Understanding Your Environment

It’s all around you

There is an interesting story of a 15-year-old boy, William Kamkwamba from a village in Malawi. He became famous in 2002 when he built a windmill to power multiple appliances in his village. Prior to this, a crippling famine had hit their community affecting the primary occupation of the villagers – Farming. William, who had a desire to pursue formal education had to stop school because his parents, who were peasant farmers could not afford the tuition fee.  Unwilling to give up on his dream, young Williams frequently visited the local public library to read. His eureka moment came when he stumbled on a book with the image of a wind powered turbine on the cover, he thought if he could build this in his village, it would solve the problem of irrigation for the farmers. After much reading, he began to gather scraps and discarded materials from the local scrapyard to build a wind mill. Since then, William has built two other wind turbines and a solar-powered water pump for his community. Today, William is an innovator and author, his story has inspired the world, even Netflix released a movie about him titled The boy who harnessed the Wind.

William’s story is proof that a good understanding of your environment is important for a truly Value Adding Life. Your environment at any given time is the incubator for the next stage of your life. Your physical location, the people around you and social conditions are all part of your environment and they are often the inspiration for your ideas. Did you know that most of the world’s greatest inventors developed their big ideas by simply observing the world around them?

The interesting thing about our world today is that we have the privilege to create our social environment beyond our physical location. By reading books, surfing the Internet, watching movies and documentaries, we can learn about realities beyond our space and situate ourselves in different places, mentally experiencing some realities beyond our physical environment. William, who had never seen a wind mill in his community got to know about it by reading. You see, we can indeed create our own world.

As you continue your journey towards a Value Adding Life, it is important you stay connected to your environment.

Among other things, your environment will do 3 things to you:

1. Your Environment Influences You

You are a product of your environment. Psychologists say that every child is born “tabula rasa” meaning you were born with a clean slate, without preconceived ideas. We only pick up our beliefs, values and world views from the environment we find ourselves. The influence our environment has on us might be positive or negative or a mix of both. We are to reinforce the positives, confront and strive to change the negatives.

2. Your Environment defines the Opportunities You See

Opportunities abound everywhere, we are only limited by our ability to see and grasp them.  When we have a good understanding of our environment, we will be more aware of the challenges and with the right mindset, get inspired to solve them. Like William, who knew the difficulty the farmers in his village faced and could see how building a wind turbine would make things better. In fact, the knowledge and resources he needed to build the first wind mill were all sourced from the same village. Great ideas are hidden in our environment, we just need to be open minded enough to see and seize them.

3. Your Environment Reflects the Relationships in Your Life

Another key component of our environment are the relationships we build. We cannot over emphasize the importance of relationships. The direction our lives will eventually take will be greatly influenced by the quality of the relationships we keep. American entrepreneur, author and motivational speaker, Jim Rohn said “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” This means; you are a reflection of the people you associate with. 

Napoleon Hill once talked about the importance of selecting one’s environment with great care saying it is “the mental feeding ground out of which the food that goes into our minds is extracted.”

I will like to close out by taking this a step further. After looking around you and evaluating how your environment has influenced your life so far, ask yourself: “How am I shaping my environment?” “Am I adding value to my environment?”

Remember, You Have Only One Life to Live, MAKE IT COUNT!