I recall this phrase from an old song years back and suddenly realised that during that time in my life I sang the lyrics but did not really fully understand the implication of it. Life was easy as I lived off my parent’s provision, wore tekkies and dreamt of a world full of opportunities just waiting for me to arrive on the scene. Through the years though dreams made way for reality and so quite a few battle scars find their way into my mental world.
We are often hit with the realisation that money is tight and opportunities do not appear on your doorstep everyday but have to be earned and worked at. John Maxwell states that: ”One is too less a number to achieve greatness”, and so we also realise that we need other people in our lives to help us mine these opportunities and to complement our skills with their own.
This realisation is so much more visible in a corporate environment. Very few organisations can really throw money at every good idea and so they have to prioritise the ideas and implement them through the right projects at the right time and do them right using the right team. Now I know there was way too much use of the word “right” in the previous sentence, but still I think you get the idea.
There is not a lot of margin for error and we need to help our organisation to find the sweet spot between efficiency and effectiveness given resource constraints. Who better to help them than well equipped and capable project managers? We will never be in the position to get our old view of life back, but we can learn from our mistakes and wear the t-shirts we earned through a world of living.
Written by Lizette Venter