When I was a kid helping my father in our small food stall before moving on to renting a coffee shop during my teens I have always envy corporate like customers who wear shirts and ties and nice black pant who frequent our shop.
No. no. I am not, like, jealous of them but looking at them I use to tell myself - I WANT to be like them, one day I WILL be like them and I MUST do something about my current situation so that I too can be like them ... all dress up in shirts and ties and can enjoy my cup of coffee as if I have all the time of my life.
Not long after, my father decided to close the coffee shop and I got a job in Singapore as a waiter in a hotel coffee house.
As a waiter I see lots more professionals in nice shirts and ties and it further fuels my desire to be one of them.
Somehow during that period I got interested in computer technology. However, at that time, I did not relates my desire to be one of the shirts and ties to my new found love in computer technology.
I am so fired up with computer technology that I will buy whatever second hand magazine I can to learn more on how to use a computer. (can't afford to buy new magazine) It was at this time that the hotel restaurant that I work in was provided with an old 386 for word processing. Needless to say, I hogged the old PC at every free minutes I have - testing the DOS codes that I learnt from magazines, changing the DOS prompt, changing the colors of the screen etc.
The Manager knows of my acute interest in the PC and they are nice enough to let me play with it as much as I like, so much so that they officially appoint me to be the resident PC "expert". And not long after I applied for sponsorship to attend a word processing class to learn about DB4, Word Perfect, Lotus 123 etc and was approved. (as the saying goes, the one with 1 eye in the kingdom of the blind is the king:-)
And so my journey into the technological world of computer begins.
Not satisfied with my little knowledge as someone who can create documents and spreadsheet I started looking again to learn more about how I can fix and repair computers. I want to learn about Networks that I read in the PC Magazine. I want to learn about Topology and BNCs.
That was when I learnt about Novel Netware from the PC Magazines and because I couldn't find any such course in Singapore that I decided I need to pack up and fly over to USA to attend the course. Just like that - I woke up one fine morning and the decision and the direction are set and I am flying.
That was like some many many years ago.
And today, sitting here, I am asking myself - where was those fire, those passions, those couldn't care less for anything else except what I want to do kind of attitude, those supreme confident that I will be able to do what I set out to do craziness, those sponge like curiosity that can absorb and internalize any subjects that I want to learn and master.
Where have all those gone??
In retrospect, how I go from being a coffee shop boy to a waiter to an IT Professional to a Management Consultant is something that all the motivational gurus are talking and preaching about.
The prerequisite is there must be Passion to do what we set out to do. And then there must be a Strategy on how to achieve it.
The next would be internalization of the Passion, which is Visualization.
Before we can achieve what we want to achieve, we must be able to visualize the outcome or the final result of what we want to become.
I used to do it a lot. I used to visualize how I look wearing nicely pressed shirts and ties. I used to visualize how I can solve Networking problems. I used to visualize how I only work 5 days a week like those Professionals that frequent my work place.
And I achieved what I set out to achieve with the fuel from my passions, my insane, tireless drive to learn and keep learning, and importantly visualizing everyday of my own transformation in the future.
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