We Are All Superheroes (Part 2)

As many of you reading this probably already know, I absolutely love superhero movies, and I've also probably already told you about how "Batman Begins" is far and away my favorite superhero movie of all time. But another one of my personal favorites is the movie "Unbreakable" (2000), about a man who slowly discovers he is a real-life, modern-day superhero. The movie offers a much more realistic take on the traditional mythology of superheroes. If you've never seen the movie you can watch the trailer below and if you're interested you can find out more by checking out the movie's Wikipedia and Rotten Tomatoes page as well.

The protagonist, played by Bruce Willis, is an ordinary family man who works as a stadium security guard and is searching for meaning in his life in his middle-age. His life is turned upside down one day when a train he is riding derails and crashes, killing 131 people total - every single passenger that was on board *except* him. It gets him started on a journey where he slowly discovers the reasons behind why he survived the crash, and the superhuman powers that lie within him that he never discovered until now due to a combination of denial, intentional ignorance, and having never truly tested himself.

The core underlying theme of "Unbreakable" is that comic books are simply one of many ways of passing down stories of great men and women from the past who were supremely talented, achieved great things, and who at the time seemed larger than life. Just like cavemen used to draw on the walls of caves to tell stories about heroic individuals and their impressive achievements, and just like the Egyptians engraved elaborate pictorials on their temple walls to commemorate people who they considered gods or god-like, comics are also a modern-day way of telling stories of great individuals from the past, even if the story itself and its various elements end up becoming exaggerated and embellished a great deal over the years for entertainment value.

There's a reason why this movie, as well as Batman Begins, are both on my list of all-time favorites. They are both examples of the superhero "backstory" which documents the physically and psychologically arduous journey that all superheroes have to go through, as they slowly discover the extent of their special abilities and have to come to grips with the enormous responsibilities those "powers" will entail.

All superhero backstory movies can be broken down into three parts. In the first part, the hero-to-be undergoes a terrible personal tragedy. For Bruce Wayne, it was the cold-blooded murder of his parents when he was a child, for Peter Parker (Spider-Man) it was the murder of his Uncle Ben, and for Bruce Willis' character in "Unbreakable," both his marriage and his life were slowly falling apart until the horrific train crash which changed everything.

In the second part, the tragedy acts as a trigger which causes the hero-to-be to start questioning their own existence and their true purpose in life. After a period of struggle where they feel lost and confused, they eventually start to realize their true purpose and start to discover the "powers" inside them that had been buried within themselves, lying dormant and becoming increasingly rusty over the years. Once discovered, they start to hone and refine these powers, becoming a truly fearsome force to be reckoned with in the process.

And in the third and final part of the hero-to-be's journey, they are confronted with their first "test" and must put all of their newfound knowledge and powers to use against a rising evil which threatens the very existence of the world that they are trying to save.

If you ask me where in this three-part progression I am at right now, I'd say that I'm somewhere between the second and third parts. I'd say that I have already been through my personal tragedy (at least, I hope so haha), and more recently I have slowly but surely gained an understanding of what some of my "powers" are. I am now preparing for the third and final part in my personal transformation, in which I try to start putting my new superpowers to good use and start doing what I was born to do and what I was always meant to do but just didn't realize until now.

This second part I mentioned, about discovering your own personal "superpowers," is not easy, as I've discovered. We are all born with certain talents and innate dispositions, and with the right training, the right guidance, and when we are put in the right real-world situations, they will emerge and blossom and flourish. But it's very easy to grow up in a situation where we never have the opportunity to realize the natural talents we were born with, sometimes because of the circumstances in which you were born, sometimes because society and people around you have different values and try to make you live your life a certain way. For example, if Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, with their intellect, ambition, and business savvy, had been born in a third-world country with no electricity and no links to the outside world, then they would have lived the rest of their lives as normal villagers, hunting and cooking and raising a family while never even seeing or hearing about a computer or how they both might be able to change the world with one. And the world would have been robbed of their creative genius and transformational abilities.

For me, I've looked back on my life and discovered some special powers that I realize now I have always had which, when put together, will allow me to become the superhero I hope to be one day. 

For example, I've noticed that I have an innate talent for knowing what other people are thinking and "putting myself in their shoes," so to speak. In a comic book this would probably take the form of ESP or telepathy or something like that, but in real life it's more of just a knack for understanding what others are thinking and going through. This power helps me in many ways - It helps me to quickly ascertain what a person's hopes and fears are, it helps me gain people's trust, it helps me befriend people quickly, and it helps me help them with stuff that's troubling them.

Another power I have discovered I have, is the ability to take knowledge and insights from interesting and unexpected places and apply it to other fields which on the surface might seem totally unconnected and unrelated. I am a person who is always thinking in terms of metaphors and analogies. The way I view the world, everything in this world is connected and everything is related in so many ways, it's just that it's not always easy to see these connections, or to see them in the right context. I believe that this kind of mindset helps me to be more creative than the average person, and will help me to bring innovation and opportunity to fields and concentrations which I believe need them most.

And last but not least, I've always had an insatiable and enduring love for languages. The simple concept of being able to communicate the same idea in a multitude of different ways, each of which only a certain amount of people who know that language can understand and appreciate. There's something about that last part that's very beautiful, but also very frustrating as well. It's awesome to pick apart different languages and discover each's unique characteristics and little eccentricities, but at the same time it's this endless linguistic diversity which causes so much miscommunication, inefficiency, and needless division in this world. I'll talk in more detail later about how I want to try to change this as an entrepreneur.

I should note that despite the many similarities between superheroes' journeys and people's real-life journeys of personal discovery, one key difference between the two is that in real life, the answers never come easy and the journey is always infinitely more complex than in the storybooks. However, this relatively simplistic portrayal of struggle and redemption in superhero stories is actually a good thing. I truly believe that despite all their exaggeration and over-the-top imagery and hyperbole, what all superhero stories in comics share is that they have managed to boil down the essential characteristics of what being a real-life hero entails and what it takes to become one. These concepts have been boiled down and simplified and presented in this type of enjoyable comic form in order to make it accessible to a mass audience, so that hopefully we can all be exposed to these kinds of stories and so that one day we can ALL discover the superhero that lies within us, which has always lived inside us but which (for whatever reason) was not able to emerge and take form like it should have.

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Like what you're reading so far? If so then I've got good news, as this is only the second entry in a three-part series! In the third and final entry of "We Are All Superheroes," I will be talking about how my personal tragedies and many failures in the past have shaped me, and exactly how and in what capacity I plan on using my "superpowers" to try to do what all superheroes try to do - Save the World. You won't want to miss it! :)

As a bonus, I will leave you with some cool, noteworthy quotes from the movie "Unbreakable" -

"Why is it, do you think, that of all the professions in the world you chose protection? You could have been a tax accountant, you could have owned your own gym, you could have opened a chain of restaurants, you could've done one of ten thousand things, but in the end, you chose to protect people. *You* made that decision and I find that very, very interesting."

"These are mediocre times. People are starting to lose hope. It's hard for many to believe there are extraordinary things inside themselves as well as others. I hope you can keep an open mind."

"It's alright to be afraid, David. Because this part won't be like a comic book. Real life doesn't fit into little boxes that were drawn for it."

"And that little bit of sadness in the mornings you spoke of? I think I know what that is. Perhaps you're not doing what you're *supposed* to be doing..."

"Do you know what the scariest thing is? To not know your place in this world. To not know why you're here. That's... that's just an awful feeling."

We Are All Superheroes (Part 1)

Why do I want to become an entrepreneur?

It's a very simple question which for me isn't so easy to answer in a very concise way. I could probably write a 100-page essay on this topic, but to put it very simply, I want to become an entrepreneur because I have a fundamental need to not just change the world, but to save it, and I believe that founding my own start-up is the best way for me to do so.

In this entry I will be talking about the first part of that sentence - How I came to realize that my sole purpose of existence is to "save the world" i.e. make the world a fundamentally better place, namely by bringing opportunities to those most in need of them.

There was a point in my life, during my junior year of college, where I hit an emotional and psychological low point in my life. At the time I was diagnosed with a mild form of clinical depression. I went on some meds and fortunately it was right around winter break so I was able to take a break from the daily pressures and stressors of school and life and just think about how I might've gotten to this point.

Looking back now, I'm able to say that the reason I had gotten to that point was because I had lost all sense of purpose in my life. I felt like everything I did was without any real purpose, any real end. I felt like I was always just going through the motions, and that everything I did was only because society said that someone like me was supposed to act like that.

Fortunately, that low point was the beginning of a gradual turnaround for me, in which I slowly but surely was able to find meaning in my life, and I was slowly but surely able to figure out what I was put on this Earth to achieve and what I would have to do to get there.

They say that if you want to figure out what you're meant to do in the future, you first have to look back at your past and the natural story that you have weaved for yourself over time. And at the time I needed that really badly. I needed to figure out what I was passionate about and what I was meant to do, because I just had no clue, I had nothing to live for and this lack of purpose was slowly killing me inside.

And so over the next few years I started looking back at my life and analyzing everything I'd been through since I was a small child. I looked at what I had always enjoyed in my life, what I had always hated, things I had thought I would enjoy but ended up hating, and things I thought I would hate but ended up enjoying. I looked at the moments where I had felt the happiest in my life and tried to figure out what had caused it, and I looked back at the lowest points in my life, where I had felt most miserable and worthless and empty inside, and again I tried to figure out what the root cause(s) might have been.

After all this analysis I started to see some common themes emerge from my life, these little recurring patterns which you lose sight of and forget about in the day-to-day mundanity of life, as the days and the weeks and the months pile on and blend into each other and you totally forget who you hoped to be and what you had hoped to become when you were young and still "unadulterated" by the pressures and expectations of adults and of society as a whole.

I realized that the one driving force behind every happy and sad moment in my life, the one determining factor  which came up time and time again no matter how much I may have blocked out from my memory, was this - I am physically and emotionally unable to be truly happy unless I know that I am somehow making many other people happy first. It was that simple. The happiest moments in my life had always been when I knew that I was making others happy, and on the flip side I had always been most miserable when I had felt that I was living life for myself and for my own wealth, my own comfortable lifestyle, and my own future irrespective of anyone else's.

It all made so much sense, and it explained so much about why I had felt a certain way in certain moments of my life.

It explains the time when I was in the third grade and my school was holding a fundraiser for UNICEF. I was so saddened and distraught when I find out what UNICEF was for, that while other kids gathered up spare change and a few dollars of contributions from people they knew, I went a more extreme route and simply took the $60 or so dollars of allowance I had saved up until then to buy a new Super NES videogame for myself, and donated it all to UNICEF, even though my parents were insisting that I didn't have to donate so much, that even $10 or $20 would have been a lot. I absolutely loved videogames back then and I had saved that money for months on end (which for a child is an eternity), and yet something compelled me to stubbornly refuse my parent's urging and instead go all or nothing with my donation.

It explains my extreme (and some would say absurd) love of superhero films and superhero mythology in general. Anyone who knows me will have heard me tell them of how I have watched the film "Batman Begins" more than 100 times start to finish, easily. And that doesn't take into account the times I'll watch certain parts of key scenes of the movie when I don't have time for the whole thing. I've done this for other superhero movies that I really like as well, yet it's something I never do for any other kind of movie. Something about superheroes strikes a chord deep within me that even I might not have been fully cognizant of until recently. I realize now that I feel a sense of kinship with these fictional heroes because of their self-sacrifice, the overwhelming sense of duty and responsibility that they must live with, and their daily struggle with forgoing a normal life for the sake of a greater good.

It explains why when I got a serious girlfriend in college, I felt so happy and yet so sad at the same time. I was happy because I had a met a great girl who was perfect for me in a lot of ways and who accepted me for all my flaws and eccentricities. But at the same time, I always felt an incessant tinge of sadness, not because of anything she had done, but because I realized that the more happy and fulfilled I was with her, the less focused and motivated I was on helping to save the world. The more I ended up enjoying a normal life, the less I would be able to fulfill my "superhero duties." I've always had this weird tendency where I feel that I don't deserve to be happy or comfortable or fulfilled when there are so many people out there who go to sleep at night hungry and impoverished, physically and emotionally abused, hopeless and desperate. That's why I don't sleep on a bed (random fact about me), and that's why I felt so ashamed and guilty of allowing myself to become happy and complacent while doing less and less towards doing what I was meant to be doing.
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Hope you are enjoying my "Superhero Backstory" so far! Due to the excessive length of this entry, I've broken it up into two parts. Stay tuned for the next installment where I talk about how I came to discover my own various "superpowers," how I plan on using them, and the things one must do in order to unlock the superhero within each of us.