How Dancing Accelerated My Growth
Or kind of did
I’ve always loved Korean and Japanese pop music, and up until a year or two ago, I had never even thought that learning the dances was a possibility for me. But, my friends challenged me to try it one day and, reluctantly, I did.
Instantly I fell in love with it. Even if I wasn’t any good at it in the beginning I loved what it gave me. It was hard work, and it gave me a great outlet for any stresses I did encounter in my daily life. It was a good workout, it helped me in my studies of the Korean and Japanese language, but most importantly, it accelerated my growth as a person.
You see, dancing is like any other sport or skill, if you want to be good at dancing you have to put in the time to be good. Now, me, being the competitive person I am, I always want to be the best I can be. So I work hard, really hard at learning every dance I decide to. It’s endless repetition. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Over and over, again and again, until I got it right. This can be translated to almost countless things in the business world. You’re not going to learn how to compose YOURSELF in a professional setting unless you do it multiple times. You’re not going to learn how to network with strangers at events unless you do it yourself multiple times. You might watch a YouTube video giving you tips on how, but those are tips that worked for THAT person. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to work for you. The only way I learned to network was from the multiple events I’ve gone to thanks to VE, and from the people I’ve met so far in Spark! I’ve only learned how to send a good business email because of the many I’ve had to send in the past.

Next, I’ll start by saying that learning a dance that was originally made for 5'9" athletic idols is incredibly hard for someone who is 6'4" and 230 pounds of no muscle. I’m tall which means my movements are slower, they’re less pronounced and they’re harder to make look good. So to even begin to make the dance look good, I have to compensate. If one move is toot fast for me, I have to work in other areas to make those better, as to draw less attention from the move I’m slow in. Or in a move I don’t know how to do yet, I have to compensate by taking more time away from other parts of the dance to focus on the one move I need to learn, i.e. disconnecting torso from legs, etc. I realized this last week that in business you need to compensate for so many things. For one, if you’re not good at web design and you want to run a start up by yourself, you’ll have to get rid of that dream and get a web designer that can accurately represent your business. Or if you’re like me and you’re building a tournament and LAN, things won’t go as fast as you want. You have to push back the date you want, in order to get what you need. I don’t necessarily like doing this, but I see what I have to do for my business and I’m willing to make the sacrifice for it.

In ending, you have to create a finished project. Just like in dance, you can learn every point of a dance one a time, you can know every part to a tee, but if you can’t put it all together, if you can’t make it look good when you’re performing it, you’re wasting your time in learning the dance from the beginning. Just like when starting up a company, you can have the best idea ever, you can have the best team ever, you can work day and night on each part of your business, but if there’s that single bit of disconnect, it looks horrible. You look unprofessional, and you make the people you worked with feel like they just wasted their time. I know what I need to do to work on a dance to make it the finished project I want. I’m going to use those same steps to create the business I want and that everyone I work with deserves.
