The willpower element is key to development

I went to watch my daughter at their dress rehearsal for their ballet on Friday and I noticed a key element, that was not new to me, of developing people. I have pondered about it a lot in the past and about it's value, but it was made so practical to me at this event. The ballet class has about 10 girls of different cultural groups, income groups and various shapes and sizes. My daughter has a perfectly shaped body for this activity and so she can trot and run over the wooden floor with grace and with almost no sound. There were however 2 other girls that caught my attention. The one has Down's Syndrome and the other one is quite bigger (podgy) than the other girls. Her Ballet dress is not so flattering and she looks out compared to the rest of the skinny cats. The things is though that these two girls, with the handicaps, had so much passion for the ballet. They couldn't glide across the floor or do the moves as gracefully as my daughter, but they had heart. They wanted to be there, they had fun. They wanted to do ballet because it was nice for them. I'm glad that they have such a wonderful teacher that has the patience to help and keep saying the same things and always building the girls. The unfair things is that there are also girls, with perfect bodies for the activity, that does not put the same amount of effort into their ballet. They can do the moves okay, but they are only there because mommy said so.
With human development it is the same. Some people have all the opportunities and belong to the right socio-economic group, but they have no interest in going fwd in life or to really develop themselves. They are quite happy to just survive and climb the ladder that society has determined for them. We all need to get to the place where we see the thing that will make us most complete and give us satisfaction and we must pursue that. It will take a price, sometimes a big one, but it is so important. The same with communities. We cannot arrive at a community with a brilliant economic development initiative and then the community just has to take what we wanna give em. They should buy into the idea, conceptualize it and agree that this will lead to their future advancement and realization of personal dreams. Unfortunately many people don't have the urge to develop and that hinders efforts, but i have found that with some "counsel" and encouragement, even those often get a dream.

Anyway, there is another piece of idea to chew on. It is actually a whole lot of ideas combined, but we will unpack it all with time.

till later...

skalla