Nuture that Passion !

A few months ago I was listening to a local Radio Station's discussion programme.

The topic of discussion was :

"Should parents dictate to their children what type of careers they should pursue?"

Listeners were asked to send their opinions by SMS. I sent the following SMS "Parents should not dictate to their children what careers they should follow. This is because we are all born with passions which we should nurture."

The radio announcer was very fascinated by this reply and this has prompted me to write this article.

Some people have found themselves doing what they are doing now because of circumstances beyond their control.

Their parents may have not have been able to get them to the training institutions of their choice because of financial constraints, peer pressure, or distance.

The other reason is that it had been a tradition in the family to follow particular careers.

I come from a family where many of my relatives had either been teachers, police or army personnel. This had been a general trend until about some thirty years ago.

My grandfather was a school teacher. My father was a school teacher and so were two out of five of his siblings.

I am a first born child of my family. When I was growing up, my parents assumed that I would be a teacher, just as my grandfather and father had been.

This was not to be the case.

My parents used to buy me mechanical toys such as wind-up aeroplanes and cars.

Within a short time of being given any new toy, I would open and dismantle it to pieces to study how it worked.

I would then re-assemble and make it work again. This gave me a sense of pride and satisfaction.

In some cases, I failed to re-assemble the toy. This earned me a few spanks from my mother who was always incensed by my "destructive" behaviour.

I was not deterred by mother's punishment.

My father, on the other hand, was fascinated by my curiosity.

By the time I was fifteen, I was a full fledged "mechanic" who was able to replace broken main springs in table clocks and tuning cords of transistor radios ,etc.

I remember one time when I was traveling on foot with my parents. The distance was about a ten kilometer stretch.

We stopped at one village, where we had some relatives, to rest and drink some water.

One of the villager's transistor radio had a broken tuning cord. My father suggested to him that I be given the radio and take it to our village and fix it. I was very glad to be given the chance to do so.

My mother tried to find an excuse for me not to take the radio, but I would not burge.

On our way to our village, my mother was not happy with my father. She was of the opinion that by telling strangers about my capabilities, he was exposing me to witches and wizards.
These could take me out of this world prematurely.

This did not deter me in any way.

Later, I had a several "customers" who would bring in their broken down radios, clocks, watches and bicycles which I willingly repaired free of charge!

A number of them bought me sweets and biscuits in appreciation.

This earned me the nickname "the engineer" in the locality.

My father realised that I was born with a passion of repairing things. He encouraged me to take up a career of engineering when I grew up and forget about being a teacher.

That is how I became an electrical engineer.

A lot of high flyers in society have identified their passions and made full use of them.

When you do something which you are passionate about, it does not look like work to you, but a pleasure.

My advice to our young generation is : Identify your passion and nurture it into a profession you will enjoy.