I would like to give you an unusual challenge today.
I’d ask you to go find the nearest mirror, look into it at yourself for five minutes. Really look. Look at your hair. Look at the details of your head and face.
You probably look into a mirror every single day. I submit that perhaps you have become familiar with yourself. When we become familiar with things, we don’t treat them with the same respect, awe and wonder we do in earlier stages. We do the same in relationships. When we are first dating someone, we treat them with respect, awe and wonder. Once we become too familiar, we take too many things for granted.
We should never think of ourselves or treat ourselves that way.
Your body is wonderfully made. It contains many chemicals like iron, sugar, salt, carbon, iodine, lime, calcium and others. You have 263 bones, 600 muscles, 970 miles of blood vessels. Your tongue has over 400 recepticles for taste. Your ears are equipped with 40,000 hairs to pick up sounds. You have 10 million nerves, 3,500 sweat tubes and 20 million pockets that take in food throughout your intestines.
You have 600 million air cells in your lungs which take in 2,400 gallons of air each day and a communications network which connects you to sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. Your heart beats 4,200 times an hour and pumps 12 tons of blood per day through your system.
Look yourself in the eye. Do you know how unique your eyes are? There are 2 structures inside the eye which are currently used for identification, and, unlike a fingerprint which can change over time or be purposely altered, these structures remain fairly unchanged throughout a person’s life. The first structure is called the retina which is the back layer of the eye and acts like the film in a camera and processes the light and images we see. The retina is made up of an intricate network of crossing blood vessels and it is this unique meshwork which is used by retinal scanners to accurately identify people.
The human iris is composed of small crypts, pits, striations, fibers, furrows, pigment and other structures which create its unsurpassed uniqueness. The iris appearance is so complex and unique that not even your own right and left irises are the same! Even identical twins have different iris patterns. Once an iris pattern is converted to mathematical code using a proprietary algorithm, the likelihood of 2 people having the same pattern is a staggering 1 in 10 to the 78th power (the odds of winning the lottery or getting struck by lightning are much much higher).
Look at your hands. No one else has your fingers nor the prints on them. In all the universe and in all times, there is no one quite like you.
Oscar Wilde famously said “Be yourself, everyone else is taken”.
How true.
Our potential is a paradox that makes us at the same time both a part of the human family and unique within that family. We are united by our having gifts, talents, life callings, and dreams of an extraordinary life. But we are each unique because all of our gifts, talents, life callings and dreams are different.
Everyone has at least 5 to 7 things in which you excel. If you can sing, calculate odds, track bird migrations, or know which direction is north better than 100 random people.
Your gift puts you in the top 1% of the population.
When you start calculating the odds as you add in more of your gifts and talents, your combination of 5 skills means you are one in 10 Billion likely to have that combination. That is more people than are alive on the Earth today. And when you add in the other 25 + ingredients of your work potential, you get numbers that are astronomical.
Along with the uniqueness of being you, comes with it an awesome and amazing responsibility. only you have the gifts, talents and potential to excel at the unique tasks which define your destiny and life purpose. No one else can fulfill the life calling you are uniquely qualified for.
If you decide not to do it, it will go undone, or done by someone else in a very different way.
Isn’t it time you decided to develop the unique potential which only resides in you? Life is short, eliminate every regret, don’t allow any of the awesome potential that reside inside you to remian undeveloped and unshared with people who need it and will appreciate it.
Comments