The motivation of the boy who harnessed the wind Movie

Dineth Shan Gimhana
3 min readMay 30, 2021

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This movie is based on William Kamkwamba’s life in Africa and how he saved the village. After school, the dry season arrived, his parents were very poor, and their farm died. Although technically he shouldn’t have gone to school, William sneaked away after the morning rally so as not to be ignored. He did this because he was inspired by the generator on the teacher’s bicycle. In the end, he was found and kicked out of school, but because his sister secretly dated the teacher, William was actually blackmailing him and let him use the library. Later, he made a windmill model. After a lot of persuasions, he asked his father to sacrifice his bicycle so that he could build a bigger windmill. The windmill supplies oil to the oil wells and keeps the family farm dry all year round.

In this movie, I have got many key things that we can applied to our lives to be successful. I would like to talk about those keys factors in this article.

Start it Smaller

William first built a much smaller windmill to see if it worked. Yes, there is a reason why people do models before doing larger projects. And it’s not just for decoration. Starting small, you can practice the subject and learn from any mistakes you might encounter in the process. Modeling can also be used as a visual aid, which is very helpful for persuasion. (I will believe it when I see it)

Share your vision and make others inspired.

William met with other children in his village and shared his vision of building a windmill for water supply. These children are inspired. They basically united William’s father and tried to get him to hand over the bicycle to William. He also shared his vision with the librarian, who showed him books about windmills/power generation.

Start innovation with the thing you have

Look around and observe your environment very carefully. What problem do you see? What can be improved? Many times, the things that improve our lives (called innovation by many) come from making simple observations and designing solutions to solve your challenges. Therefore, do not wait for others to solve the problems in your society. Use your creativity to think about solutions. Unless you give it a try, you never know what exciting innovations will come to mind.

Never stop researching until got successful, also after the success

The first important lesson is to always be curious. Curiosity is the first step in making a change. Similarly, we should not stop learning. Taking William as an example, he studied the working principles of generators and windmills and then conducted research. If this is not done, there will be a danger of damaging the generator.
It is very important to conduct research before embarking on this project. You may have a little idea about how to do a project, but if you don’t apply the right idea in the right place, it will be useless.

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Dineth Shan Gimhana

Software Engineering Undergraduate | University of Kelaniya