How aware are you of your surroundings? How aware are you of your family history? Those that do not understand their history are doomed to repeat it. Thus starts a continuous cycle of nature. What has become nature to you? And how do you change it? All of these are questions I am here to insight some direct answers on.
I want to start with my own personal history, and how I have gone about a path of creating my own walk of life totally adjacent to my own family. I have been the black sheep of my kin for as long as I can remember, and I want to give you some idea on how I naturally beat to the rhythm of my own drum.
As a young child, I just felt the urge to be free. My family is huge into sports and competition, so we were always competing no matter what we did. I just always fashioned unique ways of competing. All of my other brothers were into football and basketball, but at the age of 5, I picked up the soccer ball. Unfortunately, since I was the only one who enjoyed it, I had no one to compete with. So I followed suit with football and basketball. The moral of this particular story creates a red line incision. As a kid, this created a platform for me where I felt comfortable initially reading information and situations contrary to others. Or it could have meant that I would feel comfortable changing my thoughts to align with others for companionship. I chose the first option. The lone reason I chose to align with football and basketball was for the competition. Which is the next part of this.
In order to do great things, you have to take advanced risk. People are traditionally afraid of risk. It is a defense mechanism. In order to do great things, overcome those fears and take those risk, you have to be willing to feel the urge of mass competitiveness. I can guarantee you that since you are eager to amount to great things, you will be challenged by your peers, and even your inner self. But you have to stand ten toes down, and be brave. Stand up for what you believe in no matter what. This does not mean to be inept of any listening skills, but you are inept for ideologies that do not correlate with your personal growth and advancement. Compete not only with others on what you believe is best, but also compete with yourself on what's best. Always be competing.
Too many are stripped of this notion. You may often be told to be more like the others and to try to be "normal". In comes peer pressure. The infrastructural force that is mounted in any community. Much more prominent with teens. By the time of adulthood, your sense of adventuring imagination subdues. Fear takes over at a certain point, and you start to feel as though you will never amount to what you imagined as a child and teen. Which goes back to "always be competing." So teenagers and children are much, much more impressionable. This is why your parents didn't allow you to watch so much television, or hang out with those kids at your school they didn't like. They will try and persuade you. But where does the persuasion factor come from? The families in the community. What were your parents exposed to growing up? They try and learn from their parent's mistakes and make adjustments accordingly. They forget to take account the habitat, so they end up reenacting their parents. Just in different manners. Almost every little thing is a factor. From the weather to the amount of income your family brings in. Now you have social classes.
Before social classes, there was survival. The baseline of everything on Earth. The lion attacks the antelope for survival. The plant absorbs solar rays for survival. Mating is meant for survival. Food and water... survival. We all do what we can to help each other survive. For those that look like yourself, or reminds you of someone you know. This affect is commonly know as morality. A lot of the times, it isn't the help you necessarily need. Along the way, social classes have construed morality with fear. Now things that are simply acts of bravery and courage become disgraceful, distasteful and just outright disrespectful to the morale of your family and social class. When you feel you have let down the ones who have made you the person that you are, or feel you do not measure up, the fear consumes you. So you live that life that someone else has planned for you, and not one of your own vision. That's called "playing it safe." Don't play it safe.
Know in your heart that you are doing what's best for yourself. Even for the people around you, you are doing your best for them. Be confident that even though it seems you are abandoning old routines, you are elevating above those behaviors by overcoming fear, and using what you have learned along the way to elevate your new mindset to escape the mental imprisonment of what you don't want to be deep down. Be who you have envisioned yourself to be. Not what your society has scripted you to be. Rewrite the script.
No matter your social class or the odds stacked against you, you now possess one of the keys to overcoming financial, moral, or ancestral imprisonment. You do not have to feel inadequate or that you are abandoning anything important along the way that you have learned whether from family, inspirational idols or friends that have played a huge positive on your life. Elevating these parts of you is what's most important. Competing every single day to be better than you were before.