It's amazing what you can accomplish when you realize your true power.
By Henry Adeleye on June 12, 2015
This past weekend, I volunteered at a feed-the-homeless event spearheaded by one of my good friends from college. It was an amazing event with a great turnout for an even greater cause. People in need were fed, great conversations were exchanged, and happiness was abound. I knew all of these things would happen because of the type of person the guy who coordinated the event is, one who realizes how powerful he can be when really putting his mind toward something. Earlier in the week, we mused on how many people could do even greater things if they also realized this.
If you knew the sky was the limit for you too, not just for the "greats", what would you try to achieve? For the people considered by society to be a great are just regular human beings who figured out how to use their power. Warren Buffet once said in an interview:
Everybody here has the ability absolutely to do anything I do and much beyond, and some of you will and some of you won't. The ones that won't, it'll be because you get in your own way. It won't be that the world doesn't allow you to. It will be because you don't allow yourself to.
His words, not mine. Of course, realizing your power requires you to go beyond your comfort zone and take some sort of risk. And there's always the chance of everything going to crap. But more likely than not, the opposite will happen.
Sometimes, adversity can be your best friend. A good colleague of mine had been an avid fitness buff for quite a while. The type of guy who will try to wrestle you to show how much stronger he is than you. The type of guy who Instagrams his workouts and his homemade kale smoothies (Actually, he doesn't do either of those, but who's keeping score?). When a downsizing at his company threatened his job a few years ago, he decided to take a leap of faith and start his own gym part-time. "Faith untested isn't faith," he always used to tell me. He didn't have any prior business knowledge, or even a college degree, but he worked extremely hard at the gym as if it was his only option. As faith would have it, the gym became successful. He just recently moved to a larger gym after growing beyond the capacity of his first one, and it's grown so much that he decided this week to work at the gym full-time. The power was always in him. He just didn't know it.
What kind of power lies within you that hasn't been discovered yet? What kind of things would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? What situation do you think you're not strong enough to get through? The ability is in you, even if you don't think so. You're far more powerful than you think.