Let me ask you something. Can you name a few popular or well-known persons? They can be in any fields you want. An athlete, politician, actor, writer, etc. The field doesn't really matter. Now, let's name some important people who you think had/have a great influence on the society. Now the tricky part! Please compare yourself to these people. Do you think they are some other kinds of human beings than you are? What's the difference between you and them? Why the newspapers or websites interview them but not you? Most of these people are experts. Usually in what they are talented in. All of them have worked hard for many years to get where they are now. Some of them started from a situation that was well worst than yours. Most of them had many many failures; one after another. But, right now, you believe that they are successful.
I'm not trying to get you to compare yourself to them or any other person for that matter. But I do want to get you to compare yourself to what you can be and say why you're not doing something (or not enough things) to be a successful person.
Everyone has abilities, interests and talents. When I say talent, I don't mean a Beethoven or Einstein kind of talent, but just the things that you do better in them than other activities. What that really matters is how many opportunities we gave these abilities, interests and talents to grow. How much we tried to make a better person out of ourselves. How hard have we worked to become a better person. Do we see a point in our future that these abilities, interests and talents would finally become mature and become our skills?
Humans are like caterpillars in their cocoons. Some, stay there for all their life, live there and die there. Some but, open the cocoon, become a butterfly and fly. Don't you want to become a butterfly?
We need to take a new look at our lives. Are our lives limited to eating, sleeping, working and having fun? Because in that case, I don't see a considerable differentiation than a dog or cat! Or maybe, we are seeking much higher goals. We want to go further from just satisfying the physiological needs and we want to become someone we want. We want to find our talents and use them. We want to become a butterfly and soar in the sky.
Once, a friend told me that his life goal is to get a Wikipedia page in his name. Well, that's great but why don't we do much (if anything) to get where we want? There might be many reasons but I think the most important one is just being lazy! Of course that's a shame! But we can't deny the reality! We waste our time and energy on useless things to get happiness but even we, deep down, know that we're not happy. Every day we spend hours on Social medias. Watch cat pictures! Like someone's picture next to a waterfall on Instagram (he who we haven't talked to in years!). Spend hours playing video games and similar activities. But, at the end of the week, we sincerely believe that we don't have any time for ourselves and the unbearable burden of work and daily life has not left us a spare moment to even open a book. We well know that it just gets an hour a day to become an expert in most fields (if we do it every day) but we don't even use that one hour. Instead, we spend hours in front of TV, watching every single show on Netflix. We have conversations one after another which are basically just gossiping but if there is a healthy meaningful discussion, we get bored.
To put these in another perspective, we feel we have found peace in this warm and cozy cocoon. Why should we even try to disturb this balance and have a hardship! Why should we even stand up! Why try, why work, why accept any pains. We've got used to this living based on just satisfying physiological needs. I've even seen people who envied the life of their dogs (since he can have all the food, sleep and fun he wants)!
It's not like we don't have any interests or talents. Everyone has interests and talents even if they don't know it themselves. But we are not willing to accept the pain of hard working to find and grow these interests or talents. Maybe we are depressed. Maybe we have self-discipline issues. Maybe we just don't want to solve the problems. Maybe we're lazy. Maybe ….
But whatever the problem is, it should be solved. We need to accept that life is really hard. That life is an upslope road. We need to get to this understanding that we need to work hard and accept the pain to get to our goals. We need to believe in the fact that nothing would be achieved without going through its hardship. Nothing would be achieved easily. If we are not willing to push ourselves, try hard and torn apart the cocoon, we would never ever fly.
::samic::