“Every successful individual knows that his or her achievement depends on a community of persons working together.”
Paul Ryan
The problem, or perhaps the privilege, of being born is that we come into this world with a mental blank slate. Sure, we’ve got our innate basic instincts, our DNA and our own unique character traits. But we don’t know what we got ourselves into being by born.
We don’t come out of the womb knowing how to use a spoon, or drive a car, or how to look up questions on Google. Which means every kid born today (just like we did) has to start from scratch to learn the ABC’s of life. With so much going on nowadays, it’s easy for me to forget that in one point in my life I didn’t know how to tie my shoes, and riding a bike was a riddle wrapped in an enigma.
There’s a small bit of pride we should take from coming so far in life. Not that knowing how to use a spoon makes us unique, but our capacity to learn, and learn a lot relatively* quickly is a powerful thing and interesting to think about. (*human to humans anyway. Computers have us beat.)
Knowledge is passed down to new generations through teaching (verbally or written). To make things more complicated, knowledge is not distributed equally. Natural silos obscure and diffuse information from being easily accessed. Why weren’t we all taught how to eat healthy or how to invest in the stock market? Well, because not all of those who came before us (some being our parents) knew how to do those. Some did, some didn’t. (That would be a great one sentence history book of humanity: Some did, some didn’t.)
A wealthy family might know, but perhaps you weren’t born into a wealthy family. Or a grandmother might be able ‘to teach you a thing or two about nutrition’… the problem is she wasn’t your grandma, she was someone else’s. Essentially: We have to RELEARN EVERYTHING for ourselves.
There’s great value for learning and doing things yourself. Initiative is hard to teach. You’ve gotta want the vision for your life so badly that you’d give all your time, energy and attention towards achieving it.
Being self-made is rewarding, but it’s also lonely. It gives you creativity, clever thinking skills and resiliency, but without friends to share it with, what’s the point? I think we can have it both ways. We can pursue the things we love, be independent while also be willing to work better with others.
Be self-made, together.
We can go much further with like minded individuals who got our backs and want us to succeed then we can go it alone.
STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,
— Josh Waggoner | Daily Blog #691
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