“You can be anything you want to be, if you only believe with sufficient conviction and act in accordance with your faith; for whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.” – Napoleon Hill
I feel a little stupid, because it’s taken me nearly thirty years to realize a simple truth.
I’ll never be a Major League Baseball player, a Premier League footballer, or an Olympic swimmer.
Call me glum, sour, or bitter, but those are the facts.
No matter how much I put my mind to it, no matter how much I conceive and believe, no matter if I had the stubborn will power of a donkey, no matter if I put in my 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, it’s not happening.
To believe otherwise wouldn’t make me a go-getter. It would make me delusional.
Not all seven billion of the earth’s inhabitants can be elected President of the USA. Not all of the world’s hundreds of millions of blogs can be in the Technorati top 100. Not all of the USA’s 315 million citizens will join the ranks of its 424 billionaires (unless the dollar becomes severely devalued).
That’s not doom-saying. It’s simple math.
Bend reality too much, and eventually it’s you that will snap.
Let me get one thing straight. Your life, and every human life, is replete with possibilities. Particularly if you have access to this blog post (and thus you’re rich enough to access a computer or cell phone), the world is open for you to explore, and offers a vast array of opportunities and adventures.
But just because many paths are open to you, that doesn’t mean you can be anything. You can’t be anything.
On the contrary, there’s only one thing you can truly, genuinely be. Yet many people overlook this as they strive to be anything, and in doing so they manage to skate around their biggest and most accessible opportunity.
Even so, no one completely avoids this path. No matter how low our life stoops, no matter how lost we get along the journey, no matter how ragged and bedraggled our souls, this is the path and destination for everyone one of us.
What’s the only thing you can be?
You can only be you.
That takes no conceiving or believing. On the contrary, fantasy and unrealistic dreams are what take me away from being me.
Being who you are maybe takes a little faith, a little grit, a little heart.
But ultimately, all you need to do to get there is let go of the control console. Stop trying to be the director of your life’s movie, and sit back and enjoy the story.
In other words, start living in the moment.
Scary? Yes. And thrilling too.
You can’t be anything. But you can be you.
Who else would you want to be?
