Do We Owe It To Ourselves To Be Great?

CHUCKIE: Listen, you got somethin' that none of us have.                                       

WILL: Why is it always this? I owe it to myself? What if I don't want to?

If you didn’t know the above scene is from one of my favorite movies, Good Will Hunting. The movie stars a pre famous Matt Damon as the titular ‘Will Hunting”.  A young man whose rare genius is dwarfed by his fear of realizing his full potential. Will is relatively content with his life as a poor laborer and his Neanderthal friends even though he is clearly their superior intellectually and could use his smarts to get himself a better life if he chose to.

During the final third of the movie “Chuckie” played by Ben Affleck tells Will that he needs to leave his life behind and go do something great as he (Will) is being held back by his friends. In the movie Will decides to say “screw it” and go after the girl he loves instead of trying to become the man that would get a job that would put his talents to full use.

This leads me to seg-way into the topic. Do we really have to be great if we don’t want to? Does great power truly come with great responsibility?

We see these questions pop up in most superhero movies where our protagonists become blessed with extraordinary abilities and they then take it upon themselves to become the saviors of mankind or the protectors of their hometowns.

To be really honest if I was blessed with superpowers I do not believe the first thing to pop into my head would be saving the world. I believe I’d try and better my situation first.

Let’s take a simpler example. It’s Christmas time and your parents give you a brand new bicycle. You ride it all the time until one day you decide to stop. It’s not that you don’t like the bicycle anymore you just don’t want to ride anymore. DO you have a responsibility to keep on riding that bicycle because your parents got it for you? What if you didn’t want a bicycle? (Don’t try that in Nigeria though. Most parents will expect you to ride that bicycle till you break it)

That’s how a lot of “gifts” operate. They aren’t necessarily things we want but we get them anyway. We’re stuck with them. We can’t return them only not utilize them.  So I ask again: must we reach our full potential if we really don’t want to?

Now you might ask, why would you not want to reach your full potential? And that really is a legitimate question. But the answer to the question might be more illogical than we thought. Maybe they’re just satisfied with where they are. Not everyone measures themselves to the high standards set by their parents and society. Should that be admonished? I believe not.

In life we have to do things that ensure we can sleep at night. We need to stop living for other people and live for ourselves. If anything the people that are satisfied with not utilizing their gift should be commended because at least in this life they know what they want to do. They should only be condemned if they keep bitching about not knowing what to do with their lives when they clearly have something in front of them they could use.

Let us try and live our lives for ourselves because that is the first step to satisfaction, which is the real happiness.

Agree? Disagree? Put it all in the comments below