ENLIGHTENMENT

Imagine you’re born in a dark cave from which all of your civilization comes from. You live in this cave with all your family, everyone you know comes from this cave, and you abide by the traditions of this cave. Basically your entire generation comes from this cave and that is all they have ever known since they were born, you use fire for light, get your water from underground streams and make your food out of rocks. There is literally a whole city underground between the rocks and the darkness.

Suddenly something happens, and you find yourself outside in the open world, maybe you fell out of a hole or an opening, you accidentally end up outside. Now you see all the trees and oceans and the light, which you’ve never known about since you lived in the cave. All you knew was firelight and the torches you had to light up the cave, but you now discover this new world full of animals, birds and many other things you’ve never seen. The first thing is amazement, and you are impressed by everything you see. You find it wonderful and amazing to be here, It is incredible and wonderful. You think of going back to the cave to bring your family to discover this new world, you run back to the cave and try to explain the experience to everyone and try to convince them to come out.

Everyone sees you as crazy and no one believes what you say, no one is interested in discovering this world. They think you have gone mad, no one is willing to listen to you and when you try to explain they all run in fear, and you get locked in the prison cell because they think you’ve gone insane. Despite all of your best efforts you can’t convince anybody to follow you out mainly because they are scared of what they don’t know, they can’t even begin to conceive what you are talking about, and this uncertainty is transcribed into them as fear.

The Transformation Point

This is essentially what happens in the world today that we live, before I learned how to enjoy reading I always thought to myself like books were the most boring things on earth and I could never waste my time reading them, I’ll probably get bored after the first page. In the same way it's difficult for some people to imagine themselves making millions and yet when you reach that mark, your life isn’t any different, you don’t feel any stronger or smarter, you are just the same person, I’m surrounded by millionaires and yet, they don’t even brag about it. Once you get to that transformation point where what seemed impossible to you at first becomes at arms length, then you discover a whole new world, one which was just all around you and yet you couldn’t reach it. Becoming a millionaire doesn’t start when you get a million, it starts way before that, when you realize that you have what it takes to get a million, at that point all the fear goes away, and you realize that it was all an illusion.

Of course, reaching this transformation point where the impossible becomes possible is no easy feat, it takes not only hard work but most especially an open mind. When you see those people in the cave, they refused to step out because they were closed-minded and were clinging so desperately to what they knew, they didn’t want to challenge the ideas they had grown up with and this is precisely what was holding them back. It's the same with a lot of people today, we grew up probably in humble families where no one went far in school or no one ever had a lot of money, so it's difficult for us to even imagine going against the status quo. That's why if I tell you that you could be an astronaut or a billionaire tomorrow if you just do this or that, you will probably look at me in disbelief, but the reality of it is that anything is possible when you are ready to make the necessary time and effort investment.

Perfection is Consistency

In reality, it's through a consistent work ethic that people get good at what they are doing, they aren’t born exceptionally talented, they aren’t geniuses who fell on their heads as kids and acquired superpowers, they are just regular people who took the time to learn how to do it over and over again. Thats why in the same way when you learn what it means to be an astronaut then you’ll eventually master it, if you learn how to earn millions then eventually you will master it and basically every other field is like this. The perfection here isn’t about doing it the best way possible, but rather by doing it until you arrive at the best way possible of doing it. Whatever you want to do, just make the necessary time investment which might take years or even decades but will lead you to that point of perfection, don’t try to be perfect at the start but rather at this finish.

A good example of this is looking back at high school, it's easy to think that those who are first in the class are super gifted kids who were born with a knack for school, but that's far from the truth. The reality is that they spend most of their time revising, they would wake up at 4am to read, read before sleeping and have tutors follow them up. They do this over and over again literally every single day, meanwhile the other students are planning to go play football or watch Netflix half the time.

Having a Closed mind

This is what is holding us back, and I’ll be the first one to admit that it is holding me back as well, too. There are still a lot of things I’m afraid to do because I feel like I won’t be good at them and I definitely know I won’t be but not because I’m scared of it but rather because I know I can’t afford the time investment it will take to master them. With an open mind, there is literally nothing you won’t be willing to try, no place you won’t be willing to go and no height you won’t be willing to scale. Once you open your mind, you realize that all the fears were just an illusion and the reality was that in order to achieve those goals, the only thing necessary was hard work and not talent.

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