I can build a space ship if I want to

If you are incapable of doing it, nobody on Earth is, and vice versa.

I read about an experiment conducted in Ethiopia a couple of years ago that keeps on wiggling in my mind. American scientists at the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization, brought a bunch of tablets, boxed, brand new, to a group of children in a poor village. Those kids had never been to school, had no literacy, lived on the edge of poverty and starvation. Their goal was to simply see what happens.

The expectations from this experiment were that the children are going to play with the boxes and eventually maybe open them.

Day one - a box was already open. "Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch ... powered it up," Negroponte (OLPC founder)

Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day.

Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android.

Interestingly, those kids' main goal was actually learning, not playing. The older ones were teaching the young ones and they were all actively exchanging ideas and discoveries.

Fascinating.

More to that, every kid's tablet looked different. The OLPS's CTO, Ed McNierney, said in an interview that they had actually installed a software to prevent customisation of devices. It wasn't just the desktop that the children learned to subvert. The cameras on the tablet had been disabled by an OLPC worker as well. The children managed to get around that and turn them back on again with no instruction.

Those beautiful young minds worked around every challenge - creatively, curiously, entrepreneurially.

Now think about how many times in your lifetime you looked at something and you thought it’s so cool, you wished you knew how to work it, how to do it, how to maybe start. But you never did.

In the era that we’re living in where everything is so simplified, so convenient, so ‘time-saving’ that we developed a FEAR of the unknown.

Would you think of becoming the worlds’ best tennis player at the age of 20 if you’ve never played tennis in your life? Would you try to turn that hobby into business even though you are completely clueless how to? Would you consider leaving your Phd studies in physics to start a YouTube channel? Would you....

There are people that would. But most won’t. And it’s not about them. It’s not that they’re not brave or they’re not confident. It’s about the culture.

It’s about the fact that we are thought that we should choose a path and follow it. 

It’s about the the culture of comparison. You play volleyball worse than someone in your class at school. You are not meant to become volleyball player. You have a lower grade in maths. You are not going to be the scientist. LABLED. You are less. You need to choose something else.

But what about HARD WORK? What about DEDICATION?

What about starting from scratch, not even knowing where to start from, not even having vision of what the path could be, but regardless, believing in the goal, believing in ones ABILITY.

Maybe not even the goal. Them ethiopian kids had no goal. But they also had no doubt.

We often forget about our human ability to adapt to anything. ANYTHING. The planet earth didn’t fill itself with buildings, cars, systems, and thousands of unbelievably complicated things that make our life the way it is, things that we have no idea how they work, things that we can never do. But we did. Us as humans. Us as believers. It took one idea and one unbiased mind to put it out there and boom - rocket ships, boom - artificial intelligence, boom - civilisation, education systems, international communications.

Each and every one of us have ability, capacity and power.

What we need more is belief. Open-mindness.

We too often forget about our natural human curiosity to learn. New things, old things, things that we know a little or nothing about. It’s easy to live in today’s world without having to learn much because everything is so simplified - connection, travel, grocery, etc. But is this enough for a fulfilled living? Of course not. I won’t even allow another answer to this question. I never met a lazy person, that does mainly nothing and is also happy.

Learn. Learn. Learn. Appreciate. Inspire. START.

No matter when, where, how.

Read more about the OLPC experiment here.

btw I am on Medium.