Be Unique, Be Yourself
Funny how you’d ask a kid today what
he/she’d like to be when they grow up and they’d say, ‘I want to be
like my daddy or like my mummy.'
You ask the same question to teenagers and you’d hear them saying they
want to be like R.Kelly or Obama; like Dora Akunyili or Beyonce.
These people are great in their own rights, yes they are; read the
papers, but that’s not enough reason to spend your time living out a
life just trying to be an image of another person.
This same question is not just limited to kids and teens, ask adults,
business men/women and they’d also tell you they want to be like Bill
Gates or Ellen Sirleaf Johnson.
We all have people as role models, who we want to be like.
Folks, we live in a world that is populated with more than a billion
people. If you doubt me, ask the Chinese. Different people from
different backgrounds, some are born with silver spoons and others with
no spoon at all. We live in a world of challenges and solutions,
obstacles and stepping-stones, depending on where you’re looking.
Most of us spend our time and energy looking for shoes to fit into,
leaving ours behind, trying to live life and act the way our role
models do. It’s good but that’s not a determinant factor that we’d be
like them, because we’d be surprised that we’ll come-up short of our
expectations if we spend such energy chasing the wind.
Success is 2% gift and 98% hard work, so it goes to reason that we all
have this 2% in our genetic make-up but we need to put in work, carving
out the spoons that we missed at birth.
Now, I’m not trying to say it’s bad to want to be like somebody else,
all I’m trying to say is that’s not the main reason why you came to
earth. You didn’t stumble here from space; God placed you here for a
reason.
Now to share a personal thought: I’d say God created you, giving you an
empty book to write your life in. So while we are here writing our life
story, I wouldn’t want your book to be filled with how so-so and so is
but rather how ‘I is’.
For as you go around trying out people’s shoes, who’s going to try
yours? Even if you don’t make it big in life, console yourself with the
thought that at least your shoes are worth trying out.
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