The point of this post is to do two things...
One is a little bit of celebration of a completion of a good size project. I am proud of what we have accomplished. It took the help of a great many people and an awesome crew to do it. But more importantly it is to share what I have learned along the journey that others might be inspired to dream big dreams and then have the courage to accomplish what is necessary to do the seemingly impossible.As some of you know we just opened our new little theme park in the last week or so. Not a huge project in the big picture but it is certainly world class and of a scale that stretched us to our current limit.
It seems every time I achieve a milestone in my life I take the time to ponder things a little. Not that we have had much time to ponder with the park not being quite finished and all and our grand opening only three days away.
But as I took a few seconds to look things over and appreciate what the crew and I have achieved here at Giggle Ridge a fellow I know casually asked me how we had managed to get into this business and finally achieve this substancial dream of ours. The answer isn't a short one believe me but the question did get me to thinking a little.
Getting to this point in life was about the roads we have travelled and decisions we made along the way. How we performed under pressure was about how we handled stress in the past. Life is like that.
All we have learned to date from our experience was used to pull off this project. All the skills, all the financial knowlege, all the business knowlege, all the tools we have, and all the credit we could borrow, just about everything we could muster was called on to pull this off in just about every way I can think of.
And the path to this point was deliberate each step of the way. While our experiences are determined largely by circumstance, the choices we make are deliberate. And the consequences of each of those decisions rode with us as we put this dream together. Our credit limits and financial reserve was limited by the financial decisions we have made in the last few years. Our designs were influenced by the jobs we have done in the past. The experience and skill of our crew was determined by the training we have given them while they were with us on other jobs. In the middle of a big job with a tight deadline is not the time to try training new help. The tools we use are the ones we have purchased and taken care of in the past.
All this together made this project the most enjoyable one I have every been involved in. It was easy to make it fun for my crew. Being fun made it easy to be creative and this in turn made the project a labor of love for each of us. The result is a world class park with tons of enjoyable detail at every turn.
My point in all this is that the seemingly impossible is possible. This dream for us is more than 10 years in the making. The bulk of the progress to this dream didn't happen on the work site in the last 5 months. Ten years of dreaming and 10 years of hard work made it happen.
So dream them dreams. And also do all the other stuff that is necessary to pull it off.
And now for the next big dream I've been thinkin about...
-dan
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Dan Sawatzky
Sawatzky's Imagination Corporation
Cultus Lake , British Columbia
giggleridge@telus.net
www.imaginationcorporation.ca
"Isn't it great to do what you love and love what you do!"
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