Choose to Take the Journey

Everyone is Flawed…

…including you. But that’s ok. That’s a good thing.

As an optometrist, I have the privilege of discussing personal medical histories with my patients. One thing I’ve found is that you really can’t predict what might be wrong with people. They could be young or old, rich or poor, beautiful or unattractive. Most people have something wrong with them and the lucky ones just don’t know what they have.

It’s very easy to put others on a pedestal. Maybe because he’s the most popular guy in school or maybe because she’s unusually attractive.

It’s also very easy to put ourselves down because of some inherent “flaw” that we think we have.

We constantly read about disease X that only 5% of people have and condition Y that only 2% of people are born with. And what if you are one of those 2%? Some people start to think, “I’m the only person that has ever experienced Z!” Some people even take pride in it. They start to use this circumstance as their secret excuse for why they aren’t living the life of their dreams. Some people start to think they’re somehow unique in their human condition. But “some people” would be wrong.

Even if only a small percentage of people have any given condition, how many conditions are there? Hundreds? Thousands? Who even knows? Everyone has something. And even if you think you’re the only one living a particular circumstance or facing a particular challenge, are you really? There are billions of people on Earth.

Someone, somewhere is experiencing something very similar to what you’re experiencing. And many, far worse than anything you could even imagine. Yet some of them still rise above what anyone thought was possible.

The beautiful, the rich, and the popular are just as flawed as the unattractive, the poor, and the unpopular. Not just physically, but sometimes emotionally and psychologically as well. You simply don’t know what’s going on in someone else’s life. We all have hurdles to jump, hills to climb, and walls that need to be torn down. But no one ever became a winner by cursing the flaws that life handed them. Winners get that way by accepting their flaws and walking their path regardless.

As Tyler Durden said in the movie Fight Club: “You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake.” And neither is the billionaire in the Sunday newspaper, the model on the movie screen, or even the guy who sat next to you in the hospital waiting room.

We were all cut from the same cloth. And we are more similar than we are different. You can live whatever life you want. The first step is to believe you can.