What If Justin Timberlake Was An Accountant?

This morning like many I’m sure, Justin Timberlake’s new music filled my timeline. I clicked through a few links, to find the video for the new song “Can’t Stop The Feeling,” since I was watching on Youtube, when the clip ended, it played another JT video immediately after. The video that played was an older SNL performance where he performed “Suit & Tie,” not only did he perform the song, he also introduced it. As I watched, I thought, here is someone who clearly has that “it factor,” from his dance moves, to his voice, to his overall performance. He’s just so smooth, it seems so natural for him to be entertaining. BUT, what if Justin was told along the way to be an accountant, and he listened. What if for his whole life he was sitting in an office tackling numbers, when his desire was to be a performer an entertainer?

My thought reminded me of a story by Tony de Mello, “A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them.

All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chick. He scrathed the earth for worms and insects, and clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.

Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings. The eagle looked up in awe, “Who’s that?” he asked.

“That’s the eagle, the king of the birds,” said his neighbor. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth — we are chickens.”

So the eagle lived and died a chicken for that’s what he thought he was.”

What if Timberlake hadn’t followed through on his calling, weathered the storms to get there, and persevered? What if hypothetically he was told to be an accountant, so that’s what he did his whole life?

How many of us do this? How many of us deny how we are gifted, because it’s different, because it’s scary? What’s scarier is we could be living our whole life a chicken.

(**Disclaimer Not knocking accountants whatsoever, just using as a contrasted example)