Tag: Greatness

Let Yourself Be Great!

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Let Yourself Be Great

Let’s talk about greatness! There’s a quote that I like which says “who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?” I like this quote because it reminds me that God gave me a purpose, and with that purpose he gave me certain gifts that he intended for me to use to fulfill that purpose. With the knowledge of that in mind I know that no matter how big that purpose may seem and how much work I’m going to have to put in to achieve it, this is not something to take lightly and this is what I need to accomplish to achieve the greatness that was predestined for me.

Sometimes I get afraid that I’ve been given too big of a purpose and I start to think, well who am I to say I can do this or that but then I stop and wonder why not me. I start to think about the fact that no one would ever change the world if they ever had the notion that they might not be good enough to actually be the one to make those changes. If they opted out of even trying to fulfill their purpose imagine how that could change the course of someone else’s journey whose life they were supposed to touch.

If we stop to think about how big the objectives that we are taking on actually are we may just talk ourselves out of going after those goals to begin with. We have to give ourselves permission to not only dream the biggest dreams that we can, but also to fulfill the purpose that God gave to us. Not only do we have to give ourselves permission to live the life God meant for us to live but we have to truly believe that we can.

Being great requires that you believe in your purpose and in your abilities. You can’t be great if everyone else around you has to convince you that you are. You have to find it within yourself, for yourself. It may not be easy if you are pulling yourself out of a dark place but if you give yourself permission then you can not only tap into your purpose but you can truly be great. After all, who are you not to be!

 

Jimmetta Carpenter

Writer/Editor

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My Greatness Far Exceeds Average

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Greatness within you

“Dare to be unrealistic—Being Realistic is the most commonly traveled road to mediocrity”

~Will Smith

I’ve always hated the term average, at least when it referred to me. I think of average as a term to describe someone who is content on things a certain way and never expecting anything greater than that. It is true that I am a person who has a hard time adapting to change and who likes routine but not because I am by any means average. I like to establish some consistency on my journey towards achieving the greatness I know I am destined for. I do believe that having a sense of consistent behavior enables a person to continue to pursue their goals and their dreams.  But as far as ever being content, in that regard I welcome change.

I can’t see myself ever just settling for the way someone else tells me things should be, not when I have my own high expectations for where I end up in life. I think that sometimes my expectations for myself might be far too high and that this is the reason that I get so fearful of tackling the unknown, because I am afraid I won’t live up to my own expectations. However, that isn’t a way go about achieving the great things that I am here to do.

People say that some of the things that I dream up in my mind and that I have on my list of goals are far beyond my reach and that they are a bit unrealistic. For a while I believed that they might be right. But what is being realistic really going to get me? Being realistic might maintain my comfort level and keep me in a place of being content but then that’s not what I want. As much as I hate being in a place where I feel unsure and uncomfortable, I realize that often times it is in those moments of being uncomfortable in which I somehow shine and somehow rise above what seems like impossible circumstances.

If I stay “realistic” about things then I will never go after some of these big dreams I have and I will most certainly never achieve the destiny that was meant for me to fulfill. What harm is there in being unrealistic when it comes to your dreams and what you want out of life? After all, it is your life and shouldn’t you want the most that you can get out of it.

I am not here to be average and mediocre. I am not here to satisfy someone else’s standards of living. I am not here to live up to someone else’s low expectations of me. I am here to be great, and to challenge some people’s ideas of what greatness truly is. I am here to change this world in whatever way that I can. I am here to be unrealistic and uncompromising. So the next time someone tells you that what you are aiming for is unrealistic then you tell them, that’s what you’re here for. Take care and shoot for the moon!

 

Jimmetta Carpenter

My Write 2 Be is…

CEO/Writer/Editor

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The Stigma Behind Creating Greatness

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“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.”

~ Marianne Williamson 

I was listening to a clip the other day of a speech that author of Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert gave discussing the need to nurture creativity and to dismiss the automatic assumption that all writers, or creative types in general, are tortured souls.  I hadn’t realized until I watched this clip just how much I had always bought into that myth in the past and in some ways had fueled my creative ability behind it.  

Now it’s not that I would be any less of a writer if I didn’t have a terrible childhood where I grew up with no father and a very angry and all around abusive mother.  In my case I think that my bad childhood was indeed the fuel behind my early beginnings as a writer.  But I think that sometimes I got it into my head that if I wasn’t going through hard times and struggling to find my footing then I wasn’t a true writer.  However, I’ve realized that in the most recent years, when it comes to my writing, pain and suffering actually stifles my creativity rather than enhances it.  I feel more of a fluid movement of words when I am optimistic about things and when things seem to be going in the right direction.  

It’s always been projected that writers, artists’, and creative like minded people have this angst and anguish, this pain that lies behind their genius.  So does that mean that these creative people can not produce greatness without their individual tragedies?  You hear of great writers and poets like Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Virginia Woolfe, Edgar Allan Poe, and so many others who have had such tragic lives and their own demons to deal with and they dealt with them through their art.  However, if they were truly meant to be artists’ would it have mattered if their lives were happy and filled with never-ending promise?  

You write something today that’s a fictional story of tragedy and suffering and undoubtedly one of the first questions that someone will ask you is “Is this a true story.”  It’s as if our minds can not possibly come up with a story that is brilliant and filled with drama and tragic events that is not our own actual reality.  They do after all call it fiction for a reason.  

My daughter has a great talent brewing for writing and my best friend’s son is a movie director in the making who also has a great love for writing and they are not tortured souls.  They don’t have some tragic incident that has happened to them to suddenly make them begin to use writing as their source for directing the pain.  Why can’t there be writer’s who have come from a happy childhood and have experienced wonderful experiences throughout their whole lives?  

Why can’t writer’s, or any creative individual for that matter, not have that label of alcoholic, or drug addict, or suicidal that can be placed on them at any point in their career?  Why must writers, past, present, or future, be afraid of being doomed simply because they are doing what they feel they were put on this earth to do?  I would like to think that our future generations of artists don’t have to have that cloud of darkness hanging over their head simply because they wanted to explore their creativity.  Are we really only as great as our greatest tragedies or could it be possible that our tragedies are what strengthen the talent that is to be our greatness?  Until next time…don’t ever allow yourself to feel doomed for doing what God put you hear to do!  

 

Jimmetta Carpenter

Writer/Editor

The Diary: Succession of Lies (Now Available)

Writing as “Jaycee Durant”

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