You are nobody until you create something.
Mark Zuckerberg was nobody until he created Facebook. Billie Joe Armstrong was just a confused teenager until he and his fellow mates of Green Day created those beautiful, inspiring songs that rock the world until today. Steven Spielberg and his sci-fi madness would never have succeeded for the last five decades if he didn’t create Close Encounters of the Third Kind on 1977. There will be no Avatar without The Terminator (or Titanic), and Stefani Germanotta will never make our jaw dropped due to her mind-blowing outfits, if she didn’t decide to create, well, who else.. Lady Gaga!
Kurt Cobain, grunge, and Nirvana, is like Einstein to the theory of relativity. Simon Cowell, talent shows, and American Idol is like Adolf Hitler and the Nazi era.
So, is it wrong for me to conclude that the ability to create has been implanted on our DNAs by The Great Creator since the day we were born?
And yet there seems to be something wrong with the way we were nurtured, raised, and taught, because often the fear of failure took over and dominates our mind. It stopped us from enjoying the process of creativity. We were raised to be the smartest kid in school, to have high grades, to graduate on time, to finally settle with a family and have a decent job. Passion is not an important thing to consider, that’s why innovators are treated as rare creatures which are extremely valuable, because they’re very hard to be found anywhere.
It’s every people’s right to choose a “safe” destiny, but will it make us ready for the upcoming 21st century? All the richest people in the world today are making money from being innovators, and here we are still underestimating the power to create. The reason, for most of the time, is fear of failure. In a culture where everyone is being achievement/end-result-oriented instead of process-oriented, it’s very hard for us to keep on going and ignore the negativity from other people mocking our “mediocre” result.
I was watching Invictus last night, and there’s a scene where Nelson Mandela gave an inspiring note to Francois Pienaar right before the South African rugby team is supposed to fight against the New Zealand “All Blacks.” He took a couple of lines from a poem by William Ernest Henly, about how a person should have full control over his own destiny.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul..
I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. Don’t you just love that phrase so much? Or did you find it like a slap in the face for being such a chicken and surrender to your own fears? As the masters of our own fate, the decision to create victory or to listen to other people’s negativity, has and will always be upon our own hands. So create, create, and keep on creating. From small, personal inventions to major breakthrough.
Everything big is a result of what was once small, but were made by people who dare to think big.
Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Kurt Cobain, all of them started their little steps on this world by doing small projects at their own garage. It doesn’t matter whether you created popsicle, paper-towels, or even the fastest planes on the planet, you’ve create something. Nobody ever imagined that the internet (as one of the greatest invention in the world) would be an inevitable necessity for modern human beings, and I can’t imagine what this world would be like today without having the internet as part of our daily lives. No, I’m not addicted, but it sure has helped us a lot, right? You won’t even be reading this boring post by me if it wasn’t for the internet.
Create anything, a story, a song, a poetry, a blog. You can be the next Dewi Lestari, and you can be the next Oprah Winfrey. And since we are now in the mood to create something, why don’t you guys start by helping me think of the best title for this piece that you’re currently reading right now?
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{Wandering Ideas} 