By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
I was surfing thru the net and I chanced upon the speech of Denzel Washington during the commencement affair of the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. Now that it is time for New Year’s resolutions some of it might be worth considering in making your resolutions. At least, the younger people.
Let us pretend that we don’t know the synonym of such resolutions. They are also known as promises made to be broken.
One o f the points he made was that you should go after your passion and to realize your full potential regarding that, you have to get out of your comfort zone. Sleeping and being lazy is comfortable. Get out from that or ditch that habit and exert effort and sacrifices to develop and make use of your potentials.
Relative to that, the same actor said in another occasion that hard work works. It is what successful people do. However you define success, hardwork is always an indispensable ingredient of that.
If you are disgruntled with your job and you even consider it a dead end one, then you have to take risks. Explore other options but be willing to take the required risks. If you want to shift to being your own boss, then the risks involved are even riskier but, what the heck! That is what it takes.
If you are gungho enough, the gamble might have to entail your having to work really hard to develop all your potentials you could harness. Yes, don’t forget, hard work works.
Then he related the story about ghosts when you would be in your death bed. If you never took good risks, there will be a number of them representing your unfulfilled or unrealized potentials. They will be castigating you: “Look! We came to you so we would be brought to life. But what did you do. You just forgot about us and we remained dormant. Now, we will all be buried together with you.”
In taking risks, you have to understand that at some point in time you will fail. You will make an asshole of yourself. Every failure, however, means one more step nearer to success. He then cited the example of Thomas Edison. He failed 1000 times but he never gave up. And on the 1001st experiment, he succeeded. It was the incandescent light bulb.
You might have intelligence and the capability to work hard, yet if you don’t have the guts to fail, such potentials will not amount to anything, or will not result in anything much.
His last point was “fall forward.” This is contrary to the well worn advice to always have something to fall back on. The perspective is, if you have to fail, might as well do it trying. In other words, when you take a risk, give it your all. To always have a fall back position can mean you are not determined enough or you are half-hearted. Others say, such attitude is that of a quitter.
As I was writing this piece, I reflected on it and told myself that only people like me—who are not young anymore—should be afraid to take risks without any fall-back position in mind.
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