Lock in on this. No real or imagined conspiracy to hold you down and keep you back can succeed if you refuse to let it. Ayn Rand said that the evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.
The only boundaries on your ability to create, to fulfill God’s design for your life are those you erect and sustain in your own mind. Stop it!
Time is immaterial; you’ll spend those hours living it, right? What does it matter how long it takes, or what age you are or aren’t? When you invest in bettering yourself and improving your gifts, you are automatically bettering those close to you by challenging them to do likewise.
Education is immaterial. With the easy access to unlimited information on the ‘Net, you’ve zero excuse for being uninformed and therefore ignorant. You need no degree to learn and know. In some ways, pursuit of a degree can get in the way of your advancing toward personal and spiritual excellence, obstructing you from further growth. You tend to rely on the false shorings of your degree instead of what you actually know and how you apply it. Proof? Look around you at the people who are always wearing their degree. Observe them. Listen. It won’t take long to sense their basic insecurity within themselves.
I know some intelligent, educated people who are stunningly ignorant. Yet ignorance can only hold you back if you hide behind it.
You’ve seen the laughably-intense “College Life” reruns of the ’60s on Fox News and CNN over the past month. The only difference between now and then is the clothes and the manners.
The only authentic 60’s clothes you might see – if they still fit – are worn by the aging instigators egging today’s ‘students’ on, still smarting over the fact that their “takeovers” as students didn’t work out well, either.
As to manners? Simple. There are none.
Why include this here? These “adult students” and their graying Boomer-lib agitators are poster children for acute irresponsibility. Listen to them. Everything challenging their comfort zone – defined as anything that costs them – is someone else’s fault and, no matter how outrageous or just plain silly, they demand it be fixed to please them.
To what end? Who of any rational self-respect or business experience would ever want to hire them?
Truth? Life challenges your comfort zone every day. Anything worthwhile costs. Trying to establish a completely comfortable existence with no possibility of upset is a fool’s errand. The only place I know where there exists absolutely no discomfort is the cemetery.
Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary. (Cecil Beaton)
“They” can’t keep you down or hold you back if you’re determined to keep growing and reaching for personal and spiritual excellence. God always has and always will respond to the mind, heart and spirit that steadily says, “I will always be in the process of making the absolute best of myself that I can, and I will never stop encouraging those around me to do it, too.” He’ll send wisdom down over your intellect like a fine, warm mist, providing you discernment you’d not otherwise have.
So. When ‘they’ smugly point to imaginary ceilings, false boundaries and limited horizons, all they’re doing is revealing their own self-induced limitations – their comfort zone.
Refuse to even slow down. Want to achieve greatness in this life? Stop asking for permission. If you don’t readily see your niche, go create one.
Move forward. Always be moving forward. As you do, you’ll be giving back. And you’ll be showing others with your same irrepressible spirit they can do what you’re doing.
Ceilings? What ceilings? What boundaries?
© D. Dean Boone, November 2015