Habit Standing Between You and Greatness Everyday


From Left: Former US First Lady Michelle Obama, Barrack Obama and Oprah Winfrey as she endorses Obama's candidature for US Presidency
What is that one thing that Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk, Barrack Obama and a host of other people that we look up to have in common?

Sure there are many things, like relative success in their ventures, a massive and almost god-like following, unassailable influence on people, and a host of other qualities, but that’s not the focus today. The focus is on unconventionality.

Leo was a highly eccentric character whose spirit of discovery and curiosity transcended art and science at the time and has hugely influenced humanity to date. He invented, wrote and drew some amazing ideas that many of us cannot dream of even with the advent of cutting-edge technology.

Barrack Obama and Oprah Winfrey share one thing in common. They both rose from families that had no right or even duty to get to where these two behemoths did. Born dirt poor, disillusioned and hopeless, these guys decided that they would not be defined by the circumstances of their existence.

One rose from the abusive and loveless home to become one of the most successful media moguls in history and another, a son of a single mother and a runaway father wheeled himself through the racist bastions of the American education systems to write history as the first black head of state.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk
Elon Musk was raised an overworked single mom alongside two siblings. He is now the face behind Tesla, Space X, PayPal and a number of other ventures that have to some extent defied the conventional way of doing things, be it paying money, traveling, dreaming, and much more.

For all the people mentioned, complacency and societal norms were the sure way to go. No one would have blamed them for being like the next person and dreaming within the limits of safety, but they denounced the conventional way of thinking and made the tough choice to dictate their very own paths.

Every creative venture that has transcended normal human ability, every scientific discovery that confounded the world is as a result of a purely unconventional way of thinking and the capacity to rise from the dusts of one’s existence and to build a foundation from the bricks thrown at them.

It is only those who force themselves to do the tough things when ease is an option and those who never back away even when there are more palatable choices that end up sitting at the table, not as the meal but partakers of what is in front of them.

When one transcends the boundaries of conventionality, they begin to see things differently. It is like an eagle circling atop the hills in search of prey. The unfortunate prey is often so engrossed in life on the ground that the only time they see the air is when they are mid-flight to their death.

As a wise man said, “there is a very thin line between Genius and Insanity, and I have blurred this line”. Maybe the insane and unconventional ones are right, and that’s why they get most things right.

Maybe if all of us thought about stretching the boundaries of conventionality and stopped giving excuses based on our circumstances, we would be able to get somewhere with our lives and projects. It is not easy, but it is possible.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AFRICAN PECULIARITIES: Death and Social Media

It has always filled me with disgust and wonder, the hurry that people are in to post of the demise of ‘friends’ and ‘loved-ones’ on social media. A person is barely dead, and the images are already flooding the pages, images from the years back and now. It is only then that somebody you barely talked to becomes your girlfriend and boyfriend, when the brother you fought all the time becomes beloved, or the mother you called names becomes the greatest ever loss. Some of these people you have not contacted in years, some you have not seen. Others you could not see eye to eye when they were alive, but the moment they die, they become your beloved brother, best of friends. Your grandmother was walking barefoot while you had the best of lives in the city. You could not visit her in the village when she was sick, save for the measly Christmas visits where your desire is to show off to the low-lives that were left behind when you went to the city, to show off your car and your babies, ...
Read more

How Social Media Has Poisoned Your Life

Image
A stock photo of various social media platforms on a screen. I was reading the August 2020 Issue of UK’s Red Magazine and came across British author Laura Jane Williams speaking about her journey towards overcoming social media addiction and how her life changed thereafter. The author, who took a hundred days off the platforms, admitted to the difficulty she had to go through when she made the decision, carefully painting a picture of the anxiety many of us would undergo should the platforms be yanked away from us at a moment’s notice, showing just how far too we are entrenched in these cesspools. “ Feeling seen, understood and liked was addictive. But then stuff unfolded in my personal life that I had to keep offline and doing so revealed just how wonderful having secrets can be. I don’t have to tell everyone everything. Some things are too delicate. Too special ,” she told Red UK. These sentiments were echoed by Ezra Klein , the founder of one of the fastest-...
Read more
‘Mud’ with laughter With the current muddy situation that we have in the country, it is no longer comical to see someone fall, but it still has a taste to it. The sight of someone falling seems to be a trigger to a sick, latent humour that everyone seems to possess, and surprisingly, the more crude and awkward the fall, the better the laughter. While some people fall down on the ground with dignity, others seem to float in the air for sometime before finally landing down on the ground, only to elicit laughter from a group of people suffering from a dearth of humorous situations, and in this country, there truly is a dire shortage of laughable things. We have all been there. We have been victims of these falls, sometimes in full view of the public, sometimes in our own little cocoons, but the point we all make is that we have tasted the ground once and again. Now, someone told me that it is not respectful to laugh when someone meets the ground, but hey, they are the victims, not us, a...
Read more