I never told anyone I wanted to be a milliner. It had been a dream of mine that I never thought I could realize For practical reasons, my millinery future was tucked away with all my other unreachables. My plans were categorized into mental boxes: things I had to do for my children, and for survival. I did have a bucket list box indexed into categories of achievable and down right ludicrous. Some things I thought were possible eventually landed into the ludicrous box. Moving to New York City to go to Parsons was one of them. The farthest I got was San Francisco. The only design school I could attend was at my community college.
Remember our parents, teachers, and mentors telling us that we have to work hard to succeed, and if we don’t succeed, at least we know we tried our best? There is truth in that belief. But what they didn’t tell us was how to unleash our super power. Probably because these were the very same people who might never had unleashed their own super powers. We all have them. I didn’t discover mine until I was almost too old to utilize them. The first was my acupuncture abilities, and the second is millinery.
How do we know we have tapped into a super power? It’s going to be something we are excited to do, that we think about all the time, almost obsessively. But most importantly, it will be easy to achieve. That’s right. We have found what we were meant to do in life when it feels effortless. It doesn’t mean we are not going to work hard. We just won’t notice the passing of time or feel regret. We are in our super power realm when it no longer feels like work, and when we become energized by it.
We recognize the super power in others. We see it all the time at museums, concerts, restaurants, and even in people who walk around focused yet blissful. Our secret power does not need to be something society sees as spectacular. It only matters to us. Our greatness belongs to us, and eventually it will become something we can share with others.