But that's so not true! All it takes is a big heart and the ambition to go out there and live your dreams. Because it doesn't matter how old you are, what sex you are, where you come from or what others think of you. All that matters is that you stand tall and let the world know: I can!
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