I trust that you have now set your very own goal. Excellent! This chapter will give you some insights on how to review your goal. If the goal you have set is truly of your own, the rest of this chapter only serves to strengthen it. However if you have set the goal with some apprehension for whatever cause, you may want to re-look at it again later.
It is often quoted ‘Aim for the sun. Even if you missed, you will be still among the stars’. How true indeed. It is okay to dream, it is okay to dream BIG, the impossible dream. Dream the biggest and the wildest you can (of course within the boundary of sanity). But then again, time has proven that even what people may perceive as insanity is not a limit. Think of the Wright brothers who invented flying machine. Their society thought it was not only insane but blasphemy to God when they were talking about flying. We are surely glad that the Wright brothers did not listen to them. Can you imagine the world now without all the flying machine?
There seems to be no limit to what you can dream. You want to be the first Malaysian born President of USA? Sure, why not. Sonia Gandhi (Italian born) almost become the Prime Minister of India. Arnold Schwarnegger of Austrian born may one day become the president of USA.
You want to be the first man to land on the Sun. Okay you can laugh. That is totally insane. But wait, there could be a way. We just don’t know it yet. The problem is, we are currently thinking based on facts available to us now. For every discovery we have made, there are gazillions more we have not yet make. There are possibilities to land man on the Sun. Now you know how crazy I can be when talking about setting goals and dreaming the impossible.
My goal was to become a medical doctor. For some of you who are reading this book, being a doctor may means nothing in the context of dreaming the impossible. We have plenty of doctors now and we have numerous universities and colleges offering medical courses. At the same time, I truly believe that being a doctor is still a dream to most students out there. It still carries a noble intention, prestigious and respectable name for anyone possessing that dream. And it is still grand and mighty difficult to achieve.
However back in my time, in a secluded kampong, the intention to become a doctor was not only difficult, it was a sheer lunacy. It was a lunacy not because of what I wanted to be but because of where I came from. Let me tell you why. First, the name of my kampong was literally ‘earthworm’ in English translation. It was mythically named after a source of water which has resisted an ancient prolonged drought. The drought was very severe. The only brook in that kampong was reduced to an earthworm-sized of flowing water through a bamboo pipe and yet faithfully providing much needed source of life to the community. Hence the place named in such a way. As noble as the origin of the name may sound, you cannot help but feeling very inferior coming from a kampong with that name. With tradition and superstition still strongly manifested in the society, no one did believe that any good can emerge from a kampong named after an earthworm. Some efforts were initially done to change the name (indicating the uneasiness of the fellow kampong residences about the name), however it was never materialised and thus further strengthening the inevitability of the ‘cursed’ state of the kampong. The inferiority was there, not really a good start for anybody wanted to dream big. This factor seems to be quite significant, no one else manage to achieve even half of what I had achieved until today!
Secondly, there have been nobody (at that time) from my kampong who manage to score a respectable results in Form Five exams (SPM). It seems that Form Five was the limit for academic achievement for anybody who comes from there .... (to be continued)
Apa la.....write more....stop teasing...:D
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