On Saturday, 10th of February, a second meeting of college student scholarship holders in 2018 was held. Scholarship holders gathered in the Main Assembly Hall of the ASA Group on a dreary, foggy February morning, but a ray of sunshine, in the form of this month’s motivational speaker and the lecture he delivered, soon broke through the leaden clouds. Positive atmosphere and messages of success and progress marked this meeting which those present will certainly remember fondly.
This month’s guest speaker was Jasmin Porobic, CEO of Exclusive d.o.o., who is an expert in the field of management, but also a motivational speaker and a great friend of the Hastor Foundation. His extensive experience and years of working for numerous international organizations, including UN and OSCE Missions, Jasmin assimilated those essential values a young person needs to thread a winding path, as well as learned the best possible ways of using one’s potential and resources to the fullest. Considering his high opinion of the Foundation and its efforts, he decided to share his knowledge and experience with the scholarship holders who are now at the crossroads and thus faced with a difficult task of choosing the right path, the path leading towards success.
The two primary questions Jasmin covered with his lecture were the following: which strategies do the young ambitious people need to employ in order to lead a structured life, and how to make right firm decisions that would enable them to reach their goal. Our guest started the lecture with a simple, yet engaging exercise and used it to show our scholarship holders how even the most mundane ways of taking action can help us reach profound conclusions about ourselves, our creativity, skill at using resources, and ability to improvise. At the end of the exercise, nearly every scholarship holder created a distinct object; an important point that Jasmin highlighted by drawing attention to the fact that “a boundless creative potential lies within each of us” and whether and to what extent will it be unleashed depends solely on us and the way we combine our qualities and strong sides in order to reach unprecedented heights.
Scholarship holders learned that it is crucial to know oneself, all the strengths and weaknesses, as well as all the resources at one’s disposal. Finally, it is equally important to be able to manage one’s time and control the sphere of one’s influence. During the course of his lecture, Jasmin emphasized that it is crucial to invest energy into building up one’s strengths and adequately using them, rather than focus on weaknesses. If we spend our time trying to eliminate our weakness and reach a greater balance, we will be left with rudimentary, rather than expert knowledge, thus staying average and forsaking the opportunity to become relevant in one’s own field. By focusing on the improvement of our strengths we become unrivalled at what we do, and gradually emerge as a complete and fulfilled person who stands out from the crowd.
Conclusions which the scholarship holders reached through this interactive lecture will certainly be useful to them in the course of their education, but also life in general. In the process of developing one’s personality each one of us needs to focus on our own strengths and interests because this is the only way to become an individual who does not merge into the faceless crowd. Nevertheless, we need to be aware of our weaknesses and accept that we cannot be equally good in everything.
Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. (Albert Einstein)
Amina Vatreš
