Sunday, August 5, 2012

Kung Fu Panda: Lesson 1

1.      Every great thing starts with a dream.
 
The movie starts with a dramatic scene of Po fighting alongside his idols, the legendary Furious Five (Tigress, Crane, Mantis, Viper and Monkey) to defeat an army of villains. Alas, it was only a dream, a crazy dream it seems!
 
Like Po, many of us can recall having childhood dreams. However, at some point in time, many cast aside these childhood dreams. What happened? Maybe as they grew up into adulthood, they learnt that dreams and fantasies were for children and would have no place in the adult world. Maybe, they learnt from bitter experience that dreams and disappointments were correlated. The bigger the dream, the greater the disappointment! As such, in order to insulate themselves from being hurt, they stopped dreaming.

However, dreams are important. To be honest, my pursuit of teaching excellence involved pursuing a series of dreams, starting from scaling small hills to eventually aiming for the peak—the Mount Everest of the OEA! In the words of the great American industrialist Henry J. Kaiser,

“I always have to dream up there against the stars. If I don’t dream I’ll make it, I won’t even get close. So, dream a great dream, a lofty dream, an impossible dream!”
 
 
Source: "Four Lessons from Kung Fu Panda", OEA Public Lecture Series 2012.

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