Know Who You Are

Knowing who you are is often hard to describe. How do you describe who you are or who you have been your entire life? Many people say that who you are is determined by the actions you make. I don't completely agree with this because this states that you are only someone until you do something or take action which is usually the result of another action. Who I am is as reliant on what I have experienced, what I have done, and who my family is. I do not have to take action for people around me to know I am of Hispanic decent. We live in a society that has focused on how people look whether it be race, clothes, weight, class, or looks. If you ever find yourself convinced that who you are is based on the last four I listed, there needs to be a radical change of values in your life.

I purposefully excluded race because I believe regardless if you are deeply connected to your race or not, you must always find a sense of pride in your family roots. I say this because no matter where you may be you can always find comfort in family. Your family are who they are because of  values passed on from generation to generation in their race and culture. I am of Mexican decent and although I may not speak Spanish fluently any longer, I take pride in knowing I have a rich family background in Mexican history and culture.

Aside from this I believe that who we are is determined by two main things: what we want out of our lives, and how we go about getting that. I am aware that this is very general but please think this through with me. Any person can say they want to be successful, rich, or have a loving family, but it does not stop there. You can either work hard for it, be a honest person, accept help and get through life fair while doing your best; or you can whine, cheat, lie, expect things to be given to you and never get what you wanted in life. However in order to know what you want in life there needs to be one more major revelation in life.

You must know what it feels like to fail OR find the passion in your life that will reveal who you are.
This may sound like the cliche for success; You will never know how it feels to succeed until you know what it feels like to fail, but I do believe that from personal failure a spark is ignited within those to work harder for what they want. There are countless movies based on the lives of successful people who fought through failure. One relatively recent movie was of the life Chris Gardner who was a struggling salesman. He eventually had no money and lived on the streets with his son going from public restroom, to homeless shelter, to motels as he was working as an intern for a very competitive company. You may know what movie I am talking about now and know that Chris Gardner eventually won the intern position and began working at the company. He eventually became CEO of his own stock-brokerage firm and is a multi-millionaire. This is the type of stories that do in fact go on every single day. It may not end up being a blockbuster movie, but every one of us faces a battle that knocks us down to our knees and challenges us to figure out how to raise above it all. This is often where passion is also found. The passion we have to live, work, or change our life is what makes raising from our failure reveal who we are. We all make small and often meaningless decisions in life such as what to wear, what to buy, and what to watch; but the decisions that more than anything reveals our character is showing how much we care to pursue our passion. Our ability to care is what often defines what friends we make, what friends we keep, what career we choose, how we treat your family, how we view our past, how hard we work, and how much patience we have to keep trying.

Who we are is not looking in the mirror and describing our physical attributes or style. Who we are becomes what we refuse to let go through the tight grip of passion our body radiates. The challenge is withstanding the journey to find our passion and be ready to crawl back up from failure.