Can your perspective shift in just two weeks?
This was the final question I asked the founders who joined the Forever Projects Immersion Trip to Tanzania. When founder Mark Dombkins flipped it back on me, I was stumped. I’d been in execution mode producing a podcast series about the trip, documenting everyone else’s journey without reflecting on my own.
But four months later, and after hours of listening back to interviews, editing audio and sitting with my own reflections: the perspective shifts have become glaringly obvious.
The abundance paradox
There was one paradox that surfaced repeatedly in Tanzania: in a place often defined by material scarcity, we witnessed extraordinary abundance.
An interview with Sophia, a local team member at Forever Projects, crystallised this for me. When asked about community, she said: “In Tanzania we have this saying: I help you today, you help me tomorrow. I don’t know what I will have to give tomorrow, so if there is something I can give today, I will.”
This abundance mindset is born from necessity, when material resources are limited, community becomes the currency. It showed up everywhere: the guides who spent hours teaching us Swahili on the mountain; the women who welcomed us into their homes and businesses; and one of the most powerful stories we heard, about a woman named Sharuku. Once living with HIV and tuberculosis, unable to feed her son Joseph, she rebuilt a sustainable life through the Forever Projects program and the first thing she did was return to teach other women to become seamstresses.
In Tanzania, giving isn’t an act of generosity. It’s simply the norm.
The starkness of this struck me when compared to life in Australia, where we are surrounded by material abundance yet often operate from a mindset of scarcity. I had been thinking about this idea already after reading a piece by Chritsabel Mintah-Galloway, which articulated something I’ve long felt: when you grow up in an individualistic culture, fairness becomes the metric, and ‘fairness’ easily morphs into zero-sum thinking – for me to win, you have to lose.
Of course, this isn’t universal, nor does it apply across every Western context. The Australian startup ecosystem, for instance, is a clear exception – a pocket of genuine collectivism. As Will Richards, founder of Overnight Success, put it: “Everyone kind of knows how fragile an early-stage startup can be, so people are willing to go that extra mile to be supportive.”
So in interlinking stories across Tanzania, and experiences from the founders of the trip, two threads stood out:
Fragility breeds generosity.
Empathy creates a collectivist mindset.
This is abundance thinking: my success is inseparable from our success, and seeing it in practice really cemented my thinking that we gain far more from giving.
A favourite quote, “A rising tide lifts all boats” – J.F. Kennedy
Friction creates value and you should create value with what’s in your hands
We increasingly live in frictionless environments: one-click purchases, instant answers, technology engineered to dissolve every obstacle.
But seven days on Kilimanjaro reminds you of a simple lesson: friction is what creates value.
Every step up that mountain demanded effort. Nearing 5,800 metres, the air is very thin, your body hurts and you have to shift into a mental mode of deliberate, consistent positivity just to keep your body moving forward. It’s hard. But all 12 of us summited. And the lesson crystallised: the things worth having require moving through resistance, not around it.
Across Africa, the friction of daily life is incomparable, tied to fundamental barriers like infrastructure, access, and opportunity. Yet that friction is also what fuels innovation and genuine value. One of my favourite interviews from the trip was with Caleb, the CEO of Tech Safari, a media company across the continent. We spoke about how hard it is to build in Africa but the genuine value that technology creates is synonymous with social impact in Africa, talking about a mobile payments platform M-Pesa and the genuine impact it has on daily lives…
“Building in Africa is hard… it’s really hard. But if you build tech in Africa, you’re actually having impact. When you enable payments, you enable commerce and you actually pull people out of the situations they’re in… 2-3% of Kenyans are out of poverty because they can now trade online and do retail. You’re not trying to make product managers 20% more efficient… you’re actually pulling people out of poverty.”
Friction is the filter that reveals what matters.
And the perspective shift for me was this:
If you have skills, resources, or influence that can help ease fundamental friction for others – use them. Mentor someone. Unlock access. Amplify a story that deserves to be heard.
But equally, don’t try to engineer a completely frictionless path for people (or yourself). True progress comes from people and communities understanding their own challenges and moving through them in idiosyncratic ways.
The women who hold a nation
After summiting, week two was spent with the local team at the Forever Projects site. And the unanimous feeling after day one visiting the local orphanage was hopelessness.
Tiny babies in cribs, separated from mothers too ill to care for them. Children abandoned. Stories delivered with matter-of-fact clarity by local staff: not out of coldness, but because this was their daily reality. Every sentence hit like a punch to the chest.
But then came day two – where we met the mothers going through the 12-month program to build sustainable lives for themselves.
Seventy women arrived, each carrying a healthy, thriving baby. Babies who could have been in crisis, but instead got to stay home with their mothers who had rebuilt their lives and were building sustainable businesses.
We visited Regina, a single mother of triplets. Her husband abandoned the family when the babies were born weighing barely one kilogram each. The program supported her step by step: emergency nutrition, basic needs, business training, and then capital to reopen her small store.
When we visited her shop, she radiated pride. She showed us her shelves, her stock and her plans. She spoke about building a house, about sending her daughters to school… about the future!
The emotional whiplash from hopelessness to hope happened for us in 24 hours. For these women, it took months of sustained effort. But the pattern became unmistakable:
When you invest in a woman, the impact compounds.
Because the first thing she does is lift her community. Quoting Sophia again, “We are women, we hold the nation”.
This is the quiet superpower of the women we met in Tanzania: a blend of humility, strength, and a deep, almost instinctive sense of responsibility. You work hard for your family. You build for your community. And you plant seeds for the next generation.
Investing in a woman doesn’t just solve an immediate crisis, it repairs systems at the lowest level. It changes the trajectory of a household, then a community, then the children who grow up with stability, education, and the belief that their lives can be different.
A woman rises and the ripple effects continue long after the initial shift in direction.
So can your perspective shift in two weeks?
Yes. Here’s what shifted:
- Abundance isn’t about how much you have: it’s about how freely you give.
- With abundance comes community, and community isn’t optional: it’s oxygen.
- Friction creates value, not ease. Use what’s in your hands to always help others but never to engineer frictionless contexts.
- Investing in women is the highest-leverage investment you can make. Do daily things to help all boats rise – amplify stories, recommend work, invest time.
Two weeks outside your normal life, paired with real physical and emotional challenge, can shift your perspective in ways that change your mindset entirely.
Soph Dicker recently produced the podcast, Ripple Effects, an eight-part documentary-style mini series focused on stories at the intersection of entrepreneurship, impact, and women’s empowerment. The Ripple Effects is now live on Spotify and Apple. To find out more about Forever Projects, visit their site here.
Top photo – Pictured: Sophia, and Soph Dicker, Source: Supplied