What young leaders and entrepreneurs must learn so they can create an impact

Create, build and empower environments and communities

Let’s say you’re given the challenge to grow a forest.

What would your first step be?

Ideally, you’d first need to have a good amount of land space with sufficient access to water and sunlight. Then you could plan out how each seed is to be placed, the seeds, the amount of water, the frequency of water, the weather conditions, fertilizers, security, so on and so forth.

What you’ve just imaginatively created here, is an environment for growth. Without planning the above or pooling together any of those resources, you’d fail the challenge.

Wanting to create a change, an impact, or initiating growth requires an environment. Just like a tree, a building, a book, or a car — would need some kind of foundation and an environment in which it can be created. And we do see that in our communities too.

The same reason that schools put up posters and learning resources around classrooms. Or shops, cafes, and restaurants that are built around a housing complex to create an environment and build a community.

Leaders and Entrepreneurs today have phenomenal and life-changing ideas and visions. For those ideas to actively make an impact, we’ve got to create an environment in which it is going to establish relevance and importance. You cannot just plant a seed in a desert and expect it to grow into a forest, right? In the same way, we cannot expect change and growth to take place unless we create that environment or place it in the right environment.

My intention in writing this is simple. For leaders, educators, entrepreneurs, and visionary change-makers — start envisioning how you can build the right environment for your ideas to grow and make the impact they should.

Whether it’s gathering knowledge as is finding good soil, practicing 18 hours a day as watering the seed, building curiosity among students in a class like adding fertilizers or spreading mindful awareness, actively engaging and collaborating with like-minded people to achieve results. You could alternatively find and empower existing communities that would highly benefit from your ideas and start suggesting how to better that environment.

Startup owners and aspiring entrepreneurs — can you envision your workplace becoming a community? A place where not just employees but also students, industry professionals, and customers can come and seek inspiration and solutions? If you can’t, then you need to start thinking of how to do that. Consciously and incrementally, start pooling resources that will help you build that environment.

And you’ll see that your ideas, well, they can build a forest so long as you’re willing to create the right environment for it.

Hoping this shines some light on your path and leaves you with food for thought! I’d love to hear what you think and advise young leaders :)
Thank you for reading!