What would you do if you were given a challenge to raise $1,200 in toys and donate them to a childrens care center, and do it in just 7 hours? Today, I did exaclty that. In fact, my team and I raised over $1,500.00 in toys in under 7 hours.

I’ve been attending this seminar called The Next Level. It’s a personal development seminar that stretches your mind and pushes you to do things that you otherwise believed you weren’t capable of doing. Today at noon, all attendees were broken up into groups of about 12. After being split up, we were given all given a challenge. My teams challenge was to raise $1,200 in toys and donate them to a childrens care center and be back at the seminar at 7:30 PM.

Immediately, I could tell that my team was going to work well together. We had a chemistry that made everything much easier. We all shared ideas and eventually settled on a few different ideas of raising toys. Initially we thought of standing in front of stores and asking for donations and calling different businesses asking for cash donations. Being a Saturday, nobody was available. The stores wouldn’t donate and wouldn’t let us ask for donations outside the store. We ran into many challenges so we met back up to re-evaluate our plan and see what we can change.

We came to the agreement that going to these businesses just wasn’t working. One of my team members did have some success though. She used craigslist to find some people who were looking to get rid of some old toys they had. Through doing this, we were able to raise about $700 worth of toys!

With only 5 hours left, we realized we still needed more, and asking for donations just wasn’t getting us very far. As a group we decided that we would call everybody we knew and work on getting money donations that we could then use to buy the toys.

We all spent the next 3 hours calling everybody we knew asking for donations for our cause. To make a long story short, we were able to raise over $850 in those short three hours.

Then, the fun started. We went to Toys R’ Us and left with a $850 worth of toys, plus the $700 worth of donated toys!

We then got the awesome opportunity of driving out to St. Judes Childrens Ranch, just outside of Las Vegas, NV and dropping the toys off. What is better than that? We got the satisfaction of completing a goal, and might I add, a rather large goal, plus we were able to bring joy and happiness to over 70 children! It was by far one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

I felt the need to share this with you in hopes that you will take something from it, anything really. We’re all capable of great things, and when you’re doing what you love, those great things will just come natural.