Rashid Zakat

You can tell the most optimistic people, not because they’re smiling all of the time, or even because they’re always upbeat…but because they’re the ones who get stuff done. Now, I don’t mean the people who just do busywork all of the time…or people who just do the generic “successful” people things, but people who make a dent in the world one way or another. The people who more through life with purpose and somehow don’t seem to get stuck.

For a lot of people success isn’t an option or something they have to work hard for…it’s a given. They just have to go through the formalities, await the outcome and claim what they rightfully deserve. You know someone like that…they seem to work very hard at whatever it is that they do…but everything also seems to come without much effort. I think most of us have experienced this on a relatively micro-level. Think about what you’re the best at and how you got to be as good as you are. Chances are, you didn’t get good at what you’re good at over night, but you probably can’t remember not thinking you wouldn’t be as good as you were.

For example, I’m pretty good at building LEGO’s. Probably not very good now, but in my hey-day I was pretty formidable. I used to build day and night, not worrying about making them “good” or “bad”…just making them the way I saw it in my head. Then bigger….and bigger…and bigger…and eventually better and better. Again, I wouldn’t say I was the greatest, but what some people saw as a gift was just a hobby that I put a lot of time into…and eventually began to improve exponentially.

Now take this same concept and apply it to something a little less concrete…let’s say conversation skills. I think about the people who are my favorite people to talk to, and on a whole…they at the top of the list for a lot of people. I’m thinking of three good friends of mine in particular. They’re all very intelligent, outgoing and charismatic. Whether people flock to them isn’t as important as what they do with they people they come across. While they may not be confident in everything they do one thing that comes effortless to them is engaging people. The common thread I’ve noticed with these particular people is that they don’t think about engaging people as anything special. In fact, their conversation skills dwindle as soon as you make them aware of it. The moment they begin thinking of how well received something is, instead of moving with their instinct to speak and their innate confidence (I’ve boiled it down to a few key factors for each person I’m thinking about, but that’s another blog for another day) is shaken, you’ve thrown a monkey wrench into the process. Now, they’re wasting some of their brains processing power on what they’re saying instead of letting their natural instincts take over. They’ve, in a way, trained to be as good as they are in conversation whether it be through a combination of thinking a lot about certain universal topics, talking to a lot of people since they were a young age, or by virtue of just being very open articulate people. This is more interesting when people HAVEN’T worked on their conversation skills. When you know something is going to work, it’s probably going to work. When you don’t think of something as work, it can’t fail.

I’m very familiar with the effects of positive thinking, and I guess that’s at the heart of my teaching/learning strategy. It’s not that people are born smarter…I’ve never believed that…but some people are more confident; and learning is more about confidence than how much your brain can hold. The less I think about something and know it’s gonna work out, the faster it does. Worrying and over thinking everything causes things to not work out…that’s a fact. You’re then hindered by thoughts of things that you can honestly deal with once they come up as long as you’re not flustered by them.

Now, positive thinking can often be confused with blind faith/arrogance. The obvious difference is if you know something is going to work out, you still allow space to be realistic and cover your bases properly. For example, it never occurred to me for a moment that Soul Aquatics wouldn’t work out. (Soul Aquatics was a really dope jam session my brother Kepa and I used to host a couple of years back). It wasn’t anything amazing, but we knew that if you got all of our friends together to play dope music, people would really enjoy it. Now, there is a lot we didn’t do to make it better, but in hindsight, it was a pretty big leap of faith to get it to work, but we knew that if we planned properly, covered our bases, and had contingencies for our contingencies, we would get exactly what we wanted out of the situation…if not better. It was the largest undertaking either of us had done, but out of all of the conversations we had about it, I don’t think we ever had one about it not being good.

I think if we were more arrogant about it, we wouldn’t have gone to the lengths we went to to make sure people knew about each one, each time. If we would have operated on blind faith, we probably would have over extended ourselves to make it something bigger than we could handle and trusted it could work out. That would have been foolish. I think part of being a positive thinker/doer is knowing your limitations…but understanding that you aren’t your limitations. You as a person are bigger than any limit possible…yet limitations exist to be conquered. But you can’t conquer something you don’t acknowledge.

One of my favorite films is Forrest Gump. Forrest Gump is the picture of confidence and positive thinking. Now granted, this is a Hollywood movie, so our knee jerk is to criticize the idea of learning something from a half-retarded man, but I look at the most successful (in the real way of thinking about success mind you) people I know in certain arena’s and they are Gumps themselves. They didn’t look at their limitations and rationalize it to be a part of them, nor did they pretend these limitations exist. They took a realistic look at themselves and their capabilities and realized what really mattered…whatever that may be.

People are attracted to a certain type of confidence in a person. That’s why some people are magnetic. They have a type of energy about them that means they can do anything, and they don’t think twice about it. Most of them don’t even know it. Now, some people confuse actual confidence with an off putting sort of arrogance that assumes a level of superiority over other people, and trust me…this isn’t the same thing. Having true faith in yourself is recognizing the value of others…while avoiding the mistake of comparing your own worth and value to theirs. True confidence is admitting you don’t understand something, and knowing that you can learn if you only ask for assistance.

My last note is an observation I’ve only recently articulated. The people I categorize as the most confident seem to ask the most questions. I’m thinking of a few people in particular. They always seem to be engaged in whatever it is excites them at the moment…and it’s an intuitive sponge-like absorption of knowledge like I’ve never seen before. They never worry about seeming like they’re bugging someone, and they rarely do…because they tap into people who are excited to share the information and wouldn’t look down upon them for not knowing.