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Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Have You Ever Wondered… # 2 – If you could get a do over for your life would you take it?

Hey guys! If you didn’t hear, I started a new podcast which is called Allan’s Answers and I was joined by Tommy Wyderko, the new co-host for the Philosophy is Phun podcast. In the new show we discuss philosophical questions asked on yahoo answers. YOU should check it out! We also recorded the first episode in the now weekly Philosophy is Phun podcast but the screen recording software decided not to save the video so we need to do it over again in the near future. I’m still looking for good screen recording software so if anybody has any suggestions I would love to hear them.

Anyways, it has been a while since I have done a Wondered of Advice column post so I thought of something cool that I think you guys will enjoy. I pose the question “if you could change your life and do it over would you take that opportunity?” The first thing that I think should be discussed is about what things would you change if you could. I have been in too many situations to count where I look back and be like “Oh I really wish I had done something back then.” One common situation I find myself looking back on wishing I had done something different is in conversations where I think of some funny comeback only to be too late for the statement to be relevant at all. Another instance is with regrets. We all have regrets; it is just human to make mistakes. However, mistakes aren’t always equal and some can have major consequences. Sometimes we majorly screw up and you might want to go back and change it.

If you could though, you need to take into consideration is the multitude of “what if” questions that arise in almost every situation. What if’s are basically questions that help formulate possible outcomes and seeing what could possibly happen. Because they only speculate about things that aren’t definitive if might be a waste of time to try and think about them. Almost everything is a possibility so trying to speculate every single thing that could possibly happen would be completely unnecessary as well as probably impossible. Worrying about what would happen if you were to lose all your money all of a sudden is probably unlikely. Worrying about a pop quiz tomorrow that your mean teacher has been hinting at all weak however, might be a more pressing issue. When it comes to what if’s, priority is a major factor to take into consideration. If something is more likely to happen, then there is a greater chance pondering the what if’s may prove some use to you. The main point of what if’s are to give you some insight into the future and make you think about things to provide some preparation in case it actually happens. If you ask yourself “What if my teacher is going to give me a pop quiz tomorrow?” you will see the implications that the quiz will have on you and your grade and then you can judge if it is worth it to take a look over the material you just learned in class. Questions like “What if my house burns down?” are usually irrelevant but it can’t hurt to think about the precautions and actions you would take in case something as tragic as that were to happen.

What you are given with a chance to do over your life is basically a fresh start or a blank slate. The main thing I personally would want to know before I took the do over (if I would in the first place) would be if I would have my memories or not. Now I know some of you would say of course you would want your memories so you can know what not to do in case you made some mistakes in life. Through your mistakes made in your past experiences you learn how to improve. If you have already made the mistakes why go through life again only to redo them? To be fair, I feel like one reason you would not want to have your memories is because I wouldn’t want to relive everything that has happened to me knowing that I had already gone through it. I like to relate this to videogames and how when you play a game and beat it, you don’t want to go back and play it again. Nowadays games are adding new features so you can do something different to add to the replay ability but deep down I still feel like I have already done this and wouldn’t want to have to go through it again. If I were to do a do over I would only go into the past at the most a month. Think of something that has changed your life that happened like 5 years ago. Unless it impacted your life monumentally in a negative way, I wouldn’t want to have to go through and relive it all again even if I would be doing something different from the first go around. Even though I had a great time in my life, I would rather just keep moving forward and not have to endure everything again with the variations and changes I made going through a second time. Getting to do a do over does have some appealing aspects though like one cool thing about getting to start over is making a new identity for yourself and how you can live a brand new life. By doing it over again you get a chance to be someone new and nobody will judge you for what you were.

One of the biggest things that would prevent me from wanting to get another chance at living my life would be the fact that over time I have gotten comfortable with the life I currently live. I feel like generally people are very conservative when it comes to their lives. There are exceptions like with teenagers doing reckless and stupid things but I feel like they do it without knowing the full ramification of their actions and do it for the thrill and adrenaline rush such actions provide. One thing teenagers aren’t able to do well is assess risks and dangers and that’s why we usually do stupid things. Teenagers aren’t the only ones who do dangerous or reckless things though and these people are exceptions to the whole being conservative with your life thing. One of the biggest, if not the biggest priority we all have is survival and for some it is also being alive long enough to have kids to help populate future generations. By going through life we get comfortable with the life that we currently have and I know I would fear that something bad could go wrong with the modifications I make to my past actions. I wouldn’t want to risk the fact that by changing something I did when I was five could possibly mean that I wouldn’t be in the position that I am in today. While that may seem highly unlikely, the whole concept of the “future” deals with uncertainty because as far as we know of, nobody knows exactly what will happen. While there are people who can accurately predict future events based on a multitude of factors, nobody can be 100% correct of knowing the future. There are many seer’s and card tarot ladies who say they can read your future by looking at you palms but in cases like those I am very skeptical. As time progresses and I get comfortable, I would become too emotionally attached to the life that I am currently living. Another plus for not having memories when changing the past would be so you wouldn’t be reminded of the life you lived before. I would hate to have my actions change the lives of the people I love in a negative way and be haunted with how things were, knowing I made their lives worse than how they could have been or were before I went back in time. I would in a sense get time sick, missing my home in another time. How things were before I went back would probably be ingrained in my head regardless of what happened in my new life and if the changes didn’t make things better I would be so pissed at myself for going back in the first place and miss the way things were in the “good old days.”

Because of the uncertainty associated with changing the past, I would have to say I wouldn’t go back in time to change something that happened, in most cases. There are always situations where I would go back in a heartbeat like if my parents died and I could have prevented it. The biggest thing I am weary of when it comes to such time traveling is the butterfly effect and how my actions in the past have bigger implications than I could ever dream of. What if I wasn’t the only one who changed during my back in time period? It is crazy to think that every minor detail could mean the difference between life or death in the future or how you end up living? I saw this commercial, for AT&T I think, where they were showing the next president being inaugurated and it went back in time to when the parents of the future president met because some guy was able to switch his train to be on the one with this hot chick he saw who ended up being his wife. It is crazy to think about it but those minor details could be some of the major deciding factors in how our futures turn out. Because of this you always need to make sure you are doing things that will get you to a better life than where you are at now.

I think of going back in time as basically being given a second chance. Second chances are actually feasible and do happen at times but not always. They basically give you a chance to right the wrongs you may have made before without all hassle of time traveling. You aren’t always guaranteed as second chance however, so regardless of if you get the chance to change a minor detail that happened when you were five or not, you should always make the best effort in living your life and not make the mistakes in the first place. While it is inevitable to make mistakes, the least you could do is make an effort to prevent such mistakes whenever you can so you wouldn’t need a second chance in the first place. I feel like if we at least try to do this, we wouldn’t need to get a do over.

-Allan Nicholas

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Philosophy on Facebook # 38 - Authority

Hey guys it's been a while since the last podcast has come out. But I am excited to say I just did one with Nivek Johnson about Common Sense so go check it out on the Fan Page, YouTube, iTunes, or the newly formed Philosophy is Phun Facebook group!

This note I want to talk about authority. I like to think of authority as those who possess some type of power over you whether it is being able to tell you what to do, or you having to maintain a certain relationship with someone where you are subordinate to them in some way or another. For us kids, our authority usually comes in the form of adults who, with society, are presented as the reigning party and we must abide by their rules. You have to be accountable to someone in some shape or form. By doing this, your time on earth will be a much more pleasant one. If you work and get along with everyone then you will definitely see that you make more friends and your relationships become less strained and this usually equates to a happier lifestyle. One of the basics is respecting other people and especially with their opinions. You don't have to agree with what someone has to say but you can't just dismiss it as dumb. If you consider what someone has to say then you also get a wider spectrum of perspectives for which you can base and formulate and opinion yourself by comparing it to your own morals and beliefs.

There is a line however. There are going to be times where the authority might say things or order you to do things that you aren't comfortable doing thus crossing the line. In these situations you must trust your instincts and your own personal understanding of what is right and wrong. In order to have a successful life you need to be able to differentiate between these things. Authority doesn’t always have to be adults. In these cases the word authority doesn’t take on its conventional meaning of like a person commanding you to do something. In these cases you do something because, in a way, you are almost obligated to. One case of this is peer pressure where you are in a sense forced to do something in your attempts to fit in. In these situations it is basically a form of government similar to popular sovereignty where the will of the people reigns supreme and the most popular will is the one that is carried out. Everybody has their own sense of ethics and what they perceive as right or wrong and in situations where peer pressure is present you must be able to judge what actions you should take based upon those ethics.

There are many different forms of authority. As I have mentioned, when it comes to life, teenagers are usually subordinate to adults. One prominent example is in your family. One of your primary authority figures is a parent, especially in regards to family. In the working world and in your career, your authority figure is your boss. Social lives are different because your friendships are unique relationships that usually are equal. This might not always be the case however, like when you are a little kid you will probably listen to that friend of yours who is older than you. In many other situations there will be places that can be considered co-leadership where you are in a relationship with someone where you both are equals and one isn't considered superior or has more power than the other. Based upon things like expertise and unique skills, there will inevitably be situations where one person is considered the go to guy like if one is a better soccer player than the other and you were playing a game, that better player would probably take the leadership position. The other friend might be extremely smart in math and tutor the soccer friend when they need help. These show examples of where authority is switched from one person to the next. Time also changes authority. In government, both parties switch from majority and minority as time progresses therefore changing who has more power thus changing the authority.
It is sometimes necessary in life to appease people. This is used in order to avoid conflict. One of the famous examples is with Hitler in World War 2 being given land in order to prevent a fight. Like the line a mentioned before, there are times however where you need to put your foot down and say enough is enough. There will be times when you need to stand up against authority for your beliefs or risk getting stepped on. If you don't, your progression and improvement in life may be stunted. Like I said before though, you still need to respect others opinions and they may even open your eyes. An example is when your parents piss you off your natural reaction may be to revolt and not follow their orders. I completely understand this reaction and have done it many times but it probably isn't the best course of action unless under extreme conditions. The reason for this is simple, they have power over you while you are in their household. If you make their life hell then you won't be able to get along and life will be much more stressful than it probably needs to be.

Another thing that I wanted to mention is how the amount of authority you have is usually directly related to how old you are. Seniority is a factor that dictates authority on many occasions mostly because those who are older are the most developed and experienced. They usually get first pick whenever there is a limited supply of something. Case and point, scheduling classes for next year. They are positioned in these ruling roles probably because they have already been through the ringer. They most likely have already experienced the process it takes to climb the ladder in a certain field. It is almost like a chain of command in the military where the most powerful people have jurisdiction over people that are under them. Our current bosses and authority figure most likely had their power passed down to them after generations. All our parents had parents who where the bosses of them and now they are our bosses. Corporate bosses are employed or promoted to take over the position from their ex boss. This means that in order to get authority yourself you need to go through the steps. In a career, this means getting an education and going to college. Now this doesn’t bode well for us young people. There are however exceptions to this like with the unlikely cases where you do something at a young age and have other people including those older than you working for you. An example includes Mark Zuckerburg who made Facebook and now has plenty of people who work for him even though he is pretty young yet one of the richest people in the world. Another justification for preventing young people from getting powerful positions is because of our underdeveloped brain functions, especially when it comes to the cortex where we make decisions. Young people are notoriously bad at assessing risks and dangers properly as you can tell with drunk driving and other dumb stuff teenagers do. There is a reason why there is an age limit for people to be president or work in government because we wouldn’t want people with the power of nukes to make rash and illogical decisions. I wonder how the world would be like if John F. Kennedy was in his 20's when the Cuban Missile Crisis was happening. I personally would trust a 20 year old to have that kind of power. This is why people need to guide you to be successful like with your parents leading you and teaching you good values. This leads me to how authority has a responsibility and obligations to those they have power over like with leaders. Parents need to be willing to take on the responsibilities that come with having a kid or else they aren't going to be very successful and their child probably won't either.

There is good news however for the youth of today! As time changes, the current youth will naturally climb to these positions of authority. We will eventually be the bosses that lead the future. The only catch is that we are dependent upon the current authority as the youth of the future will be when we are leaders. One major example is with the environment and how our leaders like Obama decide to deal with such situations. They set the stage and it is an influential part of how we will lead like with the resources we will have available. Let's just hope our current leaders know what we are doing and if we learn and become acclimated to authority positions, I feel like we will be the next successful wave of people who help shape the world. I don't know about you guys but I am looking forward to it!

-Allan Nicholas

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Philosophy is Phun Podcast # 14 - Common Sense

Hey guys! Sorry for the little hiatus. Crappy software can do that though. I have recorded a couple since the last episode but they wouldn't save but this one did! This episode we talk about common sense and how it is a vital part of your life especially in social aspects and the different intellectual facets of life. Enjoy!

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Philosophy on Facebook # 37 - Credibility

Man guys I'm sorry I haven’t been on the ball when it comes to posts but this past week has been so busy and it won’t let up until around Friday or Saturday but I'm hoping to squeeze in a couple of podcasts and hopefully this post in the meantime. Anyways, this post I wanted to discuss credibility. The inspiration for this one came from a discussion I had with my friends about basketball. I was wondering why or how people can believe in others so much. In particular, I was wondering how teams would place so much faith in players like Lebron James or other stars straight from high school. If you know anything about basketball, the 1st round picks don't always turn out to be the next greatest superstar but that doesn’t stop teams from pursuing players. They find that the risks involved with picking inexperienced or young players will be engrossed by the overwhelming benefits that accompany the player. There have been many flops when it comes to picking players straight out of high school *cough* *cough* Kwame Brown *cough* but also have been many greats like Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, and Lebron James. This got me thinking about how these players can convince and in a sense prove that they are worthy to be picked even at such a young age. I've determined that the most influential factor in these judgment decisions is based upon credibility.

I thought I would relate this to the English AP test also and how, when writing, you have to appeal to credibility with ethos and ethics and the principles of conduct that govern people and organizations that give them the authority to speak on certain topics. This case works with almost everything. With me for instance, I am not an official philosopher but as your friend I hope you enjoy what I say and it appeals to your own perspectives and think that I am a credible source to discuss such topics. Besides being able to show authority, your credibility is based upon background and legacy. If you are brand new to the game, coming out of the blue, it will require time and effort in order to build a fan base. This also involves trust because if you don’t have an entity backing you up that is well known then people won’t necessarily be willing to trust you right off the bat. For instance if you have a well known company sponsoring you then the people trust that the company has the best intuition and good reason to sponsor you so you must be a credible source. In order to gain trust you must also have others think that you can provide and back up whatever claims have been made about you prior.

Your credibility is also based upon your image and reputation. How others perceive you can make a big impact on whether they think you can be the next superstar or next prodigy or even trust you as a realtor to sell their house. There are almost limitless opportunities that call for credibility to be present in order to make decisions about a variety of things such as entrusting others with money. If someone looks like a sketchy person or word on the street is that they aren’t reliable then their credibility will most likely be the making or breaking point when it comes to lending money. Because of this perspective is an essential part when it comes to determining credibility. What others think of you will determine how far you get in life. For this reason the status of your credibility has a major influence on your capabilities. When we try to go to college, we try to make it seem in the eyes of the colleges that we are credible picks to be given opportunities to go to their college. Our resumes and applications help build the credibility that colleges look for when picking people to be accepted. This is the same in the case of getting a job. You need to prove to your boss that you will be a good candidate and a reliable employee for their business.

What people think of you also determines what they will entrust you with. This is one of the fundamental factors in the economy and capitalism. We trust companies like Apple to provide us with the products we desire and in turn are willing to buy their goods. Their image is a major factor in making future decisions like this because if in the past they made terrible products I know I for one wouldn’t be inclined to buy any of their products in the future until I knew from other credible sources that I trusted said it was good. Your actions are also factors that dictate that trust. If you’re a very artsy person and do acts that correlate to those traits then you will be seen as an artist in the eyes of others regardless of if you’re good or not but just because people see you as something doesn’t mean they necessarily see you as a good artist. If you have been known in the past to lie then others won’t be willing to trust you in the future. I remember Victor wrote a post once about how time heals all wounds. This also relates to credibility and how eventually it is just natural if you are working with someone to have to trust them on certain issues at some point in time regardless of how bad they hurt on most but not all cases.

Most of what you do in life dictates your status and thus your credibility. You work for things to happen in the future. When we go to school we go to get an education to help prepare for the future. You try to do well in school to get into a good college and then to get a good job thus establishing your status. Your status plays a role in determining your credibility and it also takes prior events and actions to establish your credibility as well. I remember that Kyle Gavan during Spanish predicted what the cafeteria is serving for lunch that day. When it comes to believing these types of things, you can only gain trust if you can show and prove your abilities. Since Kyle had guessed the lunch menu correctly in the past I have decided to confer to him whenever I want to know what is for lunch today. : P People will usually only believe you if you have committed actions in the past that show that they can predict the future. This applies to almost everything where you need to prove your abilities in order to show your worth. With all the proving grounds in life, you will usually need to prove yourself at least once in order to gain a following of believers. In sports, to judge potential, you have to see what athletes show and have to offer like in regards to Lebron. If you are a player, you need to show your actual skills and put your words into action. If you only talk the talk and don’t walk the walk, then you only will at most build hype. At a certain point there will be too much hype that regardless of your skill level, you won’t be able to demonstrate enough skill to satisfy what words have preceded your actions. While it isn’t necessarily true all the time, the saying “Seeing is Believing” is a powerful thing that can convince a lot of people to have faith in your abilities and build your credibility. Building your credibility is an important part of life and upholding your abilities is almost just as important. If people believe in your abilities then your credibility has allowed people to trust you and gaining trust can allow you to do almost anything. Just make sure that your credibility doesn’t exceed your abilities because then you will hurt the people who have trusted you. No matter the situation, if you put your best ability into everything you do, regardless of the results, people will have to admire your tenacity and this will positively impact your credibility.

-Allan Nicholas

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Philosophy on Facebook # 36 - Superiority Complex

Hey guys! This time I wanted to talk about the superiority complex that I've been noticing is becoming more apparent especially in the current state of the world. So I think a good place to start with this is the definition of superiority. A quick Google search will yield the definition of “displaying a sense of being better than others.” People normally feel that they are better than others when they are in positions that are held to be more valuable and exclusive. I want to relate this topic to how those people in high positions aren’t willing to give up their positions easily. There are multitude of ways people can be seen as better than those around them. In some cases it is hard to determine superiority unless there are measurable stats to discern things like level of ability or else superiority becomes a perspective based decision. If you are a good soccer player and have racked up goals is can easily be determined you're better at soccer than a rookie but when it comes to things like popularity, superiority is based upon perspective and how you measure up in the eyes of others. There are plenty of ways to test who is better at things over others like competitions. It can be usually safe to say that those who emerge as victors some way or another are superior to their competitors.

One important thing to address that ties in with the superiority discussion is the fact that life isn't fair. People will usually have an advantage over others or a leg up that they will most likely exploit if they really care about being seen as superior. Not everyone starts out at equal positions and each one is unique like how you were raised and what resources you had were different than everyone around you. If you are born with a silver spoon or your parents are celebrities, you will most likely have an advantage over others. An issue that has arisen by having advantages is that utilization of your advantages could be considered unethical and at times even cheating. Using steroids will give you an advantage over other baseball players but you will be cheating and they can sometimes have negative effects on the user like with Barry Bonds. In order to prevent things like cheating, many precautions have been taken in certain areas to level the playing field. The SAT's for instance, do almost everything in their power to give everyone an equal opportunity to succeed on the test. In a perfect world everyone would be equal but we don't live in one so to make things equal, authoritative powers try to take away an aspect to help even things out and give others the opportunity to shine. However, it isn't always possible to make everything fair and it most likely will never get completely even. In the case of competitions, these advantages can lead to David vs. Goliath situations where the one competitor is usually outmatched in almost every aspect of the competition. The newcomer usually has the odds stacked against them from the beginning because they have no base of real audience. The whole experience also plays a role in these situations where if you're a rookie just starting out, you will probably need time in order to develop your potential to take down that reigning champion. You probably aren't as familiar with the proving ground which will probably lead to you losing. The good news, like I've said before, is that you can learn from the mistakes you’ve made and progress as a person. In the case of the challenger winning, these stories make the plot for some of the best underdog stories because they inspire hope into the everyday person that they can achieve great things even if the odds are stacked against them.

These moments to shine are situations where you are put on the spot and people are watching you. The bigger the moments the more pressure that becomes apparent and the more chances that moment can make or break you. This relates a lot to the note I wrote about moments to shine so check that out if you want to read more about that. Anyways there are many places that you don't even recognize are places to shine. These situations are what I like to call proving grounds because if you prove your worth you can climb up the chain to superiority. These proving grounds occur to you almost every day. One instance could be in the classroom and you get an A on the test and everyone else didn’t, then you are superior and that can mean a lot of things like you are superior in the subject or just the subject matter of the test or you just got lucky. Besides the implications of these proving grounds, these places aren't necessarily against the rest of the world like trying to prove your worth to others around you but can also be to prove to yourself. I think Mr. Burke's quote, "Good Better Best. Never rest, until your good is better and your better is best" can apply to this situation.

When people succeed in these proving grounds, depending on their character, they might publicize their ranking among their peers. These rankings are used to categorize the level of who's better than others. While these rankings can be pretty accurate most of the time, they aren't always a sure fire way of telling who is better than others. Publicizing your rank is a way to display your superiority over the competition. They are used to show that they are better than others and can be useful in many ways. Your character determines the way you will publicize your superiority. Some people are showoffs who display their skills in order to impress others. Another way is to be conceited, being so proud of yourself that you think you are better than everyone in basically every way. If you are intelligent you can also look like a smart ass and make everyone else look dumb. Other people are more humble about their superiority. Companies show off their superiority by utilizing their rankings to get business because they are "proven" to be better than others so you should choose them first when buying a new product. These rankings aren't just based upon ability but also status like having more money, better friends, job, etc. There are almost limitless mediums of superiority and ways to show it. Like I said before, you are sometimes born into and given superiority but not just with things like wealth. Your parents could have provided you with the genes to be biologically superior. You could be born to sing or built to play sports. Who you know not just what you know or can do, can also play a role in superiority like knowing a celebrity or an agent to get you signed into a successful career.

Proving grounds provide you with tests in order to help determine who is better than others. These tests aren't definitive. One major problem with these tests is that they could be looking for the wrong things to test for. I read somewhere that when doctors test you to see what ailments you have, they're missing a huge factor that can contribute to your diseases which is the habits that you live with because these habits can increase your susceptibility to things. By not considering certain factors, the perspective of who is superior or not can become skewed. Superiority can be sometimes hard to test as well because it is hard to find these variables that have the potential to contribute to superiority. For instance, testing intelligence using the IQ test is limiting because there are some many factors and variables that can affect results and different variations of intelligence. There is street smart as well as school smart as well as many of facets of intelligence that it can be hard to precisely say who is smarter than someone else. Because we are human, things like off days need to be considered when ranking superiority. It is hard to judge based upon a single moment to decide who is better at something because one could have choked or plenty of other possibilities. You can say someone was better at an exact moment but it doesn’t represent the whole scheme of things as your perspective is limited to a small scope.

Superiority is also an ever shifting topic. Times change and because of this, so does superiority. As you get older your abilities start to decline and those younger than you start to become superior to you. If you are superior one moment you can lose it all in the coming moments. It is also harder to gain superiority than lose it because you need to work hard to become better than the competition. You must train constantly and stay atop the changing times in order to stay superior. Superiority is also based upon experience. You need to be around people in order for them to form a solid perspective about you. If you are around someone like in school for the past 3 years, they can better determine if you are smarter than them. It allows accuracy but times change so it can be almost impossible to get a completely accurate measurement of where someone stands when ranked with their peers. By knowing where someone stands in the measures of superiority, you get a sense of benchmarks for what is considered good or not. In a way it can be like a bar that helps set a goal where, if you want to be successful in a certain area, you must beat or be better than the current record holder or person to beat.

Your strengths and weaknesses are what help form your ranking. When you get an idea of what someone is bad and good at you can better exploit them to find other areas where you can show off your abilities. Knowing where you rank with others can allow you to find things that make you shine when compared and allow you to be special and superior in different ways. The thing you need to remember is the fact that there will always be someone out there who is better than you at something and always something that you're better at than others. In my opinion there are plenty more singers out there than Justin Beiber but that statement is just my opinion. The important thing is that someone in a high position discovered his "talent" on YouTube and that made him basically a household name now. I think a part of superiority is accredited to luck where you're just at the right place at the right time to get noticed. You get superiority because nobody else got the opportunity to shine or at that moment you were the best out there or just fit for the job. The main thing I want to get across is that it isn’t always about being better. I feel like superiority is more of a self-esteem issue than anything else. With recognition comes being placed in a ranking. If you are recognized as the best you are superior. The sense of pride that comes with superiority is something that reassures and reaffirms a person’s sense of worth. To be recognized you must separate yourself from the rest and your motives for trying to become superior can range from many possibilities. Whatever you try to become superior in, try your hardest and try to reach your potential and then the sky is the limit. You shouldn’t always compare yourself to others because what you do isn’t always reliant on what others do as well. Your personal best is all that matters and if everyone put out their best effort, the world could become a much better place.

-Allan Nicholas