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I have been engaged by a lot of discussions with my fellow co – workers about how do we make an impact. It’s been our aspiration to live a meaningful life, not only just to do day to day work and unconsciously become on auto pilot mode (re : zombie). Inspired by deep talks session with Aulia Akbar and Ihsan M. Farhan, two of my awesome colleagues in POT Branding House that currently in thriving mode in a quest on becoming widely known Graphic Designer, we were talk about Time and Impact then.

It is come to my sense that one of the thing that people have in common fairly is time, where we have only 24 hours a day. I know it is a very basic thing, but let’s scale it up into macro perspective, from those 24 hours, we breakdown into :

8 hours to sleep, around 33.3% in percentage.

8 hours to work, around 33.3% in percentage.

8 hours to eat, on the road, take a shower, entertainment and etc., also around 33.3% in percentage.

Therefore, in moderate, people live around 65 years in general, so the numbers are :

21 years to sleep (yes, we sleep that much.)

21 years to work (and yes, we work that much too, in this context, we start it out from the age of 25 on average)

21 years etc., all still on 33.3%, but it has to be modified, because people tend to work in duration of 35 years long by institutional standard, took the share either from sleep or etc.

The very question is, how and when people could make an impact?

It was a tight discussion, as we know, make an impact is one of sole motivation for the millennials. The problem is : impatience.

Many of my friends who choose to work for companies, but they decide to quit their job only after 8 – 18 months duration length of work. And when I asked why they quit their job, they answered simply because they are not making an impact. I got this answer from 8 out of 10 of my friends. That is one case.

But in my comparison, I have a such an endurance lesson and a valid example from my own mother, who works for educational institution for 30 years, and I think there are lots of values, on loyalty and patience primarily. 18 months compare to 30 years, such a gap, eh?

We already got two variables here, bear with me, we’ll come into conclusion soon.

Now, about the impact. In my ecosystem, people here are self learning, defy conventional thinking, and we perceive challenge as our pulse. Then no wonder if majority of people here put their best attempt to create an impact, including me. Everyone want to be a great designer, a great writer, a great speaker on level of TED Talks, but my proposal is to reverse engineer this : why don’t we focus on making great content first, one great content at a time?

There is no need to rush for us to create an impact. The rush itself is the very factor that made lots of people got frustrated because they’re not “there” yet. Where is “there” anyway?

We, as a creator in Creative Industry or on any industry, should solely focus on create. We don’t create because of fame, or that crunchy sound of audience applause of our work, or that shiny bright lights of interview invitation from television show. My point is about intention. I suggest that we should have a pure and centered intention just to create, create, create, and eventually, I am 100% sure that we’ll become great at what we do.

Impact is a result, a variable that we can not control nor we can claim, it is the people who feel the benefit who can say. While the Time is a constant variable that just. The only variable that we can control is ourselves : our intention, and how we act to manifest it. Be patient.

Remember, every global or local role model that we have are once a beginner, and the hardest part is : to begin. I embrace and fully accept myself as a beginner on what I do, the challenging question is, do you?

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About the author :

Alby Rachman Padmakusumah is a Creativepreneur, Co – Founder and Managing Director of two companies, POT Branding House, an integrated branding studio and TABO Indonesia, civil and interior contractor . Known as Candor Commander as his personal values, he’ll become a humble conversationalist if talking about Company Culture and Creativity.