Initiating Awesome

Just the first of several opinion posts I have been wanting to write lately. Haha, where and what are my priorities? /zooms to study Light and Dark Reactions in Photosynthesis

This commentary here was inspired by several other comments regarding to several artists, including myself (which I disbelieve but take kindly, like the prospect of winning the lottery).

Not to toot my own horn, but I’ve been getting compliments by people lately on “being awesome” and how they aren’t. The funny thing is that I find it more convincing that they are awesome, with their talent and skill and untouched potential. This made me think about some things relating to the concept of achieving wonderful things, and the people who do it, and those who want to (but don’t feel confident in doing it).

Everyone has the inherent ability to become great; the difference is if they want to recognise and use this ability. Time and time again, Humanity and Civilisation have proven to us that humans are willing to go beyond the odds and rise from the ashes to create technological and intellectual marvels, as well as advance the state of mind of anyone in all aspects. We can do a lot of things. We can push ourselves to do better than we are currently undertaking. The only catch is Do you want to?

I know a lot of people — mostly good friends and good acquaintances. And a lot of them have beautiful ideas, plenty of flair and solid skills. Some of them have unrealised talents. A few of them only act upon these assets and push themselves to create bigger things. I have told them over and over again how much I believe that if they at least PERSEVERED, they can achieve “so much awesome” (as I would say in casual convo). Unfortunately, they would rather bury their potential 6 feet under for much easier and conventional duty, and prefer to hide behind the shadows of other people’s achievements and lament at their own lack of such things.

It’s not as if they cannot be awesome; it’s just that they closed the doors with high-security locks, built a fort and denied it entry.

Awesome (and talent) is never a Chosen One quality. No god of any religion dictates if any one person of any part of the continent is special enough to be given the Awesome Gene. Awesome doesn’t go to you; you go to Awesome. You have to be diligent and work hard. This is it. Everyone - Einstein and Tesla and whoever - has to go through that. They don’t sit on their laurels and wait for inspiration to strike. Lightning has a higher chance of striking anyway.

People give up before they even try. Some expect instant results, or immediate recognition, or a lot of riches and fame. That is natural, but all of these thoughts must be put aside if things needed to be done. The above takes a long, LONG time until people begin to appreciate it (you can say that the public is taking time to catch up with your genius; so, congratulations!), and not everyone is patient enough to wait that long. They take the silence as a sign of their inadequecy, and raise their flags a few moments before the war has won.

This reminds me of a story I got from Paulo Coelho, from The Alchemist:

The old man continued, “In the long run, what people think about shepherds and bakers becomes more important for them than their own destinies.”

The old man leafed through the book, and fell to reading a page he came to. The boy waited, and then interrupted the old man just as he himself had been interrupted. “Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because you are trying to realize your destiny. And you are at the point where you’re about to give it all up.”

“And that’s when you always appear on the scene?”

“Not always in this way, but I always appear in one form or another. Sometimes I appear in the form of a solution, or a good idea. At other times, at a crucial moment, I make it easier for things to happen. There are other things I do, too, but most of the time people don’t realize I’ve done them.”

The old man related that, the week before, he had been forced to appear before a miner, and had taken the form of a stone. The miner had abandoned everything to go mining for emeralds. For five years he had been working a certain river, and had examined hundreds of thousands of stones looking for an emerald. The miner was about to give it all up, right at the point when, if he were to examine just one more stone-just one more- he would find his emerald. Since the miner had sacrificed everything to his destiny, the old man decided to become involved. He transformed himself into a stone that rolled up to the miner’s foot. The miner, with all the anger and frustration of his five fruitless years, picked up the stone and threw it aside. But he had thrown it with such force that it broke the stone it fell upon, and there, embedded in the broken stone, was the most beautiful emerald in the world.

“People learn, early in their lives, what is their reason for being,” said the old man, with a certain bitterness. “Maybe that’s why they give up on it so early, too. But that’s the way it is.”

This is the best example of the progress to awesome. What I am more concerned about is the people who want to look for jewels but do not believe they have the ability to do it. In the story, the man had already undertaken his dream before he almost gave up. Some people give up before they even start.

So this is advice for my friends, and for the people who I see every day and marvel at their skill:

Forget about other people. Stop comparing your worst to their best. Start comparing your best to their best, and recognise it and bring it forward to overtake your competition. Always motivate yourself to improve, never solely to become great. Greatness cannot come before improvement, so it is more realistic to aim for the latter. And you are awesome. It’s already in your ideas and your stories and your art and everything. You cannot be someone’s awesome, only your own. So make it. Just show the world anything you have, and they will come to you.

And for my friends who insist that I am “too awesome”: no, I am not. I only worked hard. I let my ideas come and wrangle them face-to-face. Every idea has its potential and I only believed that each one of them deserves to be given my best efforts. Ideas should be treated with respect, and never insulted or dumbed down or compared to, lest they become afraid of you despite your best intentions in the dissatisfaction (they are just like handling children). I don’t degrade my skill or my ideas; I just let whatever come to me and see what happens.

In summary: Every single person has the gift to better themselves, their environment and the people around them. The only difference separating the who-has and hasn’t-yets is whether they wish to use it or ignore it.

Which do you choose?

06 October [Thursday] ● 1 year ago ● 16 Virulent Postings
[SOUP-CAN TAGS] opinion posts, when I think about it I have a lot of stuff I didn't write about like inspiration and ahhhh another post then, studying for exams,