Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas 

Magic wands have recently been delivered to the Fab Lab and we’re ready to start distributing them to all the middle school and high school youth that come to visit, study at or make things at Fab Lab ICC. We’ve also handed some of them out to community college educators at a conference a couple of weeks ago. 

These magic wands can be used to make anyone’s dreams come true. The instructions to use are fairly simple. First, find a pencil sharpener—rare these days, but they do still exist. Second, sharpen the magic wand as if it were a pencil. Third, write down the dreams you wish to come true, sometimes again and again. Fourth, wait for the dreams to come true. Sometimes they will come true quickly, sometimes it may take a while. 

While this magic wand may look like a pencil, the magic of expressing the dreams on paper is related to the power of thought. The power of thought is a lost art that has never been discovered by many of us. Many of the youth coming to Fab Lab ICC are not aware of the power of thought. When we write down the dreams we want to come true and review those dreams every day, we begin to drive our daily actions toward the dreams and over time they come true. 

The power of thought is a timeless concept and it’s been available to mankind since the first cave-people dreamed up the wheel. Somewhere, in some cave, there’s a hieroglyphic of the first wheel that served as someone’s written dream of an easier way to move things around. Since the power of thought is timeless, the magic wand doesn’t have to be computerized or require batteries. 

In the early 20^th century, a young magazine writer named Napoleon Hill interviewed Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist and philanthropist. Carnegie challenged Hill to make a life’s work of studying various successful people of the time to see what made them successful. In the decades of work that followed, Hill discovered that everyone he studied used the power of thought to become successful. In his book “Think and Grow Rich” he shares many of these stories as well as a methodology to harness the power of thought. The first step; write it down. Although Hill doesn’t say anything about using a magic wand—that idea came from a banker friend of mine—the magic wand concept helps demonstrate the power of thought and the written word to young people. 

In March of 2016, Fab Lab ICC manager, Tim Haynes and I put one of our dreams in writing; an open letter about how we would use $700,000 to expand the Fab Lab space. Today, we prepare to break ground within the next 60 days on the building. Soon after, Tim coined the phrase “Fab Force” and we wrote a paper about a new kind of work force training that focuses on a variety of technical skills combined with entrepreneurial mindset, character and communication training. Today, we are just a few months away from “Fab Force” becoming an academic and work place reality. 

Using the magic wand to express dreams on paper does work and we will be sharing these magic wands with everyone visiting Fab Lab ICC now and in the future.