In a culture where we constantly being shown people who are artificially made to appear superhuman, it is important to know what is good to compare yourself to and what isn't. When I spoke at my high school graduation, I got the opportunity to speak at the salutatorian. I decided to speak on the art of competition. I still stand by everything I said in that speech and feel it more strongly now than I did then.
People are social creatures. This was said a lot during COVID referring to people's desire to spend time with friends, but I would like to look at it from a slightly different angle. People need to have motivation to do something. People are motivated by many things, but they all root back to some sort of social phenomenon. For example, a lot of my motivation comes from my competitive spirit. Being competitive can help make you a better person as long as the competitiveness is handled constructively. I had competed with the valedictorian of my high school graduation class to be valedictorian. While, in a way I "lost," I really gained more because of it so no one truly lost in the competition. Competition can do amazing things when put into practice. Motivation comes from other people, even if it isn't through competition. Motivation can be to impress other people or to make other people proud. These are all social phenomenons that motivate people. Not all motivation is good however. Motivation is more powerful than almost anything. This is the reason that rallying people and motivating them to do bad things is so dangerous. That is exactly what Hitler did in the 1940s. World War II involved a lot of people who were motivated to commit atrocities.
Motivation is one of the greatest superpowers that humans have at their disposal, but it is far from the only superpower. Another one is the power of prayer. The power of prayer is the single most powerful thing that a person is able to use. On top of that, there is the advantage of great knowledge.
This is why education is so important. Education gives us the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the past, make things work out for the present, and make things to make our lives easier in the future. I have watched several shows that show people with superhuman powers show things that defy the laws of physics, but have the idea that the technology is more advanced than the people around them. This gives me a ton of motivation to find better and better technology and has fueled in my interest in technology.
Between the power of prayer, the motivation that comes from competing with one another, and the motivation that comes with thinking of the possibilities of what our world could be like with more advanced technology, there is very little that we are not able to do.
Thanks,
Seth Pohle