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.