Recently I have been noticing
that pressure is a huge role in our society. Honestly the pressure comes from a
lot of different origins. Pressure from family, friends, or for success names
only a few. But honestly where does that get us?
I know a lot of people who are
forcing themselves to be happy in a job career or even major in college simply
because there is so much pressure to do something that will lead to money and
security. I'm not going to lie to you; I don't want to have to worry about
financial problems in the future! It would be great to just live and not have to
worry about paying my bills because I make enough money to pay them and also
enjoy my life. I'm not saying live luxuriously but to just have the money to
pay your bills and do the things that make you really happy. Living your dream, not the dream. There is a difference.
The "American Dream"
has always been classified as success doing something that makes you happy. But
let's be honest, how many of the people who are having complete success in
making things like bottled water, or toilet paper are doing what they really
want? Who honestly grows up thinking "Gosh, one day I'm going to make
toilet paper that is soft to the touch and strong enough to handle the mess and
I'm gonna make a lot of money!"? Not many people. So I'm posing the
question, why is it so hard for us to live our own dream?
Well for one thing, most people
have irrational dreams. Some people dream of rock stardom, or fame and fortune
but don't have the talent to back it up. Then you have those people who are
really intelligent and well versed in many subjects or areas of interest and
they are forced to choose because they obviously can’t partake in all of them
and we aren’t able to do everything in college so people give up some things
they love to do in order to follow something that will hopefully be what they
want to do for the rest of their life.
Another reason is that we are
told at 17 or 18 years of age that we must choose where we will go to school in
order to get a degree in what we plan to do for the rest of our lives based on
what we have learned in the past 11 or 12 years of school. Most adults have no
clue what they want to do and we expect teenagers to have an exact answer to
who they want to be. Then if the student doesn’t go straight to college it is
frowned upon and some businesses think that the person is lazy based on their
resume. It’s a tough thing to deal with but we expect success for a lifetime
based on a choice from a teenager that we normally put no trust in to do the
simplest of tasks, now what does that say?
In a video I watched during my
Engineering and Design Class from TED.com
(click for video) that was about Gamers and how in order to save the world people
need to spend more time gaming. Now this seems to be the opposite of what you
would think, but Jane McGonigal, the presenter makes complete sense. We
apparently play 3 billion hours of game play a week. And she says we need to
play 21 billion hours a week. She explains that gamers are given the
opportunity to make epic wins. They are able to succeed better in games, but in
games we are more able to work harder, and she believes we become the best
version of ourselves. The thing is that gaming give people opportunities to
succeed and also if failure occurs then we are more likely to try again and
again until we succeed. When people in reality fail they tend to giv up or move
on to another task, or it is given to someon else to try and solve it. As these
gamers fail they increase their knowledge of what doesn’t work in order to
understand the best solution that will work. This is exactly how Thomas Edison
invented the light bulb. It was said that he did not fail, he simply found a
thousand ways how not to build a light bulb. But it’s true, from failure we
find success, but failure is unacceptable in today’s society, so how are we
truly able to find success?
The answer is that we don’t. We
simply find the most convenient solutions that work (for the time being). Failure
is the key to true success and I believe in order to be truly successful and
succeed you either need to fail and understand what can go wrong to make things
go right, or you need to understand the history of other people’s failures and
make things work based off of that data. And even after you have learned all
you can from the failure of others it is still necessary that you understand
how you can fail as well.
Failure is a part of life. You
fall before you can walk in order to learn what it takes to walk without
falling. We don’t think about it because our brain naturally processes those
simple facts and acts in order to correct it’s self. But it takes a mistake to
make something work. And sometimes you never know how many times you’ll need to
fail before you can make it work.
