"Most people have no idea of the giant capacity we can immediately command when we focus all of our resources on mastering a single area of our lives." -Tony Robbins
Traveling is one of my favorite things in life. I have been traveling to both domestic and foreign locations since a young age with my family. The experiences have taught me so much about how industrious the human spirit is.
One of the most impressive things that I learned while traveling is just how people deal with things. There are so many places that don't have nearly close to the luxuries or even the basic conveniences that we have here in the US. What do people do, figure something else out. So many of the basic things that we take for granted as time savers today are completely unnecessary. People washed clothes before washing machines. People cooked before Cuisinart food processors. Despite lacking things, people seem to make due with what they have and flourish.
Whenever someone asks me what the craziest thing I saw in Cairo, I am always taken back to one day when I was walking around the city with my mom. We are waiting at an intersection and across the street we see a guy with a goat trying to hail a cab. Eventually a cab stops for him. At this point I was very curious to see what he was going to do with this goat. Without hesitation, the man asks the cab driver to pop the trunk and proceeds to place the goat in the trunk. Now the goat didn't like this too much as you'd imagine. The man needed to get the goat to lie down before he could close the trunk. The man tried pulling the legs out from under the goat multiple times, but to no avail. The goat would keep jumping back up before the man could close the trunk. Finally, after multiple times he finally moved quick enough to close the trunk with the goat inside. He proceeded to get into the cab and they drove off. I was stunned by this whole exchange. How did a cab driver let this guy put a goat in his car? How did this guy think this was a reasonable thing to do? The thought of trying to do this in the US made me laugh out loud, but in Egypt this acceptable. The man needed to go somewhere with his goat, the cab driver needed a fare. Economics ran its course, and the goat was in the trunk. People figure out ways to get what they need done, it may be a little different but it will get done.
While I was in middle school, my family took a trip to china where we took a cruise down the Yangtze river. During our cruise we noticed many different fishing boats that had birds chained to them. When we asked our guide about these birds they explained that they helped the fisherman fish. The birds would dive and grab fish but could not swallow them due to the chains. After catching the fish, the fisherman would take the birds out of their mouth and repeat. My mind was blown. These fisherman were using live animals as fishing poles and doing it effectively.
Its an age old saying, but where there is a will there is a way. When people need to get things done, there isn't always the perfect tool or way to do it, but things just have to get done and humans are good at figuring out how to get things done.
