The key to success

The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.

Vince Lombardi

  I have seen - all of us have - so many people with such a great desire to succeed, struggling so hard to achieve their goal. The trully beautiful thing about these people is that the longer it takes to get there, the greater their will gets. And even though it may take them ages, they will get there eventually. And once they are there, it doesn't really matter that people like me have already been there for a long time.
  I don't consider myself a successful person. I was raised to aspire to  great things; I was given the education and I was born with the intelligence to do these  great things. And yet I am making sushi for a living. Maybe for others this means success. For me it doesn't. But I do consider myself that kind of person that can do everything, be one of the best at everything and in quite a short time. Until recently I thought I was just extremly lucky. That nature made me good at everything. That somehow I have hidden inside me the talent to do everything. But then I got my first job ( as a sushi chef) and people that knew me said :" your whole life you stood with books in your hands, you may be smart, but I don't see you doing something that practical". I also didn't believe in myself ( I never really do, but that's another story.) So despite what everybody, including myself, believed, I did good. Making sushi feels like highschool all over again. One example would be that in 12th grade I started preparing for Chemistry, only two mounths before the Baccalaureate. I was zero. I knew nothing, not the simplest stuff about organic chemistry. After only two sessions my teacher was so amazed :" I have never seen this. You work faster  and better than others I have been preparing for even years!". Something like this happened to me all the time. This is basically the story of my life.
   If before getting a job I was considering this talent, I no longer do this. I have come to the conclusion that the key to (fast!) success is a mixture of brains and passion. I am a smart girl and a passionate one. I was raised to reach the top in any situation. My competitiveness
is incredible: it comes first in anything I do, both work and leisure. Don't get it wrong! I don't compete against others. Every competion is against myself. If at the end of the day I am not better than I was yesterday, I will regret it for a long time. On the other hand, competing against others feels the stupidest thing to do: if not everyone was born with a high iQ, like I was, if not everyone developed a great passion for doing things, a great desire to be among the best, wouldn't it be unfair to compete against them? If at the end of the day, someone is doing so much better comparing to themselves then I do comparing to myself, that someone deserves the congratulations. Not me. Even if I was better.
You see, even though an introvert, I am a people lover. I love people. I love people who try, people who struggle. I see so many passionate people who try so hard to succeed: for me that's fantastic. Because I know that sooner or later those people will make it. For me most things come easy. Just like in school, people couldn't understand how it takes me 2 minuts to make a math exercise and I didn't understand why the teacher should explain half an hour such a simple thing. But I appreciated people who tried. Who struggled. I also had my fair share of struggling. For instance, I didn't like martial arts and yet I struggled to be good. I appreciate people who try and I resent people who don't. There are those people who have what it takes to do good but for some reason they don't want to. I resent those people. I think trying to do your best means giving back to the world what it deserves and not doing so is a real shame. Fate/nature/God/Chris Hemworth with a hammer/whatever you want to call it put brains in your head so you can do good for yourself and other people. So you can give it back. What you are, what you represent doesn't belong only to you. For every person who struggle, there is one who is too lazy/not interested to even try. How can we ever evolve, how can we move forward?