Sunday, December 2, 2007

You deserve little credit for what you are

"You deserve very little credit for being what you are"
Dale Carnegie

This quote really changed the way I'm thinking about myself.

What it's trying to suggest is that anybody could have the same results in life as we do, if they would received the same genes, grew up in the same environment and have the same experiences as we had.

I'm not trying to say that we are not in control of our decisions, what I'm saying is that although we are the one who decides which way our life will be heading, the reason why we make those decisions, comes from our past experiences.

Thus even if we have a successful life, we have no reason to be arrogant about it, because it's not really our achievement. If anybody else was born with your exact genes, raised in the same way and had the same opportunities, they would end up living your exact life.


Life is not about you and how brilliantly smart or talented you are, it's about opportunities and how you deal with them. The great soccer player Pelé said in a recent interview that he doesn't really like the fact that he's being considered the greatest soccer player of all time :

"Back when I started playing football, children didn't have the same possibilities as they have now. I was lucky to have a father that was a football player also, because this gave me the possibility to follow my dream. But most young people had to go to work as early as the age of 10. Who knows how many great football players the world has lost because of this, some probably even better then me"

Although there is still some amount of chance involved,
today we all receive countless opportunities. The ability to recognize and profit from these opportunities, is what creates success. And the more you do it, the more opportunities you will get and you will have even more success, and even more opportunities....and so on. It's like a rolling snowball, which gets bigger and bigger.

But this snowball has to start somewhere, and it does. It starts from your genes and the way you were raised, since this is where the true ability of spotting opportunities is born and where the snowball starts rolling.


But now think about this, if you take two snowballs which are exactly the same in size/weight/composition and you roll it off a hill in the exact same conditions (starting point, weather, hill angle and so on), the end results in the case of both snowballs will be the same. And the same is true for us people.


I believe, when you reach this success, it is important for you to realize, that you realize that YOU deserve little credit for this. If anybody had the exact same conditions in life(genes, parents, schooling etc.) they would end up having the exact same success as you had.

It is alright to be proud of your achievements, but getting arrogant about it...it's like getting arrogant about winning the lottery and how good you are at it.


Any comments regarding this subject are welcomed. Use the comment button below. Thank you.

Monday, April 16, 2007

First Post

"The greatest of human abilities, is the ability to change, adapt and evolve. The human being is the only living thing that is capable of radically changing his habits and beliefs between birth and death"
David Deangelo

I truly love this quote. What it basically says it's that a person is able to challenge his fate, and change it if he has sufficient determination. It sustains the idea that if doesn't mater where you came from you can achieve a lot in life, by changing yourself to be more competitive, more sociable and more influential. By concentrating on improving yourself, you can eliminate many stupid mistakes that you make over and over again, improving the quality of your life and making you more happy by your own standards.

Although many people criticize this ideology, it IS proven real by NLP and books like "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill and "How to Win Friends and Influence people" by Dale Carnegie (both were written in the 1st part of the 20th century and are regarded as The Holy Grail of self-help books).


The thing that saddens me the most, is how a very large part of people are extremely afraid of change. I see a lot of people who actually lie to them selves saying that their life is good on a daily basis, because they are afraid to challenge them selves, cause they are afraid to realize that they've been making stupid mistakes. They are like butterflies who choose not to break free from their cocoons.

It really grieves when I see some of my best friends doing these things, mostly because it's practically impossible for me to change them, unless they really want the change. Sitting back and watching people that you care about walking down the wrong path is basically torture.

Hopefully one day our society will evolve sufficiently to embrace change. Until then I guess I'll have to go and fight against the wave :)


Any comments regarding this subject are welcomed. Use the comment button below. Thank you.