The world knocks it out of you

Be careful to create self esteem.

I just got an e-mail including this text at the end:

The reason I told you you’d be surprised at your own brand of superhero’ness is that your greatness constantly hides from you. The world knocks it out of you over the years. But it’s there waiting. Like a diamond ready to be shined up again and rediscovered.

And the subject like ‘rediscover yourself’ or something like that seems to come back in many books about, well, self development or something. Even Think and Grow Rich has something like that in between the lines, like don’t consider other peoples opinions, just be yourself. I also often encounter phrases like ‘keep your own council‘ (if you want to be successful). And the story of the diamond behind the mud is also very familiar.

So what is this, that ‘the world’ knocks ‘life’ out of us. Why are we ‘just ourselves’ after being born, being a baby and then somehow lose ourselves growing up and being an adult. Why do we need to ‘rediscover’ ourselves. Why don’t we just stay ourselves without this ‘intermission’? Has this always been the case, all since the beginning of human history? Or is this just our journey on earth being a human being?

And I’m a bit in doubt now, how to continue this post. One thing in my mind is that recently I had quite some spiritual experiences, like past and ‘now’ mixing together, like there is no time, like I can just relive memories as if they were real. The weird thing is that I can’t really look into the future in a similar way. I can plan, decide, but I can’t really see or feel the future. Or can I, I am thinking while writing this now. I did visualize some things recently. Some big things. And it felt indeed as if I was there, as if it was really happening. But it didn’t happen yet. Or did it? The mind is a weird garden.

Life is strange, that’s a sentence that comes into my mind more and more lately. Napoleon Hill also states somewhere something like ‘the strangeness of life’. And yes, yesterday or today I really also felt ‘that we had met’, as he ends Think and Grow Rich with. And just realize the title of the book contains the word ‘grow’, a word I can’t remember reading anywhere in the text of the book itself, but I may be mistaken or have missed it. Or is that maybe what it’s all about? Growing?

But still, I’m looking for success, I’m looking for something better than what I have today, where I am today. And I know it’s there, as I used to have things I don’t have at the moment. So my success at the moment is still about ‘missing something’, not about achieving something, not about feeling passionate about something. And I know it’s important to turn that around, as it means my focus is on the negative, on the lacking, not on the positive, the having or ‘coming’. So in my case I guess most important thing is to find the passion, or the desire as Napoleon Hill calls it. I felt it a bit yesterday, today, but right now it’s gone again, gone in fear and insecurity, even though I am starting to feel the fear mixed with excitement recently. Very good I think, progress I think.

So how to make this post inspiring to you? How to end this post? Maybe add a (Dutch) quote that my dad often used: “‘Be yourself!’ I said to someone; but he couldn’t: he was nobody.” – De Genestet. So something like:

BE SOMEBODY!

?

Or just point you to the Principles of Success and check where you are with that like in the related exercise?

Or just leave it like this and hope you enjoy my pondering in this post?

Looking forward to your comment!

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