This really could have happened.
I could have been born in a ditch in the country of Burundi. Where the average annual income is the equivalent of $270 US. With no running water or basic sanitation. Steeped in ethnic conflict and civil war.
I could have popped out of my mama’s womb and landed on the bottom rung of a caste system, with zero possibility of upward mobility
I could have showed up on Earth when the leading cause of death was being eaten by a wild animal
But no, way back in 1977 my ass was lucky enough to touch down in Thee United States of America.
Boom.
Jackpot.
Yahtzee, mutha humpa!!!
For real, I think about this all the time. How of all the places on Earth, and of all the periods in time, I hit pay-dirt when I turned up in the USA.
Post-slavery. Post-lynching. Post-segregation.
Where I can literally, by using my mind and being willing to do the work, create any kind of life I want to create.
I think a lot of people forget how RARE this is.
This situation in which I am living is my great-great-great grandparents’ very best dream. They talked about this very place and this very day while sitting on a dirt floor in a one-room cabin, exhausted from a hard day of manual labor in a way that you and I will likely never know.
“One day…”
That day is now. And I’ll be damned if I disappoint my ancestors (or myself) by wasting this chance opportunity that was assigned to me by no doing of my own. I just somehow got blessed to live the dream, so I’m gonna live it.
And if anyone else wants to wait until the country is perfect before they make the choice to live that dream … sucks for them.
Because if reincarnation is really a thing, you just might one day find yourself in that ditch in Burundi. Kicking and screaming for blowing your chance to do something phenomenal with your life when you could.
Too many people are choosing to live in Middle America. Not a physical location, but that place where everyone crowds into the center of the bell curve. The mediocre middle. No one really stands out.
Everybody is committed to just being … average.
The dirt floor dream that my people had on a plantation somewhere in Virginia in the 1800s was not an average dream.
With all they’d gone through, I highly doubt they imagined a perfect country. They saw its potential, and what they saw was phenomenal.
Flaws and all.
So this is my Monday morning encouragement to make the most of this opportunity. To consider how lucky you may have been to hit the global birth lottery. To reflect on the generations that came before you. The ones who hoped that this day would come but never lived to see it. Other than in their minds. In their very best dreams.
Not average dreams, but phenomenal ones.
American Dreams.
On today’s episode, Eric Thomas reveals the steep cost of being average, and how in America “we don’t do average.” We choose average.
Why not choose to be phenomenal?
Source: Eric Thomas – How To AVOID Being Average! (Motivational Keynote)
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