Oh all the positive messages out there today. You can be or do anything. You’re beautiful. Important. You’re on your way! Blah blah… I’m not sure how you’ll take this, but I feel the need to interject some reality into my timeline, and my immediate space, so here it is. Most of us will always be just regular old people on the way to and after we’re in the grave. Name won’t matter outside your love circle. Most people don’t even appreciate true beauty anyway, so you’re as beautiful as you think you are. Hey, you can even create your own identity on social media. Make up some important-sounding titles. Alter your photos. Pretend you had jobs and skills people envy. Build a perfect profile. Nobody else matters. You can be the biggest fraud to ever live. And you don’t have to win a contest to prove it.
Greatness, however, is not a matter of perspective or a state of mind. It’s a label given to superlatives in any given category we as a society deem important–and we the people unconsciously empower society to do this by paying attention to and spending our money on whatever. But you do have to beat like everybody to be “great.” That said, you can live your whole life trying to be impressive and notable and compete in all kinds of stuff looking for that “greatness” label and nobody could ever pay you any attention. Then what?
Do you just die of anonymity? So what are you really doing? How do you feel about what you’re doing? Is it even for you? I’m just saying, we spend a lot of time chasing things that don’t belong to us, seeking approval we’ll never earn, lying about how close we are to greatness and trying to convince others to follow us there. But, like Solomon said centuries ago, it’s all “vanity, and striving after the wind.” Society is not your friend. They’re not handing out greatness labels. People pay good money for those, along with a lot of soul–and we still argue about it anyway.
What do you think would happen if you just focus on saving your money and your soul, invest in love, spirituality, faith, family and stuff that can’t be stolen or assigned? Just a thought. So I ask again, who’s the greatest? Well, who cares?! Yeah, really, who does? You’re probably the greatest something to somebody already. Somebody cares. Look around you. Wake up. There’s your investment. There’s your team. There’s your reason. And that’s what just came to me to share today. Use it, delete it, save it, share it. It’s all good.
From the Mind of:
Tonya D. Floyd
Author, Host, Beautiful One, Mother, Daughter, Student, Coach, Philosopher (I could go on forever, but let’s just say I’m great