The idea of sharing

Hello Yosi,
I read your article on Capital and I just want to say congratulations! I know it has been some time since you joined Harvard and you have passed the excitement season. Your writing has been very insightful and I look forward to reading more of your articles. Have a fantastic learning period!
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Thank you very much for your kind comments. I enjoy getting feedback from readers and I am quite fortunate to have gotten such a platform not only to share some of my thoughts and experiences with fellow young Ethiopians but to also create dialogues with individual readers. Though such comments are a reassurance that someone is actually reading these articles, they usually get my heart beating fast as they raise reader's expectations of me and rather than pleasure they bring more responsibility. With this in mind, I also try to raise my expectations of you so that we help each other gain better insights in the process.
The one thing I have learned during the last few years of my life is to value other people's experiences. By hearing about other people's lives and their struggles, I get inspired and widen my perspectives by putting myself in their shoes and learning from their experiences.
My father was very prominent in showing me the routes and the thousand challenges some people faced before they became successful in what they did. But the kind of community I grew up in was one that hailed such individuals and admired them. My father didn't allow me to admire people like that; he used to tell me to do more than merely clap my hands for them, he insisted that rather than saying 'wow,' I should learn from their experiences and aim to reach further lengths. I highly value this advice. Getting inspired from others' experiences, translating that inspiration and tailoring it to my individual experience is something that helped me set my own goals and standards. This strategy helped me to constantly look ahead and use others' experiences as valuable lessons to the extent that I attribute some of the progress I am making in my life. And people's experiences showed me the difference of our approaches to life, how we go on about solving our daily problems and tackling challenges. I saw the value there is sharing experiences and from then on I have been widening my perspective and started looking at things from different perspectives rather than just my own perspective.
Capital has given me a unique opportunity to communicate with young fellow Ethiopians using this platform, and I even get a chance to interact with some readers. As I proposed in the first article of this column, my aim is to share my experience with you, this challenging and rewarding experience I am living and breathing on a daily basis at Harvard. I enjoy sharing ideas and thoughts through journalism and it is something I have done for quite a few years, including for a student newspaper I started in my secondary school and for a newspaper in Tanzania. I have seen the fruits of sharing experience, and using the principle of giving what has been given to you, I try to do the same with other people. Something important about sharing experience that we often ignore is that it is beneficial to all parties. By discussing your experience with someone else, both of you, not just the listener, get inspired and start looking at the same thing from a different perspective. That dialogue allows for new ideas and thoughts to erupt, and gets people to think. The arguments and constructive criticisms that are entailed in such discussions open our minds even more to new ways of thinking. That act of sharing your experience, your thoughts, and your ideas brings way more benefit than we can imagine.
Is it impossible to share experiences? Someone once told me that as Ethiopians, we don't like sharing our knowledge and experience and the little that we know, and instead we selfishly keep it all to ourselves. I don't think I agree with this comment. There is great potential for our intellect to grow, potential for inspiration within our borders without having to look for international heroes, and so many success and failure stories we can learn from. We are not that selfish to keep everything to ourselves. So why don't we accelerate our speed at learning from each other, at inspiring ourselves, and sharing what we know and what we have experienced. This column is an attempt to do that, and trust me the benefit goes in both ways. I am losing nothing by sharing the little that I am experiencing. At the end of the day, the university I am in might have great professors and great buildings, but it does not guarantee a VIP pass to success, so by just being happy for me doesn't give me that VIP pass and it doesn't make the other person's life any better. But by using it as a starting point to open our eyes to see the world from a different perspective, to tackle our challenges from a different angle, and to share what our lives have taught us with others, we will be doing justice to this platform and we will be serving our communities.