Live Your Life

Every one of us gets attracted to the lives of others from time to time – or we sometimes admire other people’s lives. That is almost natural but it needs to be controlled. If we do not control how much and how frequently we admire what happens in other people’s lives, we will lose focus on our own life’s journey. We cannot live the lives of others. We have to live our own life.

Everyone was born with some talent of their own. Some people quickly discover their talents and end up very successful. For others, it takes long to discover what they are good at and that can be costly. Worse is a scenario where one simply cannot discover his or her talent. This could be simply because one is unlucky, or because you have not tried many options. But, it could also be a result of the fact that instead of discovering your talents, you waste time trying to imitate other people.

If you are to live your life to the full, you need to maximise the development of and the results emanating from your talents. Living your life means you have to discover what you are, what you are made of, what you are good at and what you are not really good at – in time! Once you begin to know what you are good at, you can identify your role models and mentors – people who have excelled before you in that field. But even in that case, you will have to live your life, not the life of your role model or your mentor. You will end up being different, whether better or not as good as those you look to.

Another motivation for living your own life is that if you design your success on the basis of the achievements of those that you admire, then the maximum that you can achieve is what they have actually achieved. On the contrary, if you live your own life, you stand the chance to even exceed what others have achieved. If you live your life, you can set your goals and standards as high as you want without being limited by the benchmarks of those who have done it before you.

But this does not mean that we should go to the other extreme – where we completely ignore what others have done and achieved, where we start to re-invent the wheel or where we do not want to learn good lessons from the experiences of others. That too would be another dangerous extreme. We need the right balance between getting inspired by others and learning from them on the one hand while on the other hand, not being carried away by trying to become exactly like others.

Those who have tried to become exactly like others have suffered many effects. For young teenagers, these are cases of peer pressure that have taken them into big and irreversible problems like contracting HIV/Aids and other sexually transmitted infections, getting pre-marital and unplanned pregnancies, getting expelled from school or college, failing to achieve optimal academic grades and so on. The young people that live their lives do not end up living the bad lives of those misguiding young people.

For adults, those who try to live lives of others have sometimes ended up stealing or in corrupt practices as they try to make quick big money that can enable them live a life that is not theirs. Some adults have placed themselves in big marital problems because of exerting too much pressure on their spouses trying to make their family live the lives of other families. But the adults that ‘take it easy’ and accept to live their own lives at their own pace end up enjoying life that is healthy and trouble-free, almost.

If you are to achieve sustainably, in your own way, you need to live your own life. Do not be carried away by admiring the lives of others. Get inspired by those that have achieved and learn the good lessons from them but live your own life! n