What makes you happy? What do you want to achieve in your life? How do you feel about the direction you are on? Are you confident with your choices and pleased with your success every day? Do you aspire to grow and be the best that you can be?
Inside each of us are stored all the moods and feelings endogenous to our human nature as we collect them throughout life. Our brains record everything that happens to us, along with the emotions we feel the moment it occurs. By the manners in which we were raised, the dynamics of the households we grew up in, and all our experiences since our births, our matrices of feelings and emotions develop differently from those of other humans. In that process, we are all the same. Yet because of that process, we are all different. We are all special, unique.
We may not recall what happened in our early years. We may forget about events that led us to moments of great joy or great pain alike. However, these somehow bear on our emotions and our choices as our brains have them on file and are imprinted with our detailed lives’ histories and, more importantly, with the way the chapters of our lives made us feel as they unfolded.
Our beliefs, our tastes, and our attitudes form patterns that distinguish us from one another. We may not always be cognizant of why we react to certain situations in life the way that we do; nevertheless, those reasons exist, finding their roots somewhere in our pasts, stored in our gray matters, conscious or unconscious. Lumped together, personal histories, emotional matrices, and patterns of behavior draw a picture of the human complexity more distinguishable than a sequence of DNA and more unique than the geometry of a snowflake.
No exception to the rules, I had my ups and downs, good days and bad ones, victories and downfalls, laughter and cries, and feelings of elation and sorrow. We all have felt similar emotions, and through life’s cycles of positives and negatives, we experience the same. We are alike, you and I. All of us.
Consequently, if we are the product of our upbringing or the result of our environments, you may wonder, “Is it possible to improve the hands we were dealt?” Furthermore, if we believe that for “different folks, different strokes,” given that we have unique psyches, tastes, and life goals, is there a point to a book with a common formula to achieving greater success and happiness in our lives? The answers are revealed in that we are all gifted with the capacity to develop awareness, guide our actions with free will, and raise our potential. In that, we are all equal.
For some people, success, or great achievement, is credited to a distinct feature they possess known as an X factor. This characteristic is said to be hard to describe mainly because it is deeply tied to the unique temperaments, perspectives, and qualities of these people.
Yet we all have an X factor, without exceptions.
Through the years, I have pondered life’s questions at great length. I observed, studied, and read up on the circumstances that allow us to feel good about ourselves, to grow confident about our choices and goals, and to connect with the world in ways that give our lives purpose. In the process of my research, I learned many valuable things, both from others and through my own experiences. Yet I could never find an information resource that could guide us to be on track with our lives, a source of knowledge that could foster our confidence to fulfill our potentials and experience lasting happiness all at once. Hence, I gathered and distilled my discoveries to develop, with this written collection, such a resource for us all to use.
Our X Factor is on our paths to unleashing our awareness of our environments and ourselves. It is a guide for our actions in fulfilling our lives with greater success and happiness. As we take stock in our lives, we awaken with a sense of urgency to make the most of each day of the one life that we were given.
Day after day, we can follow our paths, live life to the fullest, grow into the best version of ourselves, and perform at the peak of our potential. On this journey, we develop a sense of purpose and connectedness, rise from the obscure recesses of our minds, and brighten our future and that of those around us.
A Dash of Greatness 