Empowering

Empowering. During a team building camp, the instructor showed us a video of a commercial ads used to motivate people. It's an award winning commercial done by PBS. I will let you watch the video below first.

In the video, it describes a gold fish trapped in an aquarium, small aquarium. Everyday it just swims round and round and round, just like us who worked on a routine basis, day by day, doing the same thing in a little company. Then suddenly, the little gold fish realised that something must be done to change after he watch the TV about salmons striving to reach the top of the stream. So it decided to get out from the aquarium, realising it's dream is somewhere out there, to join the salmons. It try hard to find it's way, different ways to get to the place it wished to be. In the progress, it faced many difficulties, it saw how other fishes that are trapped in restaurant aquariums, waiting to be slaughtered for food and almost got itself killed, but luckily, it manged to survive all the challenges and eventually reached the sea/river to join all the other big fishes.

It's a very inspirational video, encouraging people to dream big and step out to reach for their dream. However, this video is like most of the other motivational stories/video/articles, it only shows you the success story. How many other fishes are killed when they are in their progress to find their goals? How many of them are unlucky to get caught in someone else's plate or being crushed by car tyres? Countless.

It's the same like in the animal kingdom, some animals/insects reproduce a lot. In order to survive, they produce many eggs and offspring, when growing up, majority of them will get killed by their predators or mother nature. Eventually only a few managed to survived and continue to mass reproduce for their next generation.

In real life, the situation is not much different. Every year, many graduates are produced by our tertiary education institutions. The little gold fish is like a lucky graduate, finally made it into the sea with all the other big fishes. However, there is something that the video doesn't show, which is how the little gold fish will survive in the big sea. Big fishes will start to prey on it, just like how your seniors or superiors will start to prey on fresh graduates. If he is lucky, then they will be guided by the big fishes. What if the big fish, is not there to guide you, but to eat you? You may not know.

Being in the working society, is like a small gold fish being in the big sea. You have no idea what's waiting ahead for you, and you will have a rough time to explore it yourself. Nevertheless, the video is still a good video to motivate, to help some lost souls to gain their direction.

"A first step is required in order for a change. Decide.."