You always have a choice
In the New York initiatives of the 1960s and ' 70s, Ursula Burns was raised by her single mother. She was born back in those days with three strikes against her: she was black, bad, and female. Life will be difficult.
Her mother scrimped and saved and worked additional jobs just to provide for Ursula and her children, but more importantly, she always reminded them that for the rest of their lives, where they were right now, they didn't have to describe them. They still had a choice. For what they had, they could do the best possible.
Her butt was worked off by Ursula. She remained on top of her studies and attended the Brooklyn Polytechnic School of Engineering, which was, not surprisingly, made up almost entirely of rich white men. She soon realized she, both academically and socially, had a lot of catching up to do. In every sense of the word, she was an outsider.
But she graduated from engineering school somehow and worked her way up to become Xerox 's CEO, helping to turn the once-flailing business back to profitability. She has worked under President Obama as the head of the STEM Education Alliance, and has been on the boards of some of the biggest corporations in the world, including Exxon Mobil, Uber, and VEON, the 10th largest telecommunications firm in the world.
Driven by the support of her mother, Burns created what psychologists term a "development mentality" early in life, which is simply just the assumption that one has a certain degree of personal control over their lives.
Contrast this with a "fixed mentality," which is the idea that your life is under little to no influence.
The fact is, there are things you can control and things you can't control in life.
You have absolutely no power over where you were born, how rich or poor your family is, your biological sex, what color your skin is, how tall you are, etc. Such things do matter and they would obviously have a huge effect on your life.
But while your situation may not be to blame, you are still responsible for your situation.
Ursula 's fault wasn't that she was born into a bad family. But she turned it on her head and let her story motivate her life, instead of describing herself as weak and becoming a victim of her own circumstances. Instead of using them as an excuse for not even trying, she had her scars and wore them proudly.
Similarly, whether you were born bad or obese or susceptible to mental illness, it isn't your fault. But it is your job to find out how to deal with your case.
Your emotional wounds can not be healed by someone else except you. Your unhealthy relationship with money can not be resolved by someone else except you. No one else will make you lose the weight. Nobody else can make the person fall in love with you.
That's not to suggest that you have to do it all alone. If you need it, you can get assistance, hire a trainer if you can afford it, and when your luck is down, get financial help. Yet for better or worse, all of that is on you at the end of the day.
In life, you have been / will be handed some true turds. You're going to have some advantages over others, some you've won and some you haven't. Dwelling on one of these for too long would just lead you at some point down the fixed-minded rabbit hole, and that is a horrible hole to be in.
BIAS Against ACTION Implement A
When he was eleven years old, Chuck Close's father died. He was told as a teenager not to even think about going to college. He had multiple cognitive impairments and was not yet able to add or subtract. His teachers told him that business school will be his only chance, because his hands were pretty good. He also suffered, however, from a neuromuscular condition that restricted his mobility, so even that was iffy.
Today, Chuck Close is a painter and graphic artist of international renown whose work hangs on some of the world's most prominent walls.
Chuck Close Close
With Chuck Near. Picture: Wikipedia
Given his early life struggles, that would be incredible enough on its own, but what's even more impressive is that after a blood clot left him crippled in his late 40s, Close continued to produce world-class artwork.
How the heck is he doing it?
Well, in a letter to his younger self, he once said, "Inspiration is for amateurs." All the rest of us are already showing up and going to work. Any brilliant idea I ever had was born out of the job itself.
In the entirely opposite way, most individuals approach work and motivation: they wait to be motivated, then they get to work. The issue is that creativity is a beast that is fickle. Some people will wait for inspiration around forever to just fall out of the sky or something. Others expend all their time and resources searching for ways to motivate themselves in order to get to work eventually. And the sentence's irony is totally lost on them.
I have witnessed this myself often, when people who are not authors come up to me all excited, telling me that I have to meet the mother of their acquaintance, because she has this amazing book idea.
Hey? So?
I have millions of ideas for books. People who don't make for a living think it's the hard part of ideas. No, it's simple with ideas. Everybody's got ideas. Yet few people are capable of implementing proposals. Few individuals are able to cope with the risk that their ideas may be bad. So their thoughts remain thoughts.
Successful individuals are not sitting around waiting for their muse to come to inspire them to change the world. They're just showing up and going to work.
Do something, then.
