First, life
is competition. Here is Will and Ariel Durant in their 1968 book: Lessons of History
“Competition
is not only the life of trade, it is the trade of life – peaceful when food
abounds, violent when the mouths outrun the food”
I have
met folks who have repudiated competition, at almost every level. “I dislike
competition” so they will say. Even more ridiculous, “I don’t compete”. As if
nature request an opinion to make her decisions. The pith is, whether you like
it or otherwise, you are in for a great deal of competition, long before you
are conceived: remember, the races of the spermatozoa is an upstream one. I
applied to a PhD program at the MIT last fall, I thought I had a chance, and
maybe I was right. But here is the reply I got:
“You a
very fine candidate but due to copious amount of applications, we could not
grant you an admission”
Well,
that’s probably how an African young man ‘competes’ with a “Lui Chi Tang” in
faraway Asia or a nerd from an ivy league. Don’t be fooled life is replete with
competition.
Second,
life is a selection:
“We are
all born unfree and unequal: subject to our physical and psychological
heredity, and to the customs and traditions of our group; diversely endowed in
health and strength, in mental capacity and qualities of character”
Well,
what’s is the odd of you being “successful” if you are born in the US versus a
sub-Sahara African country. Or what is the odd of you becoming rich if you
are born into a family of billionaires? High right? However, this is not to
imply that once you are born poor you remain so. On the contrary, life is also replete
of improbable success stories, albeit a deviation from the norm.
Third,
life must breed: Durants wrote:
“Nature
has no use for organisms, variations, or groups that cannot reproduce
abundantly. She has a passion for quantity as a prerequisite to the selection
of quality”
I
remembered my social studies tutor in high school made us memorize functions of
humans, and guess what number 1 on the list was: PROCREATION!
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