The Fairness Trap
If you spend your life waiting on the train to fairness, you'll miss your flight to greatness.
We all like for things to be fair. By all rights, things should be as fair as possible, and we should never stop working for more fairness. The truth is we're not there. We don't live in a fair world. In fact, we don't even have a good definition for what fairness is or how to get there.
It's not fair that some people are born in places with excellent schools and others are born in places with horrible schools. It's not fair that some people have easy access to clean drinking water and other people have to hike five miles each way just for dirty water. These are inequities that we could address if we really set our minds to it.What about the inequities below the surface and those not even possible to correct? Is it fair that someone is born taller, faster, without disease? If it's not, how could even begin to address this lack of fairness?
Here's your problem. You may, if you're lucky, have 100 years to live. You could spend that entire life focused on how life has not treated you fairly and your life will pass without you becoming the person you came here to be. You can get stuck in the fairness trap.
"It's not fair," is a paralyzing thought. It causes you to put the condition of fairness on your moving forward. Essentially, it puts a standard out of your control at the center of your potential. At it's best, fairness is a minimum bar.What if you looked the world slightly differently? What if you chose greatness instead of fairness as your goal? Fate and other people can control how fair things are, but only you can decide how great you'll be.
When you focus on becoming great rather than things being fair, you've chosen movement over stagnation and self-determination over the power of outside forces.
As I said at the top, we must never stop striving for fairness. It would be ideal if everyone had to run the same number of laps to achieve greatness. For now, though, you have a choice. You can run the extra laps, if that's your lot, or you can spend your life waiting on the train to fairness and miss your flight to greatness!You can be the victim in someone else's narrative or the hero in your own.
I love all of you and I hope your day is filled with peace and wisdom!
Ray