Show Your Skills/Work to the World!

You can be considered good at something until you either expose your skill/work, and the general consensus is that it's good, or you go through some sort of challenge and finish at the top. Many people consider themselves to be the "best" at something but they don't share that skill/work to anyone. 

How do you know you're good at something if nobody else knows about it but you? 

It takes courage to show your skill/work to the world as it can potentially expose you to the reality that you may not be as good as you made yourself out to be in private. 

I like to think of myself as a great writer but the reality doesn't align with how I see myself as a writer but because I know this I'm left with a choice: Do I cry about it or do I keep pushing? I chose the later... Anyone that wants to be the best at something needs to go through this.

Show your skill to the world, let it judge you, find something to improve and keep pushing. You'll grow faster this way than if you try to be the best only in private.

How the War in Ukraine Could of Been Worse...

Dictators, like Kings, are people that think about their own interests before the interests of their people and the only reason why they want to expand their rule is in order to exert power over more people. While the world's eyes are on Putin right now, due to the invasion of Ukraine, we need to thank our lucky star that the U.S.A isn't led by Putin's friend, Trump (who was quoted as saying that he approved of his friend's invasion), as the future of the world could of taken a totally different turn. 

Dictators are to be reasoned with but not befriended. 

What this ordeal taught me is that it's crucial to have respectable, morally aligned, individuals in a country's leadership roles. Annoyingly, Trump is proof that sometimes being President is more about winning a popularity contest than it is about someone of character being chosen for the role. The fault is, as I see it, on the voters more so than on the person being chosen because the voters decided to ignore Trump's morally corrupt past and give him the job of running the Country.

With the invasion of Ukraine is now in full swing, the world finally got to see what Putin's plan was with all the money he had acquired from other Countries. Whether or not Ukraine will fall remains to be seen but one thing is certain; Putin's quest for more power seems to have had the adverse effect, at least in the short term, as most Countries have now heavily sanctioned Russia's businesses. 

We live in scary times...

Don't Lie, Cheat or Steal!

 

Back in the early 2000s, there was a wrestler named Eddie Guerrero who had a "Lie, Cheat, Steal" wresting gimmick. It's a philosophy that his character was applying quite often and he was able to achieve quite a bit with it. Obviously, that was a fictitious character in a fictitious world. If we were to apply this philosophy in real life we would not be as successful as Eddie Guerrero was portrayed as being - at least not in the long term.

Lying, cheating, stealing might give us an edge in the short term but it opens the door to potential headaches in the future because the people that were lied to, that were cheated or that got things stolen from will want restitution and the person that did these deeds will loose trust in the process. Once trust is lost it's almost impossible to get it back.

When Eddie Guerrero did these things, he suffered none of the consequences but real life doesn't work like that. Eventually these things are brought to light and justice is served.

Don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal.

The Timeline We Share

To live means to be part of a timeline that we share with other living creatures. The core purpose of every living creature is to insure its continued survival on this timeline. Some living creatures, like humans, have developed an awareness to its surrounding which gave them the ability to set different, but not so different (as the root of every goal is survival), goals for itself. 

Some humans are selfish, or does things to insure their own survival, and some are selfless, or who do things to insure the survival of others including or excluding themselves. Both of these groups want to survive but one could say that selflessness is better because it benefits a group rather than an individual.

To me, it make sense to have a group of living creatures, like Foxes, fight off another group, like rabbits, for survival but where it doesn't make sense is when you have individuals of a same specie fighting each other for supremacy/survival. 

Primates, for example, have groups that will fight off primates, from another group, that entered their property. Because these two groups can't cohabit they're effectively limiting the specie's potential to grow. One would think that a group could become so big that it could conquer every other group, and then grow exponentially, but what tends to happen, with the case of primates at least, is that big groups separates to form smaller groups and the cycle repeats itself.

I've purposely chosen primates in the example above because humans have commons ancestors with them and we can certainly see similarities in regards to behaviors. The societies that we've created for ourselves might be a bit bigger and more complex but the idea behind those societies remains the same - we form these groups in order to survive and we will fight off invaders just the same as our primate ancestors did. 

At a much smaller scale, the workplace has people fighting each other to rise up that corporate ladder which, to me at least, is the same as having 2 primates fighting each other for group dominance. The type of society we've built is definitely a progression of the primate's territorial mindset.

Our society, unlike Primates' societies, has evolved to the point where we've included such things as personal freedom and equal rights. It's now possible, for example, to have women occupy roles that used to be reserved for men something not accepted in primate societies. Progress is slow but these are indicators that we're moving away, at least in some areas, from our primitive instincts in favor of a, perhaps, more logical approach to the way of living our lives.

Don't Work For Things

"The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more but in developing the capacity to enjoy less." 

-Socrates

(This is essentially one of the core philosophy of Buddhism.)

Because I don't believe that success is defined with material things, I never been one that found pleasures in accumulating objects but I realized that, for the few objects that I do own, the objects owns me just as much as I own it as I need to care for it. Some of my friends have big houses, camps, multiple cars, four-wheelers, motorcycles... all these things requires one's attention in order to function properly and you kind of, as I mentioned before, become a slave to it.

I'm not against material things but maybe we should limit what we own and not associate happiness, or success, with things regardless of what society says.

I find he world of sales to be most guilty of this as sales is about projecting an image of success through various objects that society associates with success. Salespeople knows that you're more likely to buy their products or services if they show up in a new BMW, wearing a fancy watch, than if they show up in a 20 year old, rusted, car. The problem with this way of doing business is the salesperson, who often doesn't actually have the finances to support the successful image he's trying to project, goes broke trying to look successful. Maybe this is what they meant by "fake it until you make it"?

Being excessively in debt is, perhaps, the biggest downside of trying to own too many things or live beyond your means. It's very difficult to find happiness in situations where you have to work to pay off past purchases.

A friend of mine said she wants her entire life to fit within a suitcase. She loves to travels and fully understands the joys of owning very little. Maybe we should take her example?