Ah yes, the recurring elements.
What you’ll find over and over again here are a few fundamental points being illustrated in a variety of ways. There are only a small number of real fundamentals.
1. living things learn by doing
2. growth is a mixture of “what you got” and “what you make”
3. people want to be their best
That’s enough to get us going.
RE: #1 I’ll keep hitting you over the head with this because no matter how much I talk to people about it they seem to keep forgetting it. This is not debatable, it is a fact. Try it. You can’t learn something by NOT doing it! Tennis? Go ahead, watch Wimbledon all you want, read all the books you want.. until you get out on the court and start swigging a racket around, you won’t be any good.
RE: #2 Call it what you want, the debate is over (nature vs nurture). What we know is that we’re all born with what we got… after that it’s what we make of it. And the truth is that there’s a lot more potential in what you can make than there are limitations based on what you got. That’s the good news. You just need to figure out what really moves you, what you love to do and you’ll get going with it. What you’ve got is enough to make that possible.
RE: #3 Call me a dreamer if you want (“…but I’m not the only one…”, great tune, incidentally… you can listen here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okd3hLlvvLw) . Anyway, people don’t want to fail, they want to succeed. It’s another fact – a fact of nature, of biology: living things want to thrive. Nothing seeks out its own self destruction by its nature… thriving is what life DOES. People want to thrive too, because they are alive. The ones who don’t are broken souls in need of our help.
