If You’ve Got Nothing to Lose

If you’ve got nothing to lose, then you got lots to gain.

A thought just ran through my head as I was catching a brief moment on the new local show Fighting Spiders. The three kids were just saying this:“ Hey, let’s build a country club here!”

I thought; wow, what big dreams they had. And they didn’t even have an education like most of us have today.

It began to dawn on me about the problem with our generation; we simply have too much going for us. We have jobs prepared for us once we graduate, a promise of certain income; a promise of security.

For most of us, the promise is well, not bad. But for the brightest of us all, the promise is simply too enticing not to take up. We may consider this blessing; well maybe in some sense it is, but to me it can be the darnest curse of all.

The saying goes, the greatest enemy of great is good. Just because we can do something moderately well doesn’t mean we’re meant to do it for our lives. The fact that I can do Maths well doesn’t mean I want to be in that field for the rest of my life. ( In fact, I kinda hate Maths. But that’s a personal thing. No offence.)

But that’s the problem with most of us. We can do so many things well; so many options that we have for a job that promise us good income. Writing reports; doing presentations; preparing marketing plans; doing financial forecasts. Well I can say I could do all of the above with a satisfactory level of competency.

What then? Should I pursue them just because I can do okay in them?

But for many of us; the choice with the best income is probably the one we pick.

And because we spend our lives doing something we’re good at; we never get to spend our lives doing something we’re GREAT at.

The blessing for these young boys in the movie is that;“ Well, we’ve nothing to lose, why not just reach for the stars while we’re at it?”

And its these individuals with this attitude that built our first world Singapore today: people who try harder because they’ve really got nothing to lose.

Well as for many of us, we’ve got too much to lose. We’ll settle for good.