Which One Do You Want to Be?

We live in a world full of critics. All around us are people who want to remind us why it can’t be done, why it won’t work, or why we are not the person to get it done. The internet (the bathroom wall of life) allows anyone to post anything about what other people are doing. People have built entire careers around their ability to criticize, analyze, synthesize and homogenize what other people are accomplishing.

When did we become so critical and less actionable? When did we stop exploring and simply sit back and watch other people get things done? Was it when we let fear, anxiety, procrastination or what other people think impact our own thought processes? I can’t even imagine what it must be like to grow up and survive puberty knowing that everything you do is out there for the world to see. It must be daunting to think and plan what will get posted online before actually doing anything.

We have become a people who post or who watch to see what other people have posted online. We spend hours and hours of our lives reading and consuming what other people have done instead of getting out there and doing ourselves. Who cares what other people think? Why worry about how to post and what hash tag to use? What if we converted a bit of our online energy into getting to work and actually doing something? What if we spent our time focusing on how to make our own world better and actually DOING it rather than sitting quietly and reading about what other people have done?

Not all of us are going to invent the everlasting battery or discover a way to reduce our national debt, that is not what I am asking us to do. What we can do is put our energy into actions that will make our own world better, more peaceful, more creative, and more fulfilling. It is time to stop sitting back and watching and focus on doing what others tell us cannot be done. This quote by Amelia Earhart reminds us that there will always be people who will tell us what won’t work AND there will always be people who act and do and get that thing that won’t work working. The question is which one do you want to be?