The Impact of Uncharted Waters

The first thing that I remember about my childhood is that I was leading an army of small “soldiers” while in kindergarten.

The soldiers were all my male classmates and I trained them in three basic skills: to jump high, to fight strong and to recite with confidence. Yet, as hard as I try I can not recollect how this actually started and how did it happened my male fellows to see their leader not in one of them but in me?—?a girl?—?and to trust that I was the one exclusively entitled to teach them the above mentioned skills.

At the begining I was feeleing uncomfortable, as I don’t belong there and like I have stolen this position from someone, but anyway I continued to show up day by day and to play the role.

And the thing that I do remember very clearly is that:

I was getting better every single day and by the end of my kindergarten days I was a real Commander and I was leading a real Army ready for the next chapter of their lives.

Coincidence or not my first full time job 14 years later was for the Ministry of Defence of my country and within the premises of the Army.

The second strong memory that I have from the early periods of my life is when I was 7 and my brother 5. My parents arranged we to be taken care of by an older next-door lady during the summer while they were at work. She took the job for granted and used our home and our “advanced tech toys” for the year of 1988 such as Commodore 64 computer and Hitachi video cassette recorder as a play-yard for her much older sons, leaving us often hungry, scared and sitting alone in another room.

My brother was too small to speak up but he was bursting in tears in my mother’s arms almost every day the moment she was home. As “older” I tried to bring this to the attention of my father but with his friendly and avoid-conflicts-by-all-means personality, I was “shushed” and advised to keep still since “it is only for couple of months” and that “it can not be worse than staying home completely alone”. I tried to comply but once she started to bring her lady friends over and to watch the “Freddy Krueger” horror movies into our living room I decided it was enough. The moment my parents left for work that day I broke her the news:

You are not working here any more! We don’t want you here! This what you are doing is not a way to take care of children.

I still remember the shocked look on her face. I believe listening that words coming out of the mouth of a 7 years old and taking them seriously was a bit of a challenge. But my body didn’t move neither for a second and all my posture was suggesting that I am not letting her to make not even one more step into our appartment. Without a word she finally left. My parents seamed not very surprised by what happen and in a way reliefed that it was not they that needed to take care of the situation.

It took me years to come to a realisation that she was actually the first person that “I fired” in my management career.

Needless to say that summer turned out to be one of the best… We fully explored the freedom of being home alone. We did by ourselves all of the experiments from the book “Do it yourself” although it was written on a language that we barley understood at that age, with the over-the-phone instructions from my mother we were learning how to cook and we almost burned the kitchen once, we explored the no-electricity basements of the old buildings in the neighbourhood, we lost and found our 2 parrots, we thought ourselves how to program at the C64 and we eventually disjoined its game controller (the joystick) to create an alarm system for the entrance door of the apartment…

By the end of the summer we were not anymore just a brother and sister, we were a “Team for special operations” that stood for each other and complement each others strong and less strong sides.

***

This post is written on June 20, 2016 and initially posted on Medium.com only 3 hours before the Key Notes by Dr. Peter Diamandis, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of the Singularity University and Founder and Executive Chairman of the X PRIZE Foundation and Dr. Day Kurzweil, Co-Founder and Chancellor of the Singularity University and one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, at the opening of the Global Solutions Program Class 2016 with goal to develop solutions to positively affect the lives of more than 1 billion people.

Very much looking forward to the following 10 weeks with extraordinary group of 80 people handpicked from all over the world, incredible lineup of guest speakers and experts, and the amazing Singularity team.

Dr. Peter Diamandis

Dr. Ray Kurzweil

To be continued…

Like this post and share on social media if you liked what you red. I would continue to write about my experience and the impact of new uncharted waters over me and my peers at Singularity University at NASA Ames Research Park in the following 10 weeks.

Irena Chaushevska, Founder and CEO of NewMan’s Academy & Accelerator, Local lead of NASA Space Apps Challenge Silicon Valley, Futurist and Doer