03/04/2018
Part 1: Be yourself
I’m doing another talk at Miami U in just over a week. So you get a sneak peak. 🙂 Let me know your thoughts, please!
I’m going talk about three things to BE to make it big in life, and more specifically, your professional life.
Be yourself, be kind, and be thankful.
You are an amazing miracle! Just stop and think about everything that had to go right for you to be where you are right now. As my friend Gary Vaynerchuk likes to say, you have won the lottery. You made it! I love Jesus and believe with everything in me that we were created to be amazing. Smile. You are an amazing miracle.
And to go along with that amazing miracle is the uniqueness that makes us all who we are. Smile, and get to know yourself.
I thought I knew myself. I had a pretty good idea that I liked the challenges of business and the rewards of education. My jobs in higher ed scratched that proverbial itch. But as I wrote in a previous piece, Don’t Just Fall In Line, it took leaving that world to realize that I didn’t know myself that well.
I was more focused on being the person others wanted me to be instead of who I wanted to be. I wasn’t always myself. I was often a different version of myself before 5pm and after. And my “after 5pm” self often didn’t want to talk about my day as my “before 5pm” self.
Be yourself.
Be yourself before and after 5pm.
I insulated my “before 5pm” self because I wanted to appear good enough to be in the job I had at the time. We all go through this, and it’s natural. But we are better than that.
Back in the day, which I believe I once heard was a Tuesday, a man would carry two pots, fashioned to each end of a wooden pole, from the well to his home. One pot had a small crack in it and leaked along the way, while the other held its full load each trip.
For a few years this went on. Drip, drip, drip. One day, the cracked pot couldn’t take the shame it felt an apologized to the man.
Yes, the pot can talk in this story.
“I’m sorry that I’ve let you down all these years. I’ve leaked all over the place. I wish I was as strong as that other pot,” it said.
“Sorry for what? Have you not seen the flowers that grow along the path that we walk each week?” The man continued. “Open your eyes,” as if pots had eyes, but they do in this story, “and look around at the beautiful flowers you’ve helped grow.”
On the next trip, the pot saw that these beautiful flowers, which the man used to decorate his home, give to his wife and daughters, and sell at the local market, had only grown on his side of the path.
We all have so many gifts and skills that we often don’t even see. When we are focused on trying to have the skills we think other people want us to have, we are blind to those gifts we already have.
Get to know yourself, and be your own biggest fan.
Be true to who your are, be honest with yourself and others, and do what makes you happy.
Some say, “be the best version of yourself.”
They’re wrong. There should be just one version.
Instead, be yourself. Be yourself at work, at home, at school, at church, at the game, at the party. Just be yourself.
Remember, you’re an amazing miracle!
(also available at http://justinmcglothin.com/2018/03/part-1-be-yourself)
