David Odunlami: The Future?

It’s a new month! It’s the month of March and I’m amazed at how well I’ve kept to my promise to write every day. Not every article has been top-notch but I’m still impressed with the quality of stuff I churn out. I’ve retroactively made this a mission to show myself that one does not necessarily need to be ‘inspired’ to create art (as most artist like to think). I have, however, decided that in the month of March, I’ll do interviews. I do not yet have all my interviewees lined up (yes, I’m searching. Tell me if you’re interested). I’ll still follow the prompts, but the interviewee for the day would be the one to answer the particular question.

Today’s post is of a young man named David Odunlami

Prompt:

1 March

Back to the Future

A service has been invented through which you can send messages to people in the future. To whom would you send something and what would you write.

He shrugged.

I stared at David for about 5 minutes and watched him just stare at the TV like he had not heard me ask a question. After a while, I repeated the prompt just in case he did not hear me. Then he looked at me and said, ‘I don’t know. That question is somehow’. I got a sense of him being confused – like the question caught him off guard and I realied that so many times, we think about the future in broad terms, like ‘the future is bright’ or ‘we are the leaders of tomorrow’. And because of this, we often never realize that the future is what we attain every 60seconds.

I asked David to define the future in time; or at least the future which he wishes to discuss in this interview and he said, ‘Okay. Let’s say 20 years. In 20 years. I’ll be 37 years old. So, I’ll write a letter to my child. In the letter, I’ll tell him to be good, to focus and to take advantage of what he has so that he can become a greater person than I am’.  He defined greatness as being ‘relative’ and depending on who’s achieving it. But he noted that a great person would have to be ‘Rich, popular and good.’

Whether or not I agree… is a matter for another post.

The interview ended….

But hey, I’m not leaving yet. There’s something I learned from David’s interview:

Before I asked him to define the time parameter for the future which he wished to discuss, he had attempted to give me an answer. In this first answer, he said, ‘Erm… I think I’ll write a letter to myself. Um… I’ll send the letter to myself hoping that I’m a rich and wealthy person and I’ll tell myself to take advantage of the technology in the future’

Shall we count the number of ‘I’ and ‘myself’ in that reply?

Immediately, I forced him to put the ‘future’ in a clearer perspective – 20 years/37 years old, his attention deflected from himself and from his wants and needs to be rich and wealthy and techy in the future and he suddenly found that there might be more important things than that then.

And so I learned, that in planning for the future, you must endeavor to put in perspective, a definitive time frame for each goal you have. It helps to know the importance and priority of some of our goals.

Thanks David!