With a few momentary contacts, conversation and silent observation of your appearance, summing you up, and finding a bespoke box fit for your presumed size and personality, is something some friends and close family members find easier than sucking in air and puffing it out through their nostrils.
They can boast of knowing you better than the foot paths leading to the streams in their villages.
To clear your mind completely of any doubts, that’s if you still have some, because most people hardly have any left, they seek out fine sounding, logical and relatable evidences.
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If you are the smartest in your class, a group of highly opinionated folks will take it is as a day job, the task of subduing your mind into accepting the limiting belief that you are a lecturer, and nothing more. In the little world in their minds, your destiny had been clearly defined, and it is lecturing.
If you studied a medical course in the school, business becomes a default no-go area for your type. You must practice medicine. Any other career is lesser and beneath your highly exalted medical certificate of study.
They rub it on your face and keep rubbing it deep hoping to drive in their point of view and opinions about you. That task to them comes easy too.
Emotion is a poor guide. Decisions made out of it leave regrets in their wake. Regrets often come later after you have been cornered and securely lured away from the things you find meaning in doing and into the things your family, environmental and peer pressure have approved for you but which have little meaning and attraction for your soul.
Nobody can ever know you better than yourself. I know some parents will throw in their last card to challenge me on this one. They should wait until I throw it open for a challenge.
Unless somebody’s words match with who you know yourself to be, they are at best their personal experiences, expectations and orientations put in words. Your life going forward will be sweeter if you succeed at not falling for people’s opinions and definitions of who you are.
How many people in this entire world really have the independence of mind to make decisions and choices, without overbearing influence from others and environment? Most people of the world aren’t that wise and neither are they courageous to say things and stand by them.
This thing called democracy doesn’t help matters as well, because it created the false narrative that majority is always right; so it helps to reinforce groupthink, since people are likely to frown when you show signs of being different from others.
I think it will amount to asking for too much, if you expect most people to take charge of their lives; that’s actually for the minority.
To train your mind to be able to make sound judgement, laced with courage, integrity and discipline, should be work of a lifetime. Not sure more than 1% of world’s population belong there.
It is the courage that makes the difference. Courage to be in charge of your future.