Yesterday, I watched the TED-Talk interview featuring Google CEO, Larry Page, and I discovered this inspiring 2 minute video of Zack Matere, a Kenyan farmer who used simple searches to cause awesome change in his environment.
watch here ►►►African Searcher
It almost brought tears to my eyes as that Mr Matere's community in Kenya did not have much access to the internet. Just like I feel frustrated that many Nigerians still do not have that much access to it as well.
My frustration comes from the fact that (just as Zack Matere in the video) I have known for a while, how simple searches can cause a dramatic change in your life. And how that change can affect people around you.
Search has been the thing that has given me hope since 2005 when I first started to become actively involved with the internet. Social media is great too, but Search has kept my insatiable thirst for knowledge constantly hydrated.
Through Search, my business partner and I discovered amazing things about printing and improved the quality of our lives by leaving our regular jobs to become pioneers in the digital print marketing industry in Nigeria.
Through search, I was able to magnify my education in cognitive psychology, improve my knowledge of marketing, and appreciate certain aspects of modern branding and advertising that my lecturers back at the University of Lagos just weren't able to teach me.
A more recent example was the day that I decided to search the term, "Nikola Tesla" after watching the movie, 'The Prestige' for perhaps the fifth time.
I not only got to read amazing things about the legendary scientist, but I also discovered Tesla Motors - an American automobile manufacturing company - a carmaker with a difference.
I got to read some of the blog articles of Tesla CEO Elon Musk (born in South Africa by the way) and immediately became a believer in the Tesla cause. Musk may not be the richest man in the world, but to me he is an entrepreneur to be emulated. The most remarkable one I currently know.
So search led me from a simple curiosity about the depiction of Nikola Tesla in a movie, into discovering fascinating human aspirations in SpaceX, Hyperloop, and awesome cars that I expect and HOPE to change the world forever.
Anyway my point in all of this is that the internet has been a great source of possibilities, inspiration, hope, and happiness for me. And living in this present Nigeria with all of its.....issues, I just cannot imagine how my life would have been without the world wide web and without search.
I hope and pray I would be able to touch more and more people's lives like Zack Matere did in Kenya, with the little knowledge I have about the internet. And hopefully, those people would be able to touch other people's lives by sharing the knowledge that they in turn gain from their own unique searches.
EDIT (11/14/2017) :
To follow up on the inspiration I got from Tesla, let me just add here that I've since got a Green Card and moved to the USA in DEC 2016, and thanks to how much I had learned about Tesla (thanks to Search), I now work at Tesla.