This is a guest post by Brian Vishal.
The megastructures of our world today have a thing or two to teach us. First and foremost, that dreams however insane, are valid and that dreams, if dared, can forever transform the contours of familiar concepts.
It is amazing the insanity of imaginations people quietly harbour in their hearts but only a handful are courageous enough to pursue. I wish all men possessed the intrepidity required to pursue dreams. This week, my mega dream challenge landed me on a study of the Dubai Mall, a 20-billion-dollar Downtown Dubai complex.
The Dubai Mall, the largest shopping Mall in the world is 55 hectares – 135 square kilometres and equivalent in size to more than 50 soccer fields. The mall contains more than 1,200 shops, a 5 star – 250-room luxury hotel, 22 cinema screens plus 120 restaurants and cafes. The mall also has one of the largest aquariums in the world with 33,000 live marine animals on display and complete with a shark tunnel and underwater zoo.
A team of 20,000 workers equivalent to a small army, works round the clock to make this mega structure functional, operational and excellent. With millions of visitors each year, this mall is a national tourist attraction. For instance, in 2012, the Dubai mall received 65 million visitors; more visitors than New York City. Imagine that! Such can be the effects of somebody’s dream.
In this life, I have come to a sober conclusion that what you call big, maybe very tiny in comparison with what others call the same. What you call great may be small. What you celebrate as magnificent maybe an embarrassment to somebody else. What you defy may be nothing and what you idolize may be mediocrity. Your best day could be somebody else’s worst and your ultimate could be someone else’s beginning.
The question is, how did they get to such dimensions of apt, acumen, skill and excellence. The challenge is not in where we are, with reference to where they are, but rather, in seeing and in rejecting the lowliness of the place we stand today. It is in abandoning it as less than ideal and considering it as unacceptable. It is in embracing the real belief in the magnificence of our dreams and developing an unchallengeable confidence in our true worth.
Our worst problem is not in the ability to become humongous but in the willingness to dare become it. The dilemma is not in the means to become but in the faith that we can deliver it. The hurdle is not in birthing new records of achievements but in the awareness that we have whatever it takes to. The potential, the fertility and the ability to become anything is already resident within us.
We are endowed with the potency to manifest miracles, the capability to produce new things; the question is, are we willing to dig deep inside and go beyond the mud, the murky and the shallow places of the well of our hearts. We must be willing to dig deeper, go further, demand more and stretch higher until the waters from our well become clearer, sweeter and purer.
Our fear to confront the comfort of our minute-ness, the scare of rejecting the dottiness of our courage and the flimsiness of our persuasion are the greatest fences keeping us away from actualizing life in gauges and measures as great as God intended. The tragedy is, people that fall in love with their comfort zones never experience a marriage to greatness. Infatuation with shallowness is enmity with the adrenaline pumping treasure hunt of the deep seas of life. However, the choice is yours; to live in the bare minimum, the just enough and the daily bread or to risk it all, take a step into the unknown and run towards where there is no path and leave a fresh trail, your own original trail.
If you can allow yourself to observe life from without yourself, it will sadden you to know that what you consider the measure of greatness is actually by a village standard. Life from above is so different from a worm’s eye view. You will be grossly unwise to think only your stand is the right one. It is ignorance, arrogance or both, to think that your view is the only view. In this world, there are perspectives, viewpoints and pearls of wisdom that will humble and silence you. Seek them constantly until your world becomes transposed, your experiences promoted, your mind stretched, your thinking provoked and your realities enriched!
Until in the midst of all your education, skill, talent and expertise you begin feeling inadequate, inexperienced and unqualified, you haven’t challenged your familiar world enough. Until you despise what used to give you goosebumps, you are not growing. Until you outgrow flossing, show-off and show-biz you are still in the kindergarten of greatness. Until your achievement becomes a feature in trending topics and until your name invokes feelings and emotions, your impact is still only kitchen-felt. Until your presence provokes reactions and the mention of your name causes ripples, you are not yet mega.
Until people can make careers out of your success you are not successful. While believing God for fare home, somebody is believing the same God for an extra private jet. The difference is not in God, it is in your belief, or rather, your doubt, that His impartiality can deliver to you what others are enjoying from Him. In my opinion, it is self-defeating to hate successful people and simultaneously desire success. It is such simultaneous equations that never become solved.
Any time you see success, walk to it and find out how it became what it is then go and do what it did to get where it is. Don’t accept to be on the opposite side of living and existing, choose to live and live an abundant life, all round, all overcoming and exceedingly fruitful life. Believe that you can do all things, be all things because nothing is impossible and impossible is nothing!
The Dubai mall is mega! That’s a fact but as you consider the perceived size of your life, and as you baptize the conquests of your little steps with melodious and euphonious names, remember this; you are only as big as your comparison to whom you consider bigger. Maybe its time to travel beyond your fellow dwarfs and see how Giants live.
See you at the top!
Ephesians 3:20-21
Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the
power that works in us…”