Remembering people and wanting to be remembered

If I'd have to describe my life for the first 20 years, I'd probably tell you that it was mostly in the form of an existential crisis. Throughout my childhood I was thinking about what I wanted to do in the future as a profession, what school I wanted to go to and what university I wanted to attend. In short, I was looking for the path to take for the next few years, in a circumstance whereby my academic path is laid out by societal expectations.

Then came the period of which I was in army, whereby my existential crisis was replaced with a sense of nihilism; I was convinced that my life would truly never allow itself to have any meaning in a greater, purposeful self. Now though, I figured that the meaning of life is probably to make your life meaningful, preferably in a way that society sees fit, for it is society that will remember an individual for something that they have done, not yourself. 

As worked out by many behaviourists, it was found that many people simply just wished to be remembered and feel important. After all in this short life, doesn't everyone wish to be that one individual to make a big difference in the world? Every body wants to be Marie Curie, every body wants to be the next Albert Einstein, or if not they wish to be somebody remembered for something revolutionary that is still being used to this date. 

What people never truly acknowledge is the amount of effort these influential people have put into their craft. It took Einstein years of study and hard work. Heck, he even had to work into areas unprecedented and argue for its purpose! Can you imagine how hard it must be to argue against your friends to convince them of something that only you know to be true? This is how he came up with special relativity, a field of quantum mechanics that shapes the way we see the world today.

Of course, there are some that are just purely talented, for I feel that there are a few writers and authors come up with great pieces of work through fluke, such as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird when the sequel Go Set A Watchman was quite the let-down. But there are authors like J.K Rowling, who had to go through 12 publishers in order to get her work published.

I may have said this before (as is often so when you have written posts about your ruminations for the past six years), but the formula for your success is basically as such:

Hard Work + Talent = Success

Where if you are very talented, you need little work relative to someone with little talent to achieve the same amount of success. In the same way, a person who is hardworking will always succeed to a higher extent to someone who is talented but lazy.

Long story short, you are not going to make anything of your life if you don't work hard in whatever you wish to be remembered for. So in whatever you do, work hard! You never know if your passion lies within whatever skill you wish to invest your time in next!

Cheers,

Matthew Tan