“Success stories are nice, but everyone can’t be the next Oprah Winfrey, or Michael Jordan, or Steve Jobs, or blah blah blah.”
True, but those people can’t be like you either. And they also couldn’t be like all the unique people who came before them. And striving to be the next X, Y, or Z misses the point anyway.
The only game worth playing is the one where you get to create the adventure of defining what it means to be smart and successful on your own terms. And you don’t get to play that game if you spend your time listening to people who are hellbent on making you afraid of your ambitions.
Maybe you can’t be the next Tom Brady or Stephen Curry, but you don’t need to be. Great people only seem special because they figured out how to capitalize on their own unique combination of strengths and advantages. They focused on their own peculiar interests and eventually became masters of a distinct point of intersection. There’s no reason you can’t find your own way to do that. You may or may not get the same amount of money or fame, but you can become the Grandmaster of your own game.
All successful people are unique. So what. All failures are unique too.
Uniqueness is a good thing. And the worst way to celebrate such a good thing is by using other people’s uniqueness as an excuse for denying your own capacity for greatness.
