A small percentage of the world’s population truly go on to greatness in their communities, fields, and industries. Some people wonder how others know-how (or at least they think they do), and the remaining sum think those who’ve obtained greatness had a magic bullet or a trust fund that they were born into, and so they disavow any means of achieving greatness.
I contend that a number of those people who have obtained a level of socially deemed greatness have done so with a contributing factor to their success: They take actions as if they were the heroic version of themselves.
I stopped reading and watching fiction as a primary medium of content consumption for a while. “It’s rubbish,” I thought. “It is completely illogical and child-like to consume anything that isn’t based on things that have or could potentially happen. Non-fiction books on your given field are where true knowledge and path guiding information lies. Philosophy, self-improvement, finance, business, marketing, entrepreneurship, is what I should constantly be consuming.” I told myself.
I now feel slightly mistaken in my judgment. Fictional books provide many incredible axioms, metaphors, and inspiring stories for life. These types of tales pose a couple of prominent questions for individuals: Who is the Hero of your story? Furthermore, what if you were the chosen one?
Many fictional stories have a Hero or a Chosen One who is prophesied to save the world as we know it. They possess exceptional powers and intelligence, which they use to accomplish extraordinary feats one can only imagine. They undergo the Hero’s journey because they’ve been selected whether they like it or not. Hercules, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Luke Skywalker, Wonder Woman, Tony Stark, Captain Marvel, and Frodo Baggins are all examples.
But it’s totally impossible to be something like anyone of the Hero’s above, right?
I mean, don’t get me wrong they’re fictional, and you can’t just go and time travel or anything as such, but; you can be the next best thing, and you can be the Hero of your own story. You can be the chosen one in your life, starting with the little things. You could learn HTML or PHP coding in a week or learn another language in a couple of months. You could take “online classes” in your spare time and be an expert/professional in astronomy in a year or two. You could work out every other day for 30 minutes (1% of your week) and be ripped in 2-4 months. You could start a company and literally, change how the world functions. You could be the Hero someone else momentarily looks up to when they are in dire need. Within six months – 1 year, you could be flying in a wingsuit or be a base jumping expert.
One could become a genius in business, engineering, astrophysics, energy, and programming like Tony Stark. Oh yeah, someone’s already done that. Elon Musk was relentlessly bullied kid in South Africa, and now he’s revolutionized transportation… and energy… and monetary transactions… and GPS navigation… and now is going to colonize another planet in space… and build a base on the moon… and you could produce similar results.
Or are you too cool to try something new? Or too secure to look naive regarding a new topic just because you don’t know much about it yet?
Most people act like someone else is the Hero in their story or like they are going to be saved by some miraculous thing/ person. They don’t take care of themselves like they would if they thought they were the only ones that could save themselves.
To my original point, the ones who do end up making continuous self-improvements to better themselves as if they were their own Hero, often end up achieving greatness in a much broader sense than they first set out for. You can too.