I am martial artist and coach. I make people better by translating my knowledge and experience. 42 years of sweat, struggle, and some bloodshed has lead me to this place. It is not easy to own who you are when you have so many choices. You can be you or you can attempt to be so many other people. What do 90 year olds do? They regret everything they didn’t do and wish they did more of what they wanted instead of what they were told to do. At whatever age you are, you need to listen to your elders. They are showing you the future. If we are lucky enough to survive ourselves and this world, we will grow old. No matter what technology is created or new way to do whatever we all get old.
You know where you are headed. No matter what else you have planned, you won’t be stopping time. What are you going to think about your life when you get there? Are you going to be happy with the fact you were yourself and you squeezed everything you could out of life or are you going to have regrets because you waited too long to do so much? 1 life, that is all you have to make your mark and be a person of real value.
I can admit that it has been hard for me to accept who I am. So much conditioning in life has made me struggle with who I am. I battled the desire to be what I was told I should be. It is so easy to do what we are told. We get rewarded and recognized for doing what we are told. But doing what we are told does not always coexist well with who we were born to be. The screwed up truth is that we will be ridiculed for being ourselves if it doesn’t achieve the trappings that the world deems as success, but if we do find a way to consume the trappings while maintaining a sense of self – we will be respected and rewarded. The world likes winners and the world likes followers, everything else is looked down upon. I am not judging any of this, it is reality that has to be accepted. You can’t change reality from the outside, you have to get in the game and play it different if change is what you are after.
This doesn’t sound like a business lesson, but it really is. You have to be self aware. If you are not pursuing your goals and working within your talents, you will never achieve a balance between work, personal happiness, and goal fulfillment. Yes, you do matter and what you want to do matters. You can go work a job you hate but you don’t really hate the job, you hate you for not being strong enough to be yourself.
Wake up to the reality of who you are and the fact that you will be spending the rest of your life looking in the mirror. If you want to find real peace and happiness, you have to behave in a way that allows you to love who you are looking at in that mirror everyday. It is totally up to you how you proceed. You can look inward so your outward makes more sense and you can be more empathetic to others struggle for truth, or you can ignore reality and live an old age filled with regret.
I hope you choose to be you and you fight to find your personal truth. I truly believe it is the only fight worth fighting and it will allow you to be the best whatever it is you were meant to be.
Brian Wright