As the new year begins and everyone is setting socially unenforced new year goals remember that you can still be great, far beyond what anyone normally considers related to “resolutions.”

You can put something into the world that wouldn’t exist without you.

Be Your Own Leader

David Foster Wallace has this great bit about leaders I’ll quote a lot of:

“A leader’s true authority is a power you voluntarily give him, and you grant him this authority not in a resigned or resentful way but happily; it feels right. Deep down, you almost always like how a real leader makes you feel, how you find yourself working harder and pushing yourself and thinking in ways you wouldn’t be able to if there weren’t this person you respected and believed in and wanted to please. In other words, a real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.”

I’ll add that a leader is someone who reminds us that we can still be great. That our time is not yet up.

We humans want to do big things. We yearn to do big things. It’s become uncool to try hard, but deep down we all want to believe in & work towards something bigger than ourselves.

Of course we easily forget this. Daily life, and bills, and jobs, and relationships… all good and (mostly) important, but too easy to get lost in the minutia of the day to day.

The Truman Show is one of my all time favorite movies. The character who’s the creator of The Truman Show has a great line:

“We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented.”

We have to fight that reality, kicking and screaming as necessary.

To remind ourselves that we’re better than a few boring new years resolutions that we’ll forget in 6 days.

You are your own leader. Don’t look around for someone to give you an excuse to be awesome. That’s your choice to make every day.

On this final day of 2018, I humbly remind you that you too can be great. You too have something to add to the amazing human experience. Big or small, we can all grow beyond the reality with which we’re presented.