How to Embrace Your Authentic Self and Achieve Greatness

While examining the meaning of life, I often think about the people who have gone on to the great beyond before us. I’ve wondered how great thinkers viewed their own journey through life when they were alive. Did they think that their brilliant ideas were crazy? Most great men and women look at their work as incomplete or lacking true meaning. We all must fight insignificance to find ourselves as worthy. In a world that has so much noise, how should a person find their unique sound or make their mark? Today’s hard lesson in motivation and self-appreciation comes from the United Negro College Fund’s (UNFC) slogan that says, “The mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

A great mind is indeed a terrible thing to waste, but what can be considered the wasting of a good mind? To me, it is when a person gives up their own thinking that could lead them to success and become hopeless in their pursuit of success, happiness, and fulfillment. Your mind is a creative tool to get you from where you are currently, to where you are going. Only you have the internal GPS and compass to direct your step toward a greater future. We should not allow our minds to be infiltrated by anything that is superficial that will lead us incorrectly. With the advent of social media and the pervasive promotion of ideas on the internet, we must stay true to the mission we deem to be important especially keeping the core of values that we hold within ourselves as necessary to achieve our goals.

It may be easy to give your mind over to others because it seems more difficult to have and keep your own right mind when there are voices speaking louder than yours. These voices carry one mission and that is filled with the hopes of deterring your path. Staying focused and not being easily influenced becomes more challenging when you don’t know who you are, or you have not found your own voice. We must be able to discern the real us in a sea of other’s unwanted opinions. The cost of losing oneself to obey the voice of another will not only cost the person who is giving up their right to have a voice, but also the world which will be robbed of the original genius ideas of said person. In life, we should aspire to be our true authentic selves even if no one understands us or praises our way of being. Rejection of our way of thinking could mean we are innovating out of season.  It could just mean that we are ahead of the times in which we live. Either way we must continue to pursue the life that we are destined to live and not shrink back in the face of adversity.

Historically, many people had to overcome the voice of self-doubt to come into their own greatness. Think of the great artists of centuries ago, who were not touted for their works until after their demise. Had they elected to not created because they were misunderstood, they would have robbed the future of their present selves. This would cause the people who needed the legendary world changing and history making impacts to permit their own future creativity, to have been choked by the hands that were fashioned to make a difference. Think of your beginning stages toward success with a different perspective, could it possibly be that the way you are thinking may seem strange now, but it will make sense to another generation? I encourage you, the reader, to not give up in your pursuit to find and be your true self. Don’t waste another minute focusing on another man’s race who is running in another lane beside you thinking it is more significant, because your race is just as important. If you don’t waste your time, you won’t waste your mind.

--- Swilley