“You’re Gonna Die”.
A mentor of mine shared this truth when a woman on the street came up to him and asked him for three words of motivation.
He thought about it for a couple of seconds, and looked into the cell phone she was holding, and stopped her cold. The simple phrase, 3 words long, was the ultimate truth anyone can ever understand.
And the look on her face was priceless.
What instinctively sounded like something depressing was in fact the most honest, powerful and liberating truth that anyone can ever share with you. Because this life, right now, is all you can be sure of.
Despite a million different claims of what happens next, you have to worry about what is directly in front of you, what you are experiencing right now.
And the only way to enjoy it, and feel like you gave it your best shot, is to be Yourself.
Because authenticity is kind of in short supply right now. From social media to the news media and everyone else in between, there’s so much positioning, spin and outright falsehoods that when you come across someone who is authentic, it resonates with your soul in a way that seems too good to be true.
That’s why I try hard to be real in this work, because I don’t want to give people the impression that I’m more than I am.
So that you can understand that it’s ok to be 100% you,
If we were to talk, you’d find that I struggle, I fear, and I have times of feeling lonely. I have my strengths, and many, many weaknesses. For every kernel of wisdom I have attained, there have been mistakes, failures and defeats.
Every moment of success has had many more of loss. The truth to learn from this is that struggle, loss, defeat, sadness, fear and loneliness are part of being human.
And they are the only stepping stones to I know to reaching this thing we call success, which is really just a state in which we hope to experience joy.
But even those who have arrived at ‘success’ can find themselves feeling the opposite of joy if they forgot to bring authenticity along with them.
If you spend your life being someone who you aren’t, you’ll also spend your entire life wondering if they’d like you if they really knew you. Nothing will seem real, and everything will seem fake.
And you’ll have wasted your life trying to make everyone else happy, instead of yourself.
So today, I want you to focus more on being you. If you don’t have a clear idea who that really is, well that’s a sign that you need to get busy getting to know yourself. Too many of us have lived with the opinions and ideas of others as our North Star, instead of listening to that voice inside of us whispering the truths of our souls.
Listen to that voice, and learn to recognize it when it speaks to you.
Because as the title of this piece says, one day you’re gonna die, and every day you spent living your life listening to someone else’s conscience is a day you blew a chance to listen to your own.
You’ll never find true happiness trying to be someone else, because the only person you can get right is you.
So find the truth of you, and live that as kindly, nobly, honestly and compassionately as possible.
Just be you, every day you can...
and that will be enough.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings