… I realised how rare are the moments of seeing someone different. I realised how indifferent I became towards people I meet, buildings i walk passed, things I own and creations I see…
Let me replay to you our life. A quick rewind.
Here is you — a little shining precious star.
Hello world, you are beautiful. Your mind is beautiful and your thoughts are out of this world. Here is when you look at things not as how you see them but as how you think them. You look at the blue sky and think of a big belly of a pink elephant, you touch the grass and think how it can turn into a rainbow, you greet a puppy and talk in the language that you invented. You start to cry during house parties, you pay a lot more attention to plants and flowers, you scream when your mom makes you wear skirts and you begin to drift in your own dreams of you flying into space. Yet you have no idea that is exactly what makes you precious. You and your world.
Grow up and see how this will flip your world.
You hit your first kinder garden, school and then university. You first start to learn how grass can never be blue, how elephant is only grey, how puppy and humans do not have one common language. How you are not allowed to cry in public, how you should try to be sociable when people are around and how attention should be spent on the person speaking rather than the drops of coffee on their mug behind them. This little edgy star is turning into
a square.
This is when you are being told 1+ 1 = 2, A is followed by B, Russia is the biggest country in the world and E=mc2. You have been moulded into a perfect square. The square, that is establishments — school, college, university and people in them, who remind you what you need to strive to become a perfect square. It’s a memory game you play with your peers to solely define who is better. By this time you stopped day dreaming as you were told off by teacher too many times. You learnt: if you break the rules, the rules will break you. Chase the square, because the worst is yet to come.
Hi there, you survived. You got your job! This is your square, you thought you made it. No, you have another mould to fit in. This time — it’s a circle.
Forget about everything you learned at school as the square is just four sided, life is not an exam paper you get to pass anymore. Life is a circle- a journey to become well rounded person. Because the world does not just need those who can write gravity law, but it needs someone who can sell it, who can speak and who is emotionally stable. By this time, you do it again, you look around and start to chase what everybody else is chasing — job titles, salary, soft skills, qualifications, career plans, house and kids. You spend the rest of your life trying to perfect the circle that others seem to fit in so well. You run, you sweat, you stay awake, you skip, you slip, you flip and you trip — all for that perfect circle. You stop for a moment and look around — everyone around is a circle, circle that connects you with everyone and disconnects you with yourself.
The world hunger for money, safety, capitalisation, globalisation, standardisation, you name it. You have many to fall back on to blame your shape that you have today. And as everyone is trying to achieve the same shape — circle, the competition is getting tougher, as there is not much space for circles.
What do you do now?
Nothing much. All it takes is to get back to your previous shape. To your edgy rough sides, not perfect circle or square. Just you — be it triangle, parallelogram, diamond, star or just a blurb. Fill the space as we still have a lot of it unfilled.
Peter Thiel in his book “Zero to One, notes on startup and how to build the future”, tells us how most people are not extreme athletes or lazy addicts but fall somewhere in the middle which shapes normal distribution.
He draws us the picture of successful co-founders who tend to have extreme qualities falling into both ends, creating an inverted normal distribution. How successful founders can be visionary/charismatic together with extreme arrogance/cockiness as Steve Jobs once was. These people tend to attract fame and infamy at the same time.
In the world where speed is taking over our souls, we started to focus on others more than ourselves, we started to chase others when those that need to be chased is ourselves.
Want to break out from this?
Start from yourself. Spend more time with your true self, listen, feel, understand and explore yourself.
Get back to those dreams and thoughts you had as a kid
to those sparks when you were playing at the beach
to the visions you had when you were drawing
to the tunes you listened in the garden
to the colours you drew in your brains
to the voices you told to yourself
to the animals you spoke in the zoo and
to the crazy thoughts you were waking up everyday.
here is to you, not me.