I hate the idea of the “Haves and the Have nots.” Sure, right now there are people who “have it” more than you, and people who have “had it” more than you for every generation before you. But what actually separates you from anybody else? That answer starts and ends with “people.”

People are defined by two things: chance and decision.

Chance is the sum of everything that you cannot control: where you were born, your parents, what was given to you, what was offered to you, and what you had the opportunity to do.

Decision is everything you have done and will do, and each of your decisions are directly intertwined with the chances you have been given. Who is to say how different you would have chosen to live in another person’s shoes? But despite the infinite uncertainty of your decision, it is the single irrevocable constant in your life. Not a single person, event, animal, entity, or unknown in the universe can change your ability to chose what you do next. So long as you are alive, you will always have that.

If I could tell you that there was one meeting of chance and decision that could be pinned as the single most important event in any person’s life, at any point, in any place, it would be the realization of your capacity for growth. Realization, meaning not just being lucky enough to be someone who understands it, but being someone who choses it. Once you make that call, once you truly decide to commit yourself to growing, the only thing left between you and the impossible is time. There is no limit to how good you can be at anything or everything. Think about it like this, take any natural number you can think of, say 100, now try to get it to 0, only dividing it by 2. You can get close, but never there. You can be thousands of times closer, yet still infinitely far. Growth works the exact same way. There will never be a perfectly even clean zero, but as long as you live you can keep getting closer.

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