Knock Knock

Knock Knock dan skognes motivation blogger speaker teacher trainer coach educator1No joke. Are you knocking?  It is not your job to open the door. God does that. It is your job to knock and keep on knocking till you find the right door.

Many years ago my wife was married to another man. They were in the jewelry business and were constantly frustrated that the wax patterns used to design jewelry were brittle and broke easily. They had very short shelf life and were just too fragile, and yet everyone in the world used the same stuff to carve their patterns.

They got the brilliant idea of mixing plastic and wax to make it pliable and give it more versatility. The only problem is….how do you mix oil and water? Neither one of them were chemists. They just had a dream of inventing something that the world needed, so they set out to do their experiments in a crockpot.

Thousands of attempts later they were frustrated and her husband threw up his hands and gave up. My wife, however, had one last ditch effort that she thought was worth a try. They were using some DuPont chemicals. She decided to call DuPont and ask for the head chemist and solicit his help. She called, and the next thing you know she is talking to the head chemist!

She explained that they had a small jewelry business in Texas and they were trying to develop a new product using some DuPont chemicals, but they were stuck. They asked him if he would help, and he asked if he could see the latest work they had done. They sent him the experiments and he replied with three possible solutions. The first one failed. The second one failed….but the third one WORKED.

That was the birth of Plasto-wax. That invention changed forever how jewelry patterns are made around the world. That provided not just a business but a solution to a problem that every jeweler in the world faced daily.  What would have happened if they had not continued to knock?

What dream do you have? Keep knocking. Don’t give up. Dreams do come true for those that do.

Shalom!

Dan Skognes

2 Responses to “Knock Knock”

  1. Cliff Loriot says:

    Thanks for the post, Dan.

    You hit a real soft spot in me. I’m a doggedly determined dreamer–a visionary. But I have failed at every attempt, and now the Lord has disabled me to the point that I could never accomplish exactly what I set out to do.

    However, a dream is a concept, a goal that can be achieved in many different ways. Just like your wife’s previous experience, I’m looking into different ways to see my dream come true. One of the ways is to expand my knowledge and skill set.

    That’s what your wife did.

    Last year, I knocked on a different door and it opened. This year, I knocked on another door, and it opened, too. But one thing I have found to be true: You have to be ready to go through the door when it opens.

    Thanks again.

    • Dan Skognes says:

      Funny how that works, Cliff. Sometimes the doors open quickly and sometimes they seem to take forever. One thing I know for sure, God’s timing is always perfect and it is never just about us. Everything that happens to us affects other people too. So we have to trust God and His timing. Shalom! Dan