More than a decade ago, when I was still in college, I was part of an organization whose name is something some of you may probably see plastered around the campus. One day I found myself suddenly selected in a group which was forced to handle a week-long event aimed at marketing our organization externally and within the student community. There was a problem identified early on. Most of us were new, who had no formal education yet in what would be required from us. I’m not really sure how the group was selected, but as far as I could remember, the people in the group didn’t have much in common as we came from different colleges.
And yet, this idea of implementing something really big had us all incredibly excited, so we started planning and asking everyone for advice. I could remember us going one company after another trying to raise funds. We found out the hard way that it wouldn’t be easy to raise funds when we have no identified beneficiaries other than basically ourselves. We traveled a lot as we scoured locations, studied events, and most nights, we would stay up late in a house I rented in Teachers Village.
So our week-long event finally came. And tell you what, until now I always revel at the thought that everyone in our organization loved what we did in that week-long event. We started as a group who didn’t know much but, faced with the prospect of delivering something bigger than all of us, we all collectively learned and educated ourselves and in the end, we succeeded not just on the goal of the event, but we were much better skill-wise than when we started. Each of us could properly do Marketing, Logistics, Financing and other skills that would be invaluable once we started our careers. To this day, this group is still some of my closest, and we still travel and have dinners every now and then.
I wanted to tell you this simple story to introduce our