How Big and Scary is your Imagination?

Listening to the radio on my way home yesterday evening, the radio OAP was having her usual playful batter with her audience. She had no idea something she said resonated with me as I tried to relax after a grueling day.

“You’re only limited by your imagination”, she said.

Her words kept me thinking. How wide or wild can our imagination be? How could someone, an ordinary man, Steve Jobs, have imagined the iPhone (and the i-everything else) when there was nothing like that in existence? How could a young molested teenager become Oprah - the world's most powerful woman? How could Nigeria have produced great business men such as Dangote, Tony Elumelu, Otedola, among others, when the business climate seems too frigid for comfort? How could these business people have imagined prospering, building conglomerates from the ground up, expanding to other African countries, employing and catering to the families of over 5,000+ people, in this same country where the failure rate of new businesses is as high as 70%?

Imagination is dream-like. It only exists in your head. I can't imagine anyone understanding the things and scenarios I imagine. They do not live in my head. People around you can hardly understand what drives people with great imagination. And many times, we are limited by what we see around us, what we experience, how hard the doors are shut in our faces, how heartbroken we are when that miserable bank alert finally notifies us (after our threatening and compelling), and automatically, we put up a blockade in our imagination where there should not be. We forget easily that like Joseph the dreamer, many dreamers start from inside the well and end up on a throne.

I guess this is a strong word for me, and I hope for you too. You are only limited by your imagination. Whatever it is that keeps you up at night, makes you park your car by the roadside amidst traffic and swearing drivers to take down an idea, keeps you smiling in the lazy afternoons when your air conditioner decides to pack up and your sweat is threatening to drown you; whatever it is that makes you believe that the world is at your feet and you only have to push a little harder to break through the ice; whatever it is, don’t kill it. Allow yourself imagine beyond what is humanly possible.

Like they say: if your dreams don’t scare you, they are not big enough.

Photo Credit: Thank you DeathToStock Images.