Life Fairness

I've recently become interested in "remarkable human beings", like people that live really interesting/impressive lives and do really interesting/impressive things. So just now I googled and found this website. I didn't get past the first article before I wanted to stop and write a blog post, so here it goes.

Depending on when you are reading this, you'll see the first article on the site is about a 17 year old kid. You can read the full article here, but the jist of it is that this kid started working on a prosthetic arm when he was 14 years old and now he finished it and got to show it off to President Obama at the White House. Oh, and he also got hired on by NASA to work on a robotics team. Dude's 17, not even old enough to buy a lighter at a gas station.

Now here's my question. Is that inspiring or is it depressing? Sure, the kid put a ton of work into it and taught himself pretty much everything he needed to know to accomplish that, but it seems, at leas to me, that most of his success came naturally. What kind of 14 year old has the brain to even want to do something like that, much less have the ability to do it. You can praise the kid all day, but most of that skill and brain power he can't really take credit for.

I'm sure what I just said is true for most remarkable people, and it goes the opposite way as well. Some people just aren't born with the ability to go very far in life. It's just a fact of existence. It's not fair. Some people are born with so much more ability and potential than other people who are in the same situation.

Despite what you may think, I'm not going to segway all of this into some inspirational 'work hard with what you have and you'll be successful' schpiel (is that a real word or can I just not find the correct way to spell it?). I'm just making an observation really. Some people are born with big time advantages and some are born with big time disadvantages, and there's little that anybody can do to combat that.

I suppose it all comes down to finding a way to love yourself and to be happy with yourself. Comparing yourself to others is a dangerous game. If you live your life trying to match up to 17 year prosthetic arm guy, you're probably not going to be very confident about yourself and that'll slowly start to kill any chance you at reaching whatever potential you have. You can't really go anywhere in life until you're cool with who you are and comfortable in your own skin. I've never had any self-confidence issues which I am extremely grateful for. A lot of people have thought that I'm a cocky asshole in my life, but that's their problem and not mine. What you lack in natural ability, try to make up for with confidence (true of false confidence, either of them works). It's not really easy to do, but if you can figure it out it'll sure help you out a bunch.

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Viktor Frankl

This post piggy backs my last post about what I've been noticing about humans and the impact of our attitudes. You can read that post here.

The name in the title of the post is the name of a man that who had just about as tragic of a life as you can imagine. He and his family were imprisoned during the holocaust in Nazi Germany. I read about him while reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I don't really see a point in re-summarizing the story, so here's a quote from the book written by Stephen Covey himself:

Frankl was a determinist raised in the tradition of Freudian psychology, which postulates that whatever happens to you as a child shapes your character and personality and basically governs your whole life. The limits and parameters of your life are set, and, basically, you can’t do much about it.

Frankl was also a psychiatrist and a Jew. He was imprisoned in the death camps of Nazi Germany, where he experienced things that were so repugnant to our sense of decency that we shudder to even repeat them.

His parents, his brother, and his wife died in the camps or were sent to the gas ovens. Except for his sister, his entire family perished. Frankl himself suffered torture and innumerable indignities, never knowing from one moment to the next if his path would lead to the ovens or if he would be among the “saved” who would remove the bodies or shovel out the ashes of those so fated.

One day, naked and alone in a small room, he began to become aware of what he later called “the last of the human freedoms” – the freedom his Nazi captors could not take away. They could control his entire environment, they could do what they wanted to his body, but Victor Frankl himself was a self-aware being who could look as an observer at his very involvement. His basic identity was intact. He could decide within himself how all of this was going to affect him. Between what happened to him, or the stimulus, and his response to it, was his freedom or power to choose that response.

In the midst of his experiences, Frankl would project himself into different circumstances, such as lecturing to his students after his release from the death camps. He would describe himself in the classroom, in his mind’s eye, and give his students the lessons he was learning during his very torture.

Through a series of such disciplines – mental, emotional, and moral, principally using memory and imagination – he exercised his small, embryonic freedom until it grew larger and larger, until he had more freedom than his Nazi captors. They had more liberty, more options to choose from in their environment; but he had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options. He became an inspiration to those around him, even to some of the guards. He helped others find meaning in their suffering and dignity in their prison existence.

In the midst of the most degrading circumstances imaginable, Franki used the human endowment of self-awareness to discover a fundamental principle about the nature of man: Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.

I'm not sure if I have too much to add to that story, I just thought it was pretty cool that I read that story a day after I wrote the post I did yesterday. Total different scopes too. I mean if this guy can have that kind of willpower and control of himself and his situation in that situation, how can any of us feel justified in not being able to control ourselves and make the best out of such petty situations that get us upset everyday.

The point I'm trying to make isn't the same old "other people have it a lot worse, suck it up" story either. This isn't a "don't be a shitty person" post, it's a "look how much less shitty you could be and how easy it is" post. Viktor understood how much better exercising his innate human endowments could make even the worst of life's problems. We have self-awareness, which a lot of people choose to not utilize, we have imagination, which a lot of people suppress for infantile reasons, we have conscience, which a lot of people will do anything to ignore, and we have independent will, which a lot of people never take advantage of because they let themselves get so firmly entrenched in natural conditioning and expected response.

Long story short, find a reason to be happy, find something that gives you a chance to stand out, and never let a bad or ignorant attitude ruin something that could be great.

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Attitude is Everything

My good friend Anthony Cooper sent me a link to this blog post the other day and it really had an effect on me. The blog author didn't write it, it's actually a graduation speech given by a man named David Foster Wallace. It's a pretty lengthy post, so I'm sure that most of you won't bother to read it, but if you have like ten minutes I promise it's really worth your time. For now I'm going to summarize it and then share some of my thoughts.

The bulk of the article, or at least the part that I liked the most, talked all about human attitude and how a simple change in outlook can have such a deep and far stretching impact. In the speech, Foster set up a situation in which an average American person works a standard 9-5 shift at his white-collar desk job and then has to deal with the frustrations of traffic jams, supermarket lines, and the selfishness and overall annoyance of other people around them. It's a common situation that we all have been through in the past, and that we will all have to continue dealing with as we grow up. The question is not of the situation, however, it is the reaction to the situation.

Are you the kind of person that gets really frustrated with petty things like this? Does someone cutting you off in traffic or a simple task taking longer than it should clearly affect your mood and attitude? Think about this stuff. Look back to a time you've been frustrated or angry in the past week, and try to figure out why you felt that way. Was the situation worth getting worked up about? Did it have any far-reaching impact on your life? My guess is, probably not. I would also venture a guess to say that your attitude made said situation much worse, not only for yourself, but probably for some of the people around as well.

Humans seem to me to be conditioned to get in this robotic state of mind in most situations that present themselves. There is a lot of repetition, a lot of monotony, and a lot of really dull hours in life. That is not going to change, you can't control it. What you can control is allowing personal growth in these situations. In my experience, humans rarely seem to strive for general, personal improvement, especially people under the age of 25, which is who I've spent most of my time around in my life. We want to be successful, we want to feel valued and important, but we tend to not realize that there is rarely a time when we are unable to get closer to reaching those goals. Focusing on being a better person in the dull moments of life can make a huge impact. Not only will it make your everyday experiences better for you and everyone around, it will ultimately make you a more attractive person, a more successful person, and a much happier person.

One huge way that I think we can become more well-rounded people is by interacting with people around us, even if they are strangers. I've been riding the T (it's like a subway) to work since I moved to the city, and I can honestly say that I would rather take the 20 minute commute to talk to a stranger rather than reading a book or listening to music or playing games on my phone. I haven't had much success in doing so, because most people put off this aura that you trying to make a conversation with them would be the worst thing that could possibly happen. I'm sure people aren't really like that (well not all of them at least), and I'm sure I have left that impression on someone in the past as well. Just imagine how much more you can gain from having a real conversation with another human being than entertaining yourself with music or games or what have you.

I always go into these posts with a bunch of thoughts but no real structure for them, I'll just start writing and I usually end up somewhere I didn't really see myself going. So yeah, I'd love to hear opinions from other people.

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First Year in the Real World

So over the last four months I have graduated from college, acquired a full time job, and moved out of my parents house for good. I am approaching the one week mark of being on my own (with two roommates), and I gotta say doing all of this real life stuff makes you think about a whole lot of things.

I've always heard that the first couple years out of college are awkward, scary, overwhelming, and kind of depressing. I've always been confident enough to think that every year of my life is going to be fantastic and everything will just keep getting better and better and better until I die on top of the world. That sounds ridiculous but honestly I think that's how my mind has been working the last 22 years.

However tonight I come to this blog post to admit that I am starting to realize that I was wrong. It took me all of 4 months in the real world to be knocked off my soap box. Don't get me wrong, I still think I'm pretty great and I'm looking forward to where my life ends up, because I'm still pretty confident that it's going to be pretty great, but my morale curve has definitely been on a downward slope this year. It probably all started after I began working 40 hours a week doing something I really never wanted to do in the first place. Then the whole thing about not being around people as much (at least people in your same social classification) which means that you just have more time alone to start talking to yourself more than you talk to anyone else. That might be preferable to some people, but I really do think that's been the worst part about being out of school.

I've talked about this before, I honestly feel like I can put up with pretty much anything that life throws at me as long as I have people that I like around me all the time. And I'm not really even talking about just two or three people, I've always liked to have bigger groups of friends. Right now I'm living in Pittsburgh where I don't have that, and if I said it's not hard I'd be lying.

I also think that being in your mid 20's is tougher for single people, because it's really a challenge to meet a lot of different people when you're working full time. Plus it seems like 90% of the people you see out in public are way older than you. I guess that's not too far off from being true mathematically since I'm still in the first third of my life. I haven't had a girlfriend in almost three years now and I definitely think that's been the best way for me to go. There weren't more than a few days those last 3 years that I've even had the desire to have a girlfriend, but again, once you get out of college things start changing. I'm not saying I'm signing up for christianmingle.com or anything, but it's just another example of how weird things are right now. I suppose being this age isn't as strange for people that are engaged/married already, but I kind of think that they're at a disadvantage there. I've only seen one side of it, but being married right out of college still seems silly to me. I think everyone should have to be poor, confused, and borderline depressed for a bit of time in their life, just to get the gratification of getting out of it.

Anyways this was just a bunch of scrambled thoughts; probably one of my worst blog posts, but maybe it's a base for me to try and extrapolate in the future.

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