You Are a Masterpiece

Welcome to social media, where you are Pygmalion, meticulously shaping and sculpting the perfect version of you.

On a professional networking site like LinkedIn (where this was first published), this masterwork is called a CV and with the right effort, yours will be so incredible that others will surely fall in love. 

            And if they don't fall in love? Then clearly you must have done something wrong and you will muster the strength (with a little torturous feedback from friends) to continue your efforts at perfection, striving to find the ever elusive three-word description that perfectly sums up who you are as both a human being and an indispensable professional. If only you could figure out exactly what kind of ninja you are. No, that's cliche. How about wizard? Too Harry Potter. Swordsman? Samurai? Hobbit? What sort of mythical character best sums up the way you do spreadsheets?

Sound familiar? 

The truth is, you are an artist. We all are, spending our lives perfecting a single masterpiece: ourselves. We are not merely the highlight reels of our CVs and social media posts. If you feel like that is who you are supposed to be, then imagine going to an art museum, where instead of Mona Lisa's intriguing smirk or Picasso's multi-faceted depictions of human angst or Basquiat's tormented souls, all the faces were replaced with smiley emojis.

You can spend a lifetime trying to show everyone that you are the smiley emoji. You can lose yourself in the worries that everyone around you seems to be closer to being that smiling emoji than you are. But in the end, the things that make your life robust aren't the accomplishments or the victories or even the struggles. It's the uniqueness of every moment you spend on your own particular path, all of it adding up to one great masterwork that no one else could have ever created: You.

A CEO's life is no more incredible than yours. 

They took the opportunities that came into their lives and found success in business. You (assuming you are not that CEO) took the opportunities that came into your life and have found success with being you. A smart person with really strong focus might turn their gifts into a high paying corporate position. A "scatterbrained" person with ADHD might turn their gifts into a lifetime of noticing details in the world that the more focused person will forever be blind to. Neither the CEO nor the scatterbrain will ever know what it is like to experience life with a mind calibrated like the other's. The scatterbrain may miss out on the CEO's massive paychecks and fancy cars (if that is something the CEO chooses to buy) but the CEO may miss out on the scatterbrain's countless little moments of excitement when noticing all the small details that other people can't see.

            Chances are you are neither the CEO nor the scatterbrain, but your personality probably has aspects of both. In the end, you are this unique mixture of many traits, creating a masterpiece that is not statically hung in a museum (or posted as a selfie, profile or shared link), but rather lived and experienced every moment of every day.

This is the grand illusion of life: that your individual accomplishments or the summation of all of them make you who you are. 

They don't. No artist is defined by one painting or even a few. You are instead the summation of your life. No three words will ever add up to that. No online CV will ever be better than who you truly are. Yes, you may find yourself playing the game of trying to find that elusive description more often than you'd like to, but in the end, they are just words, whereas you are a living, breathing human being who should never feel ashamed for what you are not.

Here are some things I have tried my best at and failed at: Maintaining a full-time job for more than a few of years. Selling one of my screenplays. Creating an app that lots of people started using. Having an animated film I worked on for months go viral. Showing my paintings in a gallery. For every great sounding success listed on my CV is a counterbalance of what others might call failure. Heck, I'm the most guilty of only seeing those failures. In the end, though, the things described above and the way they are described on my resume are both true. We can spend our lives trying to look perfect, when really the ways in which we fail are usually what make us the most spectacular.

            You need not be a Level-30 Shaolin Warrior of Whatever-ness to prove you have value. You are already a masterpiece. Don't ever think you are anything less.