The long and the short straw

We don't choose where we are born, who we are born to, how we are raised, the condition in which we live, the food we are fed, the schools we go to, the teachers we have and a million other factors of early life that go into shaping who we become through how we behave. Some of us are luckier than other, yet, we all have the same opportunity each day to improve on who we were yesterday. We might not all be able to move as far and sometimes we could go backwards, but the potential to improve is there.

None of us are blank slates, all of us owe much of what we are (both the good and the bad) to others, as well as a lot of luck in the positive and negative too. But at some point in our lives, we have to realize that while this is true, we also have some level of agency over our future results, we can still affect our outcomes, rather than being victims of the world in which we live.

When I look at my own experience, I can see lots of points where I have been unlucky, where conditions or genetics hasn't been on my side. But, I also know that there are other options too, where lucky has swung in my favor and provided me options to counteract the negative to some degree and do better than I would if I did nothing.

For example, I didn't give myself illness, nor did I have any control over the birth of my daughter and the staff who made mistakes - yet, I also didn't have control over possessing the potential to write, to earn, to work more than twelve hours a day, 7 days a week for years on end. But, possession of potential is only one part of it, application is still required and at some point decisions of activity has to made and fulfilled.

For instance, there are literally thousands of people that I have come across in my time on Hive that could have ended up with similar results to myself, but for whatever reason, the vast majority chose not to make the attempt. Likely through a continual series of small decisions, we ended up in very different places and while none of us have control over much of what we experience, this small decisions add up.

Daily, there are thousands of decisions we make actively or passively, whether it be what we eat, when we sleep or how we choose to present ourselves in a particular moment. Each is a tiny fork in the journey of our lives that leads us to the next set of conditions and decision to be made. What I have found through the observation of myself and the people around me is that there is a large spectrum of personal norms in how we negotiate and behave in our world and we normally take the path that is the most comfortable for us. This doesn't mean the easy path, it is just the path we are willing to walk and often, people do take the one that doesn't challenge them, doesn't push them, doesn't improve them.

We talk about the income gaps, we talk about the gaps in opportunity and we compare ourselves to the results of others, but we rarely look at the gaps between what we as individuals do and what has led to others achieving the results we chase. So many smart people presenting their intelligence, yet most continually fail to get to where they want to go, mostly because while they talk, they do not walk.

I am lucky in many ways, but perhaps where I am the luckiest, where I got the "long straw" is that regardless of my conditions, I have the willingness to continually push myself into the fray. No matter how many times I fail, I keep trying and trying and trying. While I "feel" that this is me making the decision to continue, I also know that a lot of it is probably not, it is just the way I was born or shaped by environment to be.

However, this is the thing with it - how we apply these positive and negative traits we have no control over having matters a great deal. When we try to copy the paths of other but do not have the same potential or abilities, our results are of course going to vary greatly. Though, when we reflect and understand what our strengths and weaknesses are, we are able to find ways to apply them to put them to work for us. One person is tall and athletic and suited to sport, another logical and detail orientated and fit for application design, someone like me, tailored to write.

Working out who we are is critical if we have specific outcomes in mind, because of we don't we can work toward a goal with the expectation that what we are doing is correct, but never have the potential to reach it along that path. We can decide to forge on, making more decisions, taking more steps, but if those steps aren't leading us to where we want to go, how do we expect to get there?

We have very little control in this world, but the control we do have is vital if we want to change our outcomes from what we have always known, into something that we have always dreamed. The end of the path is never certain, but what is, is that all paths eventually end. Some people think that because an end is inevitable, it doesn't matter how we get there, but I think it does, because in life, our experience is the only thing that is valuable in this life.

Some people use their experience to improve, some use it as an excuse not to.

We are not simple creatures, we are a complex set of variables that are never repeated the same way twice. None of us gets the long straw, no one gets the short straw - we are each handed a mixed bundle of straws of different lengths and it is our personal responsibility to use them, or waste them.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]