When The Student Is Ready, The Teacher Will Appear

I first heard this ancient Chinese proverb about a year ago: "When The Student Is Ready, The Teacher Will Appear." I heard it from someone when we met after I offered to help them when they told me that they had been struggling with a personal project for months. That person said to me that the major challenge that they were facing was acknowledging that they needed help to develop the project. It wasn't until they realised that they needed to look for help that I appeared in their life. We now have a mentor/mentee relationship that has lasted for almost a year.

It wasn't by a miracle that we met on that day, nor crazy coincidence nor luck. I'm sure they had met many people before me who would have made excellent mentors. They just weren't ready to be helped and thus missed out on those opportunities. When they finally acknowledged that it is OK to ask for help, they seized the opportunity they saw when I offered it.

Since then, I have started mentoring both students and established professionals to help them develop their projects using my experience of 20 years working as a Project Manager in my previous industry.

At the end of last year, I joined the Beyond Barriers Mentoring Scheme from Kingston University as a student mentor. The programme was developed to achieve equality, diversity and inclusion in graduate employment and improve access and opportunity by offering support to under-represented and disadvantaged students. Who wouldn't want to be part of such a beautiful endeavour?

I've also been helping out students from the University of London who have reached out about learning what it means to have a career as a photographer.

As I've said in previous posts, our biggest challenge as a society for the new decade is bringing people together. What better way of creating connections than sharing my expertise with others. If you find yourself with some spare time in your hands, why not offer advice and support to younger generations or even peers and help them overcome their challenges.

I can assure you that you will not only learn as much from them as they will learn from you, but you will also create new connections, expand your network and contribute to making your industry and your community stronger.

Photo credit: behind the scenes shot by Tori Dance.

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The Day After

I wrote this post a couple of days ago after coming back from having lunch with friends. During the meal, one of them asked us not to talk about politics because they didn’t want to feel sad all the time and politics made them sad. This political climate has caused too much division and too much pain. We need to find a way to fix this.

Adam King, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) software engineer, came up with a tool called Talk To Transformer that generates coherent paragraphs of text one word at a time. The AI software predicts the next word in a text using neural networks to complete the text. I asked Transformer: “How can we bring people together?”, and the software generated an answer that suggested an “interracial alliance”.

We definitely need more allies, and if a piece of software can come up with that conclusion on its own, I don’t see why an intelligent species like the human beings wouldn’t be able to achieve it.

The holidays are over now, and today marks the first day of a new year, a new decade and a new challenge. In the words of Diane from Bojack Horseman: “every happy ending has the day after the happy ending”. Today is the day when we have to start bringing people together.

Photo credit: group shot of the participants of The Trampery’s Pathways Programme.

Do you like what you just read? Consider becoming a patron on patreon.com/jccandanedo where you can learn more about my creative process and the stories behind my images. I’d love to have you as part of my Patreon community.

You can also subscribe to my weekly blog posts here!

An Experiment For The New Decade

In recent posts, I have been advocating for more inclusion and less divide and for finding commonalities with those who are different from us. This includes those with opposing points of views. Before the year ends, I propose an experiment: let's start the new decade by giving inclusion a try. Miranda Dempster, the Editorial Design Director of the New York Magazine, said in a recent interview: "Sometimes you have to try things just to prove why they are not right, but you might discover something else along the way you hadn’t anticipated." Let's keep an open and non-judgemental mind towards other people's opinions, and see where that takes us.

With this, I am not saying that we should condone abuse or hate speech in any way. But it might actually surprise us to learn that, at the core, we all want the same things no matter how different we are.

Someone who does this brilliantly is model Rain Dove. She receives so much abuse online that someone else would have ended up crawling under a rock and disappearing from the face of the planet. However, with kindness and an open mind, she takes the time to listen to her haters and has honest and open conversations with them. Most of the times, she turns haters into allies.

One thing that we must always keep in mind is that others also think that they are right. They also have evidence that we are mistaken. They might be as manipulated as we are. They believe that their point of view is what's best for the world, too. And, you know what? They might be right. Have you ever considered that you might be the one who's wrong?

This is a dilemma that's been on my mind for a few years now. And the election results in many parts of the world over the last few years have made me continuously ask myself that question. How is it possible that over the last decade, people around me are voting for governments with completely opposite views of the world to mine? Am I one of the bad guys?

I think that, just the fact that I am reassessing my views of the world and my stand on the issues that I care for makes me a good human being. A bad person wouldn't even consider that they are wrong. So, my resolution for the next decade is always to try to find common ground with people who have different points of views to mine. As Miranda Dempster said, we might both discover something new.

Happy Holidays 2019 and have a wonderful new decade!

Photo credit: behind the scenes taken by Chloe Rosser.

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