Lessons/Reflections from my 20’s [Day 16]

On comparing ourselves with others.

Nowadays, it is very transparent who are doing well. Look at the magazine, Instagram, Google Search.

There is much fanfare about it, they are lauded by the world for being amazing. I spent many years studying success and wanted to discover the common threads in these people’s lives.

Among these I studied:

-Elon for engineering solutions to unsolvable problems
-Kissinger for politicking
-Alinsky for taking on power structures
-Schwarzenegger for the American Dream
-Jobs for shifting paradigms in consumerism
-Christ for shifting the mindsets of billions for thousands of years
-Zuckerberg for networks
-Redgrave in sports
-Kanye for music

What quite quickly becomes uncomfortable in studying these guys are the comparisons that you can draw with your own life.

It is natural to compare and we hear about these guys and how seemingly quickly they were successful.

With all of these guys they were extremely successful from what appears to be the get go, with everything they touch seeming to turn to gold.

You ask yourself:

-When did they learn all this stuff?
-How did things just turn out so well so quickly?
-How could one possibly get all this experience and talent so young?

After many years of pondering it, questioning myself (was I working hard enough? I’m doing the 14-hour days? why am I not like Elon?) always asking myself why was I such a laggard and I found my answer.

As Sam Mussabini said to Harold Abrahams in the film Chariots of Fire, ‘You can’t put in what God left out.’

We are all here to do something, and people who are doing prodigious things like the aforementioned, it was on the basis of a special platform that they began on, a God given talent, genetics, however you’d like to put it.

Now, we all have special talents in life and it can be hard to discern what your path is when you see an awesome talent you have for something you think you may want but then you get derailed.

I spoke to Olympic silver medallist, Roger Black about this, Roger unfortunately had to be doing the 200m when the indomitable Michael Johnson was in his prime. Black severely hurt himself and it looked like things may be over for him, but a little voice in him told him to carry on to go back to it. You see Black knew he had it in him, he knew he had the talent to go out there and make it happen and he did win an Olympic silver medal.

The problem today is that we consciously or unconsciously compare ourselves to the greats and find ourselves wanting. The next problem with that is that the media and biographers cut down the time period that it took them, and weren’t there for the repetitiveness of the tasks they had to do to hone and harness their enormous inherent talents.

When we focus too much on the values of society that lauds these folks, we take our eye off our own greatness and goodness. We look at what society is rewarding and contort ourselves into that shape, overlooking our own inherent talent, neglecting our own best asset. We desperately want to be rewarded by what society appreciates in the moment. We twist and shape ourselves for their benefit and forget about yourselves and what we’re here to do and what makes us happy then becoming miserable.

We overlook the fact that what makes Elon, Elon is that is he unapologetically Elon. He is not trying to be anyone else; he is simply working on expressing himself in his truest possible way. This is the same with all of the greats, they are just expressing themselves in their truest, most authentic and aligned way.

And, sadly, some of us don’t appreciate the gift that we have and we want to be someone else. This leads to depression, anxiety, fear, anger, lust, greed and suicide. This failure to accept ourselves as we are, a big ball of talent, and to work with what we have, that is our great failure.

Now for some perspective, if Elon didn’t have a laptop, he would be nobody he couldn’t do what he does without a computer.

But who makes the laptop?

Why thousands of people do. Someone has to do the covering of the laptop, make the keys, design the laptop, put the laptop together, put it in a box, deliver it, deliver the parts that make it up, make the screen, feed the people who make the screen, clean the factory that made the screen and so on.

Are you following my point?

These guys are great, they’re awesome, but they are just building on what we, as a collective have achieved, and our forefathers achieved and their forefathers before them.

So do not minimise yourself, do not exaggerate yourself. Figure out who you are and be the truest expression of it.

As Emerson said,

Envy is ignorance,
Imitation is suicide.

By no means have it figured out, but I’m working on it and have gotten to a level where it doesn’t trouble me.