Don’t let anyone tell you what you can or cannot do

By John DeVries | February 6, 2008

Don’t let anyone tell you what you will or won’t become in life. Of all the things in life we can’t control, who we become is truly the one thing we indeed can change. In fact, it is completely up to us to do so. To see it otherwise is pure folly. Those who are nothing, have chosen to become nothing. They lead meaningless lives of insignificance because at multiple points in their past they chose to do so.

If your rights are stripped of you, your house burnt down, your limbs cut off, and your family tortured and killed, you still have free will. You can choose to hate your prosecutors. You can choose to love them. You can choose to let fear control you, or you may choose courage and embrace your fear. You can choose to find meaning in your suffering or you can choose to die. No one can strip you of your choices no matter how either someone, or something may limit you. As long as you have breath and cognitive thoughts, your choices continue. And who you become and what you are is a direct result of those choices.

Disbelief is for the weak. Faith for the strong. Follow your bliss and fail a million times a long the way. Take risks, do the things you fear, fall down so many times you’ve forgotten what it even feels like to stand up. At the end of it all, you will have lived a life worthy of the time you spent here.

It will take time, there will be days you feel like giving up on everything. But with consistent effort, perhaps over the course of many months, years, decades, or even lifetimes, you can do anything.

Gandhi was so afraid of public speaking, that for a good chunk of his life he couldn’t spit out a coherent sentence in front of a group of more than two people.

Abraham Lincoln failed in business, spent time homeless, went bankrupt and lost his fiancee to death before they were ever married.

Thomas Edison went $300,000 into dept on a failed business venture.

Viktor Frankl, a successful neurologist and psychiatrist from Austria, lost his new wife and almost all his family and friends to the death camps of Nazi Germany. After the war he got a Ph.D, wrote over 32 books (many of which were published in 20 or more languages), married a second wife, had a daughter, and was a visiting professor at Harvard.

Be like these people. And don’t let anyone tell you, “you can’t”, or “you won’t” do or become something.

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