How Can We Succeed Less As A Human And More As A Being?
I believe many of us take ourselves professionally, but we don’t take ourselves personally. We want to succeed more as a human, than as a being. It is similar to stubbornly demanding to be loved without paying the price of being vulnerable. But we all know that the trade-off between love and vulnerability is a tough one for anyone at any age.
However, what about the trade-off between our professional and personal selves?
I’m not talking about developing ourselves as the unique snowflake we’ve always been told when we were young(er), but to recognise that, despite the erosion of truth bombs, maturity and adulthood, we’re still special to begin with. Yes, shit happens. Yes, things go wrong. Yes, people surprisingly have a high tendency to upset us. We would like to think that humans collectively become better as we age older like wine or ginger, but some truly leave us speechless and shaking our heads. Overtime, we learned that these phenomenons, whichever pillar it may be — career, kinship, friendship, health and interest, share the natural ebbs and flow of life, especially in the later stages. Somewhere along the line, we automate our feelings on these occurrences in our pursuit of our ideal self.
The issue is, our ideal self has to come from ourselves, not from others.
A work resume makes it more accessible for someone to understand you as a worker. It is meant to show how capable you are. It is interpersonal. On the other hand, a life resume is personal. It may or may not be understood from an external point of view, that is to say, even your closest friends or family members may not even have a glimpse of how happy you feel upon hearing the first 6 seconds of the chorus in Laputa (Castle In The Sky). No doubt, the song is sad and melancholic. But it sent a tremble to my heart and it rippled ever so slowly; I cried a little inside. My hands were wrapped upon a music box, and it spoke to me not in words, but in a melody of a forgotten story I’ve missed out a lot on and far too long. I was happy, and no one could understand.
I was happy knowing that my happiness was only meant to be understood by me.
I believe the scarcity in our world is no longer knowledge. We have the breadth of information available at our fingertips. I believe we have a lack of focused attention. There is a surplus of attention. To be exact, there is a surplus of divided attention. We are torn apart from many attention-grabbing information and supposedly to-do tasks of what resembles a good human being. We allow the external world to feed us with tons of information, conveniently dismissing the possibility that not all information is educational, accurate or true to us.
We let the do’s and don’ts, the right’s and wrong’s, to be defined and focused by a multitude of people when it should simply be questioned by us.
We plaster words such as discipline, awareness, self-control, respect, curiousity, empathy, resilience and patience as valuable traits on what makes a good human. But what makes a good being is different. In fact, it is terrifyingly simple. It cannot be measured. It cannot be understood. It cannot be taken away. When you’re being intimate and real, you’ll know it when you ask yourself — Am I truly happy when I do X, Y, Z?
