I still learn a lot about what I can learn at Knowmads. Actually, sometimes every day seems to provide fragments of new insights for me that I can piece together every now and then. And one of these insightful mosaics taught me more about the importance of doing – on a personal level.

At Knowmads, we do stuff all the time and when we need a short break from doing we talk about doing. That is only a little exaggerated. Pieter mentioned it at least five times (in ten minutes) when welcoming us home on our very first day. Knowmads is all about doing and learning by doing – and that´s great.

Now what I´ve realised is that often I did not start to act but instead made up tons of gorgeous plans/daydreams in my head. Some of them may consist of a smart idea – a good thought now hidden in the construction. But almost none was ever tested in reality.
I realised how much time I spent thinking, talking and dreaming about ideas until they are developed to a stage in my head that would take a lot of time to attain in reality (even if I would strive for them to become real with every ounce of force and determination that I´ve got in me).

With an overly developed, ready-made plan in my head I might oversee what is really needed for my idea to become real and I might forget that the conditions in reality differ.
Worse, developing all these ideas and considering them in my mind over and over again can stand in my way. They become the substitute for taking action, a lot less satisfactory but safe and comfortable.

The difference between the thinking and the acting is that in reality there is risk and there are unknowns in the equation. There are – most of the time – also other people involved and this leads to a process whose destination we cannot always foresee.

Yet the plans in my mind only count for me – and even for me they do not count half as much. The plans that have been put into action are those that matter way more, even if they´re far from being flawless. And only these also count for other people.
When it´s just plans in my head, there is no proof of what I can do. Dreaming is important and should be encouraged – I don´t want to say that it´s not. But measuring ourselves by our dreams and our ideas only is a meagre joy.

Perhaps that is why it feels so good to be at Knowmads. I think I measured myself more than once by the ideas I came up with in the past. I was still in school, so my talking about – let´s say social entrepreneurship was precisely that, talking.
Now it is not about that anymore, now it is about what I get done in reality.

I love to prove that I can work out something that consists of the essence of a dream at the core.