Finding Yourself

All of us want the same broad things for ourselves.

We want to be happy. We want to be healthy. We want to be prosperous in all our ways. I have not met one person who said no, I want to be unhappy, or sick or a failure.

In our pursuit for happiness, health and prosperity, we are often encouraged to look for role models, other people who already made it to where we want to go, and then to do what they did. To copy them. It is often said, “find successful people, and do what they do”. We are sometimes even encouraged to “fake it till you make it”.

Although there is some value in studying successful people, to which I will get back shortly, the dangers far outweighs that value.

Dale Carnegie tells the story of his own life where he studied successful actors and took their best qualities and practiced them; and where he imitated other best selling authors, just to realize he will never be them. Plus, the world has had that flavor already, it wants something new.

He only achieved success after he said to himself,

You’ve got to be Dale Carnegie, with all his faults and limitations. You can’t possibly be anyone else.

So what are the values in studying successful people? Their habits. Study their habits. Not who they are, but what they do, and do not do. A habit is something you do consistently, without thinking about it. It is a subconscious activity. It is something that is so ingrained in you, that you do not have to think about it. You just do it. Good habits make us. Bad habits break us.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. ~ Emerson, Self Reliance

Who are you? What makes you tick? What are your best qualities and what are your worst? What are your current good habits and which ones do you need to get rid off?

Only you can answer these questions.

I know that you are “fearfully and wonderfully made”. I know that even after you were consumed in your mother’s womb, there was only a one in 300,000 billion chance that the person who is specifically you would be born! What I know about you, is limited. You alone know the full story. Only you can tell it.

I know that you are unique. You are special. You are one of a kind. You have in you all the qualities you need to be yourself. When you come to realize this; when you come to accept this, and when you embrace this fact, that is when you find yourself.

Welcome to the world. We have been waiting for you! Now go, unleash your unique power and live your life to the full; as happy, healthy and prosperous as you dare to be.

~ Will Kilian

Tags: be yourself, copy success, fake it till you make it, finding yourself