“I think we spend too much time being afraid of our own mediocrity.  We don’t want to sing too loud in case anyone finds out we don’t have a voice like glass.  We don’t write music because we aren’t Mozart, we don’t paint because we aren’t Picasso, we don’t tell people we love them because our voice might shake when we say it.  We try to be pretty criers, we don’t dance because we aren’t that good.  The reality of our humanity is that we are all a little bit average at a lot of things.  The truth is that we are all not that good so stop holding yourself back from enjoying the things that you love because you’re not a prodigy at everything.  Scream the song at the  top of your lungs, and confess your love and let you voice be shaky, cry big ugly tears and dance really badly because life is too short to be scared of being human,” Whitney Hanson. 

As I’ve been talking about the last couple of days, we need to find our own greatness even if we don’t see the immediate result.  We need to be fully who we are because we never know the ripple effect of our actions and how others respond to what we do, what actions we’ve encouraged in others simply by being ourselves. I will say it a million times if I have to—this life isn’t about being perfect.  Perfection is an illusion.  I am not saying settle for mediocrity but I am saying we need to learn to be ok with it as a starting place.  No one begins an expert—we all have to learn.  Even the greats.  Yes, there are levels of innate talent we are born with, but in order to be great and really know who we are and develop ourselves, then we must be ok with being a novice.  We have to be ok with starting.

Think of all the time we waste wanting to be good enough to show who we are when we simply could have shown who we are and learned the rest along the way.  Think of how many times we would have known the answer or we would have won had we simply gone for it.  Who knows that if we had allowed ourselves the initial experience that we may have learned something more and become the example we thought we were never good enough to be in the first place?  Sometimes we need inspiration and other times we need to remember that we are the inspiration.  Grow, try, fail, learn, and try again.  Mediocre isn’t a bad word.  It isn’t a matter of settling, it’s a matter of understanding and becoming who we are meant to be.  Be that person, that version of ourselves that has the courage to go for it.  Be the person we strive to be—don’t be a copy of someone else’s genius—create our own genius.