Then and Now
The world today demands some interesting proof of your credentials. You can apply for a job, do eight rounds of interviews, take a Myers-Briggs test, put together a prospectus, and still get an email saying you're not enough after three months of conversations. There is something exhausting about going through all of that only to have someone make a conclusion about you from a distance.
It can be pretty daunting to have someone who barely knows you tell you you're not good enough. That is life though, right? Regardless of where you stand, you're being measured, and every interaction that includes rejection can feel like a message telling you that you're not enough. Even when you know better, it is hard not to carry some of that personally.
What I would submit is that these interactions are a far cry from a measuring stick of who you truly are. In fact, your real résumé is not really rooted in titles or accomplishments. Your real résumé is a compilation of the failures you've survived, the stress you've endured, and the sacrifices you've made. Those things may never show up cleanly on paper, but they say far more about you than most credentials ever could.
This takes nothing away from your wins or from anyone else's. Still, when someone asks you what makes you amazing, often your mind will go back to the things you have overcome. Those things may have resulted in a win, a success, or an accomplishment, but the weight comes from the fact that they required something from you before they ever gave anything back.
The real question people want to know is, have you done hard things? Have you been knocked down, and did you get back up? Did you own the situation, or did you blame it on someone else? Those are the kinds of questions that reveal what a person is made of, even if they are not always asked directly.
While these situations are what mature us into effective, high-functioning adults, they are also the ones that start to pull us away from our childlike faith, innocence, and belief that we can do anything. The same experiences that teach us resilience can also teach us hesitation. They can make us stronger, but they can also make us more guarded.
In fact, the marriage of the two would forge a person into the successful adult we all want to be. Someone who has done hard things and come out stronger, but who has not lost their sense of faith, wonder, or belief. Someone grounded enough to carry real responsibility, but still open enough to believe that more is possible. That combination feels rare, maybe because most people drift too far in one direction or the other.
When you are a child, one of your greatest strengths is belief. You do not need every detail worked out before you move. You do not need a spreadsheet, a case study, or unanimous approval to imagine something bigger than your current circumstances. As an adult, that same kind of belief often gets replaced by caution, and sometimes caution is necessary. Still, when childlike belief is paired with adult discernment, you get someone who can dream without being disconnected from reality.
Beyond that it's curiosity. They ask questions freely. They explore without feeling embarrassed by what they do not know yet. Adulthood can slowly replace that curiosity with the pressure to appear competent, and that pressure can make people stop learning long before they stop working. When childlike curiosity is matched with adult discipline, you get a person who keeps growing instead of just repeating what they already know.
Children also tend to recover quickly. They can be fully present in a moment, cry over something real, and then move on without spending the next six months building an identity around what happened. Adults often call that immaturity, but there is something in it worth paying attention to. As we grow older, we become more prone to dragging old disappointments into new seasons. When that childlike ability to recover is joined with adult resilience, you get emotional strength that does not require emotional hardness.
There is also an honesty in children that most adults spend years editing out of themselves. Children are usually more direct about what they feel, what they want, and what they do not understand. Adults learn how to be more polished, but sometimes that polish comes at the expense of truth. When childlike honesty is joined with adult wisdom, you get someone who can be real without being reckless, and clear without being cruel.
Children trust more easily. That can make them vulnerable, which is why maturity matters. Still, many adults have become so guarded that they confuse wisdom with distance. They know how to protect themselves, but they no longer know how to connect. When childlike trust is joined with adult boundaries, you get the kind of person who can love deeply, lead clearly, and stay open without becoming naive.
Maybe that is where real maturity is found. It is in learning how to carry the qualities that made you alive in the first place through life without letting life strip them from you. Life is going to test you either way. The question is whether those tests will simply make you tougher, or whether they will make you stronger while helping you stay fully human.
That version of adulthood is harder to find than competence alone. Plenty of people become productive, efficient, and capable. Fewer become wise without becoming cynical. Fewer become resilient without becoming closed off. Even less learn how to carry both strength and softness at the same time, and that is probably why it stands out so much when you meet someone who does.
Maybe the real goal is not just to become more impressive as you get older. Maybe it is to fight to keep the child inside you. To keep the belief, the curiosity, the honesty, and the trust, while also developing the discipline, responsibility, endurance, and wisdom that adulthood requires. If a person could sustain both, they would not just be successful in the way the world measures success. They would be whole.
Today’s Forced Challenge: I want you to FORCE yourself to attack at least one of these challenges:
1. Do something you are bad at on purpose: Pick something light and non-essential like drawing, dancing, rollerskating, shooting a basketball, or learning a card trick. The goal is not improvement. The goal is to practice being seen in process without needing competence to justify your participation.
2. Follow curiosity for one hour: Spend one hour exploring something with no practical outcome attached to it. Read, build, wander, sketch, or tinker with no plan to monetize it, master it, or turn it into content. This helps you recover curiosity without forcing every interest to earn its keep.
3. Spend a day noticing wonder: Look for five things you normally rush past, cloud patterns, old trees, neighborhood details, people laughing, the smell of dinner, the way light hits a room in the afternoon. This is not sentimentality. It is training your attention to see life again instead of only managing it.
4. Tell the truth faster: The next time you are disappointed, tired, unsure, or hurt, say it plainly without packaging it into something more impressive. This challenge is about recovering honesty while keeping the maturity to express it well.
5. Let yourself be delighted: Eat the cereal, get the ice cream, go to the arcade, watch fireworks, buy the Lego set, fly the kite, or sit on the swings. Notice any voice in you that says this is a waste of time or beneath you. That voice is often more revealing than the activity itself.
Maybe that is what we are really after. Not just the strength to survive life, but the ability to go through it without losing the parts of us that made life feel possible in the first place. To become steady without becoming cold, wise without becoming cynical, and tested without becoming shut down.
If we can hold on to the wonder of a child while carrying the weight of an adult, we do not just become more successful. We become more fully ourselves.
“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age.” - Aldous Huxley
-Who you are today, is not who you have to be tomorrow-
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