Reflection on the inspirational speech
Recently, I saw a video on Ted Talks. On this video, Dean Furness shares his story of the accident which made him not able to walk and left him in a wheelchair. In his speech, he says that after the accident he started to compare what he was going to be able to do going forward, with what he was once able to do and that left him frustrated. He also says that he realized that he had to forget about the person he was before or else his frustration would have turned into something harder to recover from. This made me to think. We all have plans about future, but we never know what will happen next. When life puts obstacles and challenges in front of us, we need to try our best to overcome it rather than mourning on something bad which has happened to us. We have to always find ways to make our life better.
Furness also explains that he had good days and bad days, but it was up to him to decide of something was good or bad. It was in his control to determine if it really was a bad day. This is a great advice for all of us. We all have bad things happening in a day, but we can’t just let one or few bad things ruin our day or our entire life. It is up to us to feel grateful about the good things that happened and forget about the bad things. It is up to us to decide whether a day is good or bad.
When Furness started training and participating in wheelchair marathon, he again began to compare himself with other athletes and other paralympic medalists. He had to block that out and focus on himself. “Take some time and focus on you instead of others” he says. By this we understand that he has moved forward in life only by focusing on his performance and improving it rather than comparing himself with others performance or achievement.
“It seems as though those personal averages are almost always used to measure where we are in comparison to our peers,” he says. “I think we should look at that a little differently. That personal average is just that, it’s something very personal, it’s for you, and I think if you focus on that and start to build that, you can accomplish some amazing thing.” By this we can understand that we should only focus on improving ourselves than focusing on others and comparing ourselves with others.