Who pushed Your Buttons in the past?

Recently John Ilham passed away unexpectedly at only 42 years of age, from a heart attack while out jogging/walking his dog. John was an Australian success story come true. A Turkish immigrant that came here with His family when he was 5 and grew up in one of the roughest neighbourhoods in Melbourne. After starting work in a factory with his parents, he moved on to sales and at the age of 26 went into business for himself, selling mobile phones in a small shop. A notion that prompted one of his mates to call him, ‘Crazy”. A term he accepted proudly and used it with his name to make it his trademark. Now 16 years later “Crazy John’s” has 120 shops and is the biggest seller of Mobile phones in Australia. Recently John’s personal wealth was valued at 310 Million making him Australia’s 126th richest Person. Not bad for a poor immigrant child from the wrong side of the tracks, hey. So who pushed his buttons and inspired him to strive for better things?

On the days after his passing, two of our major TV networks showed in-depth interviews with him and his family done recently. And in both he remarked back to his last day at school where one of his teacher’s said goodbye to all the students and wished them luck or gave them words of encouragement, whatever. However when he came to John he was very negative and said he would never amount to much. And those words were the spur that drove John on to prove his teacher wrong.

Sure, the first few years produced nothing to do that, but John had dreams and ideas and followed them and eventually he succeeded even beyond his own expectations, even if death has now cut short further expectations. But this one person, evidently pushed his button’s enough to inspire him to do better than what would be expected from one from a ‘Broadie Boy”. (One from the suburb of Broadmeadows.)

What about you? Who has, or who can push your buttons?

What were your Dreams and expectations? What can you now do, even at this late stage, to bring them about? I don’t expect that you will ever achieve the wealth of Crazy John but who knows how far you will go, until and unless you try, hey? So will you? Over to you: Walter