Viewpoint: Follow your dream

While Christmas and New Year may already seem distant memories, I would like to touch on something that occurred in December and discuss how that event will colour my thinking for 2024.

With a couple of weeks to go before Christmas, an old friend visited me from California. He had left England to go there when he was 18. At the time, he had a dream. He was an excellent water polo player and his dream was to study at a top university in the US with a strong water polo reputation and to achieve this via earning a sports scholarship.

My friend wasn’t satisfied to choose any old university just for the purposes of making the move. He wanted to be the best and to do that he had to look to the most successful university for water polo in the US. To many, a dream at such a high level would have seemed just that; a dream, with the chances of it becoming reality remote. But he was not to be put off. The first attempt ended in failure. He was just not fit and strong enough.