Simply proactive.

As we move through life we pick up certain skills, independence, communication, personal management and of course the conniving skill of making excuses.  We naturally learn to conjure up explanation so that everything looks good. A project fails and we blame it on the weather, someone dies and we blame it on sorcery. Somehow the blame game has become part of being human.  With this cycle we end up being reactive creatures. We wait for something to happen before we actually do something.  There is a term for creatures that live this lifestyle, its animals. Naturally, we too are reactive; after all we evolved from chimpanzees.

But we are not animals; we can do better than that. Given the size of our brains, nature raises expectations on us. We are expected to be proactive. Abraham DeMoivre’ clearly portrays what proactive means. De Moivre could have easily lived like any other tutor, live for the next penny. He was poor, he couldn’t get a reasonable job at universities due to his French origin and yet he didn’t give up on mathematics. . He even played chess to supplement his income. He read from giants like Isaac Newton and he eventually derived the infamous deMoivre’s theorem.  Here is the difference between DeMoivre and ordinary people. DeMoivre had something to blame, poverty, but he didn’t use this excuse, he worked his way around it. If you are wondering what proactive means then you got your answer.

Proactive means going for our goals and working situations around them. It means moving towards our goals even when its’ not feasible to do so. It means taking charge of our lives and learning to adapt to whatever obstacles comes our way because reality is always made of obstacles. Reiterate that goal in your head so that nothing you do will jeopardize it. It’s by far the most direct way to being proactive.

There will always some kind of obstacle, something to keep you from reaching that goal. If excuses is all we are looking for then we have nothing to worry about. But if we live for excuses, then what is the point in living. Be proactive, it’s the only way forward, no great man became great accidentally. They had a mission, and when obstacles came like De Moivre they worked their way around them.  So here’s the moral of my 400 word essay, be proactive, life’s amazing that way.