In Praise of Genius - Olé!

Recently a negative comment has been made against my suggestion that Belinda might be a good candidate for council.

“god, haven’t you got enough on your plate.”

The author clearly wants to protect Belinda from any pressure, maybe she fears Belinda has little or no capacity to achieve more than she has. We will just have to disagree on that, it’s only a difference of opinion.

Belinda will never know when she has achieved everything possible, until or unless she fails at something and cannot go on again, an unlikely scenario. People often do withdraw from a project and then start again, maybe from another direction, using some different methods. And having observed Belinda over a few years I’d guess she has failed at a fair few things. But she learnt from failure and kept on succeeding. Nobody who steps up to do something new can be anything but creative, and creativity can be frightening. But if we ever hesitate to push ourselves because we are afraid of failure then we would be very limited.

Failure is feared most by those without faith. Having faith in something bigger than ourselves, God, Allah, the cosmos, or whatever your personal choice might be gives us strength. If you only have faith in yourself then you can easily experience real doubts, but having a faith dispels those doubts. I know Belinda does not share my Christian faith, but she does have faith.

One of the phrases used back in the day when I was building systems was, “..... and then more” It was on posters and stickers to remind us all that however hard we worked, however good the system, we could always do more. If anyone has the idea that those who work with technology are not creative then they haven’t been watching the evolution of connectivity from the teletype and acoustic coupler days to the ipad. It took guts to propose the next step in technology, but without those gutsy people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs we wouldn’t be connecting now.

Some questions, other than “god, haven’t I got enough on my plate?” for all of you in the under 50 age group to consider;

Do you feel comfortable that the representative who is your voice on shire council speaks your language and truly understands the issues facing a 21^st century family?

Do we need some new creative ways of civic thinking to bring us into the 21^st century?

Are you confident that the issues affecting this community are being discussed in council from the perspective of the 30 year olds?

Can you confidently applaud the strategies adopted by the council that have shaped the social and economic development of this shire?

Are we really harnessing all the creativity possible in our community, not just the aesthetically creative, to deliver solutions to social and economic problems in this shire?

If you trust that young families, farming families, and the employed, (as opposed to self-employed), residents are being well represented then maybe you can delegate to the older generation. But just possibly you might like to think about who will step up when the older generation have gone and none of the younger generation have any civic experience?

I have no desire to twist Belinda’s arm, or put too heavy a burden on her, I respect her too much for that. My observation of Belinda is that she is a very capable woman who has the capacity to inspire others, and we are in desperate need of inspiring leadership in this community. I’m sure there must be many other capable young people out there in the community, but at the moment none are stepping forward to serve, none are prepared to let their genius serve.

In her TED talk Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love gives us all an explanation of how we can be bold and creative and let the genius out of the bottle. Olé!