It’s time to rediscover who you are. It’s the secret to life, the universe, and everything, and I can tell you now the answer is not 42.
Right, and you think you know who you are. You don’t know anything, and I’ll tell you why it’s time for a quiet sit with a nice cup of tea and a rethink. Got your tea? Oh, you don’t drink tea. Time to start. Do yourself a favor and pick out a nice orange pekoe, they call it Constant Comment at the supermarket. Go get some, come back, brew the tea, pour a cup, then come back here.
Have a careful sip, it’s hot.
Now where were we? Oh, yes. Rethinking.
You know that thing you’ve been telling yourself? I’ll do this or that when the time is right, I have to wait for things to get better, I’ll be able to make my stand then, well guess what?? That day is never going to happen. Quite a shock, I know. But trust me on this, it’s never going to happen.
You’re never going to be smarter than you are now. You might be wiser later, or you might not be. But the important thing is that whatever you’re hoping to be able to do, now is the time to start doing it. If you want to go open a restaurant, it’s time to start not only thinking about recipes, but making a business plan and finding out what it takes to do it. Want to paint, but don’t know how to draw? It’s time for the foundations – go take life drawing, color is nothing more than a wet pencil with tint. Trust me on that one. Want to act? Time to start dreaming, not stop – but do it with your eyes open.
Have you ever felt like there is a big secret to life and that everyone knows it but you and that nobody’s talking? I’m talking, and I’m going to tell you what it is: no matter what it is you want to do with your life, no matter what it is you want to become, it’s a solvable problem. You can solve it in tiny bits and pieces, but it’s up to you to figure out what problems you have to solve and what doesn’t help you move forward, and that’s a very very easy test. Think of something you think might help you. Then think about how that’s going to move you closer to your dream, and if it isn’t, don’t do that right now. Move on to the next thing. And if you don’t know what to do, make a list of all the things you don’t know, write them down, and start asking questions of people who know more than you. Amazingly, most people who know more than you do are anxious to pass on their knowledge. It’s a sign to them that they’ve been on the right path, and they’re generally very happy to do it.
But the big secret is that success is a matter of figuring it out. It’s a puzzle, yes. But it’s a puzzle with finite rules, learnable ones. Have you ever assembled a bicycle? Remember how hard it was, but you had those instructions to help you out. Success in real life is just. Like. That. The instructions are out there, and each step, each problem you have to solve, I can promise you somebody has done it before you and written down how they did it. You have to have the persistence and the determination to keep looking things up as you go, but if you do that, and keep doggedly at it, and you don’t let anyone tell you that your dream isn’t worth while, inch by inch you will succeed. And it will be ungodly slow. You’ll feel like it’s like pulling teeth sometimes, that there has to be a faster way, and there just isn’t. This is how it’s done – this is how it really works, and there is no faster way of doing it.
I’ve been trying to raise the quality bar of my illustrations lately. No, this image is not unique, it’s from the cover of a Supergirl comic I saw in a store today. However, I did pencil and ink this myself.
All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity’ but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.
~ T. E. Lawrence
Dream big. Seriously, dream big. Everyone has dreams, but most dismiss them as undoable, unworkable or unrealistic. And these people are the ones whose dreams never come true. Explore, find out what you were meant for. Shake the box and tip the crumbs out and see what’s really there. There’s more potential inside you than you realize, and the difference that makes a success instead of a failure can be surprisingly small.
Robb Pratt gave us Superman fans a new little work of art to geek out over:
The character design is a departure from anything I’ve ever seen before on this subject material – it has an appeal that’s hard to define, but is immediately engaging. The biggest problem is that it’s over all too quickly – but then, it’s also hand animated, and it really does take time to do this at all, let alone do it well. It all makes more sense when you go to Mr. Pratt’s web site and discover that he’s a Disney animator and storyboard artist.
The main problem with developing working warp drive apparently isn’t the math. We’ve figured that part out. What we need, though, is an unimaginably monumental supply of energy to power the thing.
The spokesman for CERN’s ALPHA experiment—Jeffrey Hangst of Aarhus University, Denmark—says that trapping these atoms was a bit of an overwhelming experience:
What’s new about Alpha is that now we’ve managed to hold on to those atoms. We have a magnetic bowl, kind of a bottle, that holds the antihydrogen […] For reasons that no one yet understands, nature ruled out antimatter. It is thus very rewarding, and a bit overwhelming, to look at the ALPHA device and know that it contains stable, neutral atoms of antimatter.
Well now we’re one step closer. At CERN, scientists have successfully captured antihydrogen and can hold atoms of it for study in a magnetic bottle. They know they’ve got antihydrogen, because when they release it, the expected annihilation takes place.
You’ve just gotta see this.
Why have I been writing about leaps in scientific knowledge and technology lately?
Because I feel that Humanity is reaching for its future with both hands, and that if we can solve the mysteries of the universe, it’ll make it easier to solve the problems of your everyday garden variety human beings as individuals. It is an exciting time to be alive. We are on the verge of a new frontier, and it all begins right here, right now. Our perspective and perceptions are shifting as our awareness and understanding of the very nature of reality itself expands.
On seeing the Enterprise’s warp engine while visiting the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation (where he would briefly play himself in the 1993 episode Descent, Part I), Stephen Hawking smiled and said: I’m working on that.
I feel like a kid on Christmas morning. I can hardly wait to see what’s under the tree.
When your life is a blur of work and driving to and from work and being so tired from work that you don’t even have the energy to sit up and watch television when you get home – when things you thought were being handled for you aren’t being handled at all and it all winds up on your shoulders anyway – you start to lose the meaning of it all. Nothing matters anymore look what i found. You start to wonder why you keep doing it day after day after day with no reward and no purpose, and no joy.
Stop and look around you. No matter what, that tremendous weight of responsibility you carry is only made worse if you forget who you are, what makes you you and why you started down the road you took in the first place. If you can’t remember why you started down that road, and you realize it’s taking you to places you no longer want to go, it’s not too late to turn around, go back up the road a piece, and pick a different one.
Better choose – you only get to travel so many roads in your lifetime. You’d better make each mile count. And on the way, don’t forget to look around and enjoy the things you enjoy. You have a right to it.
Look yourself in the mirror every morning and ask yourself, “If I got to choose what I’d be doing today, would I voluntarily choose to do this?” We’re not guaranteed a tomorrow. Your lifetime might be ninety years – or only thirty-two years, and only one more day after that. Your days are the most precious thing you have.
So it’s not idle frivolity to “stop and smell the roses”. You need to stop and smell the roses once in a while to make sure that the roses are actually still there. And if they’re not, you need to go find some.
It’s time to rediscover who you are. It’s the secret to life, the universe, and everything, and I can tell you now the answer is not 42.
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