The Greats - are you gonna be one?

I have a theory that you can not know what you want unless you know yourself; know yourself truly and purely and love every part of that. The thing is, I also believe that you can not know yourself very well if you don’t know what you want. I used to have a dream as a kid - not the normal kind of kid’s dreams of astronauts and doctors and teachers and Barbie - my dream was to be great.

As a kid when you are good at something they tell you to pursue it, like with sport or a hobby like dancing or karate or soccer. I was great at writing and so I pursued this. While most kids were off playing sports or dancing I was day dreaming, reading and writing and was off with the fairies, literally.

I thought I was an awesome writer, writing stories about great fairy princesses, mystery novels, monsters, aliens, heroes and romance. However there was one problem that I never anticipated. No matter how big you dreams are as a kid, no matter how great you think you may be, the real world will always come along and remind you of how insignificant you are. The innocent, naïve and ignorant bubble you lived in as a child, bursts as you grow older. You begin to realise that you might not be as great as you thought. Think of it like a pool.

The pool you swim in gets larger and larger and you find yourself drowning and in an effort to save yourself the hassle of beating the few hundred thousand million to the other side, you give up. You allow yourself to slide into average-ness.

You settle for less then what you want.
Less then what you dreamed.

The realisation and ignorance of this burst naivety is what separates the greats from everybody else. Many people let them selves drown to an underwater world where ignorance is bliss and they pretend that they are happy with everything they have. But the greats, the greats are different. They realise that the naïve bubble has burst and they give it all they have got till they get where they want to be. They know that to let go of their dream would be to let go of their lives and drown.

Everybody has it in them to be great. Everybody has that opportunity its just that only half of us realise that when you think its time to let go, it’s really time to get a floatation device and grip on all the much tighter.

I myself was once afraid to grab on to the floatation device. My dreams started to slide, the thoughts that everybody was so much better so much smarter, funnier, better writers - these thoughts came fast. I didn’t want to be trying so hard for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to paddle so hard that I found myself going around in circles. I was looking for a guarantee that was never going to show. And so without knowing what I wanted and only knowing what I didn’t want, I turned and took a long look back. I looked at how far I had come. I looked at where I was and what had brought me there. Then I took a look inside and realised I knew myself. I knew what kind of person I had become and I knew why. I knew what I liked what I believed in and who believed in me. The realisation that my bubble had burst and that I was drowning in the ocean no longer scared me.

To know where you are going you have to know where you came from and who you are. What is the point of getting to the other side when you realise you left your heart back at the beginning? And so with this knowledge I took a big grip on a floatation device, knowing in my heart that knowing myself and being just that would lead me to what I wanted, all I had to do was paddle calmly and wait.

They say patience is a virtue, I say it is a necessity. After a long battle of waiting comes the success, though you may have to put in an effort to get the type of success you are really after. However, once you succeed, once you reach the other side and become who you are and who you want to be, after you grab hold of your chance to be great and ride with it you realise that it was all worth it.

Aside from all that jazz of what kind of greatness and success you were after whether is was family, happiness, career or love; aside from all that the realisation that your life is what it is because of what you made it, is the greatest success anyone could ever dream of.