Wishing to be a Buff
by Elizabeth Kanabe
George Costanza summed up an attitude that we often take in life one episode of Seinfeld when he looked at Keith Hernandez who was a civil war "buff" and stated, "I'd love to be a Civil War buff. ... What do you have to do to be a buff?" Many people look at lives and achievements as if they were snapshots taken at an instant in time and every person had as equal of a chance of being placed in any situation. If life occurred like that, it was be acceptable to say "Boy is he lucky! I wish I was a baseball player, famous actor, inventor, civil war buff…". But we know that this is not the case.
We understand who it is that we look up to in sports, work, family life, and why. We understand why the best are the best at what they do, and to some extent we understand how they got there (although there will always be outside factors that came into play). It requires commitment, time, effort, and patience among other things usually over many years.
Daily the decisions that we make affect who we will become. It is up to each person to decide what to do with their time and how to enhance their life. We understand the difference between investing time in something that is possibly undesirable for the chance of a better future, and immediate gratification in something that might not benefit us in the long run. So it is not usually a surprise that we end up who and where we are. I am often impressed at how much my friends who have chosen not to invest the time in education and work understand the repercussions, and realize where they could be, but simply choose not to go down those paths.
If we understand that our actions affect who we are, we should understand that others too have invested the time to become who they are. Good looks, athleticism, connections might get you started, but ultimately a person has to work at who they are. Too often we look at others and wish we were like them. We wish we were a Tiger Woods, Brad Pitt or Einstein.
This thinking produces two undesirable effects. The first is that we undermine how much work and time was invested for a person to get where they are. We forget all of their bad and only see their good that we desire in our lives. Secondly, it takes the blame off of ourselves for being who we are. Wishing to be something or someone that we aren’t means that you take no responsibility for how you got here and will put in no effort to change it. You simply wish that you could be someone else.
No one has the time or resources to be the best at everything, and for this reason the best at one thing will always lack something else. Similarly, you have a finite number of outcomes that can occur based on your choices in life. If you’d like to live a life in the day of a baseball star, try reading a biography. But ultimately understand that you chose not to invest your time to become one and make sure that it’s for the right reasons. To not be a baseball player isn’t a failure as long as you have your successes.
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