One of the most valued trait of humankind is their adaptability. You will be surprised the power that is embedded in humans to adapt to unfavorable conditions. In life, you will meet unexpected challenges, but your ability to make do with what you have will give you an edge. There are times that what you need to take a certain action may be unavailable and waiting for it may delay the action, so you need to learn the act of improvising. More often than not, the skills you put into work at the moment of need or in an emergency may decide the fate of the situation.
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In order to be good at Improvising, you have to be committed to building up and developing yourself. Of course, you can only do some excellently well when you have prior knowledge of that particular thing. An experience I had during my internship period made me to understand the need of Improvising. We were in the middle of a production session and the machine we were using went off. When we checked, it was discovered that a hole was bored in one of the cylinders and caused the machine to stall. The only solution was to seal up the hole so that the air will not escape.
At that point, we knew we needed to do something so as to continue with the work and to meet the target for the day. When we reported to the production head, he came to inspect it and placed a call to the servicing agent. It was on Friday, and already evening, so it was not possible for them to come and fix it. Which means that production will have to be on hold till Monday, and that will also means massive loss. Right on phone, the engineer from the servicing firm gave a few instructions on how to temporarily fix it and manage it till Monday until they will come for proper fixing.
On the phone, he asked us to get a particular gum (a couple gum called "four minutes" gum) which luckily we had. He told us the proportion we were to mix the couple gum and how many minutes to leave it upon application. After we followed the directions, we were surprised to see the hole sealed and the machine picked up and started running. We were able to complete the production for the day and even the weekend tasks. Imagine if we were unable to fix the problem, our work would have been placed on hold. This was the advantage of improvising.
One thing you need to understand about life is that you will be faced with uncertainties, so you need to learn to embrace them with flexibility. You should not be too rigid about life nor follow life as "it must be done this way" kind of approach, learn to give room for a flexible approach. This will give you a more opened view to whole new level of possibilities, especially when the resources at hand may be limited. By improvising, you will be surprised that what you have at hand that you think is not enough will be more than enough. The world is continually changing, and so should the approach to life be as flexible to match with the changes.
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If you are waiting for a perfect condition that will support the kind of action you want to take, it may not come, so you need to consciously create the condition you need and most times, you will do so with what you have. One of the characteristics of the human race is to adapt favourably even to unfavorable changes. In order to Improvise effectively, you also need creativity and innovative mindset that will focus more on finding solutions to problems instead of focusing on the problems themselves. The truth is that you may not have been able to prevent the problem from arising in the first place, but you can definitely do something that will proffer solution to it.
Life does not always follow a specific pattern, nor a linear curve, so you have to be ready for anything and everything. This is the more reason you should be built to be prepared for the inevitable - change. I conclude with this popular quote, as I paraphrase:
Learn to substitute the preferable with the available if the former is not available.
Thanks for reading