If it Mattered

Does success purely result from luck? Or rather, does fortune favor the prepared?

Maybe you find yourself in your mom’s basement, three in the afternoon, but fuck it, you’re still in your pajamas. There’s a bowl on the coffee table, the now-melted remnants of an early afternoon ice cream binge. The color-changing room, lit only by the soaps and informercials emblazoned on the TV screen. And then there’s pitiful you, perspiration causing you to stick to the dark brown leather.

In a way, it’s admirable, the way you’ve defended your descent into darkness. Maybe you just didn’t figure out what you wanted to do until it is too late to change. Maybe you feel that the life college was supposed to prepare you for just didn’t quite pan out.

Enough with it already. The history books are filled with men and women who go quietly; but they’re written (and told) by those who have decided to make a noise in the world.

If you think that your diploma, or your internship, or your thesis or whatever shining badge you think demonstrates your awesomeness to the world somehow entitles you to the life you want, you’re mistaken. There is no entitlement in the world. There is the life you want, and your hands - now go out and reach for what matters to you.

There’s point A, the recognition by our generation that we don’t have to accept the world around us, and point C, the point where we have the new world we want to live in. But our generation has forgotten part B, the hard work, the part where it isn’t handed to us on a silver platter but rather must be toiled over, sacrificed for.

Of course you’d say that, is the pitiful cry heard most often. You’ve got a great career, a great life, a great everything! Why wouldn’t you tell everyone how easy it is? After all, you have it so easy.

Nothing could be a more pathetic excuse. There are a great many people in this world that don’t have opportunity, that will never get a chance, that will never know what having it easy" means to people like me. But if you’re whining on Facebook about not getting that perfect job, or that raise, or winning this week in trivia, I can guarantee that you are not in that category of people.

It’s easy to conjure up excuses, about how the interviewer had it out for you, or you weren’t feeling it that day, or the test was unfair, or any of a hundred thousand petty little things that you could claim to have gotten in your way. But here’s a better question: did it matter to you? Did it really matter, in the kind of aching, bone-deep way that the most important things in life do?

Then why did you let anything stop you? Why did you let some insignificant factor in you life throw up an insurmountable roadblock? Because if it mattered, if it were important, you would’ve found a way around it, or a way through it.

Truly, what is it that’s holding you back? Because the only thing that separates those that are doing and those that aren’t is that one person did, and one person did not.