BrotherAP,
Excellent, however, could you share with us on what foundation are your plans rooted. What are the core values or beliefs?
-Sapiens
I come from a stance of empowerment.
We've known for ages that the mind is an amazingly powerful thing. Your brain is capable of completely reorganizing itself to learn something new. This has been shown by countless studies that challenge a persons reality. One example is making them wear contacts that flip the world upside down. These people, at first, are hopelessly lost, not able to coordinate anything and feeling disorientated. By two weeks time, they don't even notice that the world is switched. It seems normal. Their brain has re-organized to compensate.
If you are determined, you can learn anything. Some things outside the realm of your natural ability may take more effort from you than another person. You have more to be proud of for learning these things, because you forced yourself to do something that didn't come naturally for you.
For example, I am naturally good at math, science, and computers. People regularly praise me for these skills, because they don't understand that they're all easy for me. I do not have to put effort into them.
I get much less praise for keeping a clean house. This is an ongoing struggle for me! I have had to completely retrain myself, struggling against my nature the whole way. I could easily fall into my old habits at any time, but I keep myself in check. This takes much more effort than learning math or science for me.\
This is the same story for snowboarding. I remember being 10 years old and riding up the lift, freezing my ass off dreaming about sitting next to the fireplace with a nice cup of hot chocolate watching cartoons - but I wanted to be a good snowboarder. And, by the time I was 16, I was instructing professionally. Considering that I'm not naturally athletic, I'm very proud of the fact that many people have called me the best snowboarder they know. I earned that.
But, there was a time when I would not try and change things. People will tell you "Be happy with who you are" and I honestly tried. I placed value on superficial things, like beauty, and truly believed that I did not deserve an HB10. I had already taken myself out of the running before I had a chance to play the game. There was more to it than that. I also dropped out of high school, and watched my friends walk across the stage while I sat in plain dress in the audience. I almost gave up on all of my dreams, loathe to work minimum wage jobs for the rest of my life. Then reality hit me like a train, and I got my GED. Now I'm halfway done with a bachelor's in mechanical engineering, and I have the third highest GPA in the department. Always, before, my intelligence had given me a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card in school, and I was arrogant about it. But when I was faced with the reality that my friend who was no smarter than I was had ended up at Princeton, and I was a dropout, was when I fully understood the value of hard work and determination. The value of wanting something.
I realized that we're all the same. Some of us are given more, and some of us are given nothing and work for every thing we have. I, for one, am proud to say that I worked for something - and that's what motivates me. It's not the million dollars in the bank so much as the accomplishment that I made a million dollars (or ten or a hundred million). I can risk losing that entire fortune, and never regret it, because I'll know I did it. Even if I die broke. I still achieved that. Besides, if I can do it once, I can do it twice - so what's to fear? I now know that I can have a supermodel, given I learn to seduce women and place myself where I can meet a supermodel - and just knowing that I can means that I can choose whether or not I do. Even if, in the long run, I don't - well it's because I chose not to. Whether I could or not isn't really a question.
So I embraced the fact that I really can do anything I want. I freed myself from preconceived notions of careers and common pathways, and now that I truly believe in my own abilities I can plan to do anything. I blew my oppurtunities wide open, and I'm setting crazy goals.
Now that I believe I can do anything, I've made plans to do all the things I've always wanted to do. Before I die, I will own a house on every continent, see every wonder of the world, know the taste of wealth, snowboard on the swiss alps, see the northern lights, touch a shark in the wild, learn how to talk to a monkey via sign language, sail across the atlantic ocean, learn to be a stunt pilot, and learn how to hanglide, amongst many other things I've always wanted to do.
And, I always know that if I end up in the gutter, I can make my way back out and start all over again.
How can I not be confident, with all that to look forward to?
BrotherAP