Khalid Latif – Inspiring Video Learn How to Win at the ONLY Competition that Matters
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Some of us just don't think that much.
One night, I left from a meal and
there was a homeless man asking people for
money outside of our center. And I said
to him, I have some sandwiches I could
give to you. And he said, I don't
want your sandwiches.
I walked away thinking that this guy doesn't
want my food,
all he wants is money, He's probably not
even hungry, or he's gonna use the money
on drugs or alcohol or something like that.
And I caught myself in my thoughts.
And I said, the only person who can
answer why he doesn't want my food
is he himself.
And so I walked back to him, and
I was a little annoyed, and I said
to him, why don't you want my food,
man?
And he walked to his shopping cart, he
took out a bag,
and he said, I already have food.
And he said, if I was to take
your food in addition to the food that
I have,
there's no way I would be able to
eat all of it,
and some of it would get thrown away.
And he said, me living the life that
I live,
I will never
throw away food.
I said thank you to him
for not just teaching me something about himself,
but teaching me a lot about myself.
And I walked away with a different recognition
of who it is that
I'm not necessarily today,
but what it is that I really want
to be in the long term.
Society teaches us to look at ourselves a
lot,
just think about how much time you spent
in front of a mirror, how much time
you spent in terms of the care of
your physical, your external, to fit into boxes
that people place you in, that you might
not even know you're in, but you're trying
to fit into somebody else's standard of who
you're supposed to be.
My daughter and I, we go to Dunkin
Donuts a lot. She's 4 and a half
years old.
And if you ever see her, her name
is Medina. She's got this just contagious
energy to her. Real
deep love that people can't help but fall
into.
We're going to Dunkin Donuts one morning, and
we walked in to Dunkin Donuts, and the
poor guy behind counter,
even before any of us said anything,
saw my daughter smiling at him, and he's
just giving her munchkin after munchkin for free,
and she's just taking them 1 by 1
by
1. And after we got our food, and
we left, we're standing on the street, there's
an elderly woman standing next to us, and
a person comes out of Dunkin Donuts who
had just finished whatever he bought,
and threw the wrapping paper on the ground.
The elderly woman
with very clear disgust
just spoke out loud and said, can you
imagine somebody would do that?
My 4 and a half year old looked
at me, and looked at the trash on
the ground, and then looked at the woman,
and said to her, why don't you pick
it up?
I got very uncomfortable,
and I went and picked up the trash
from the ground.
But it
made me really think about things,
where you have people
who are definitely
making the world a much dirtier place.
And then you have people who can even
identify that that's a problem, that you shouldn't
be throwing garbage on the ground,
but there's not that many people who are
actually going out of their way to still
pick it up and make it much cleaner.
And I think where we transition into that
third place,
that says that it's not just enough to
say that something that is not good is
not good.
Because you can say that that's wrong, but
what are you doing that's right?
What are you doing to add something that's
just positive?
I think we get scared sometimes because we
fit into this very formulaic pattern of what
it means to be successful.
Our sense of identity is tied to things
that we possess and things that we own,
and our sense of fulfillment
is based off of things that come from
outside of us rather than inside of us.
Nobody's telling us that we need to be
honest, we need to be compassionate,
we need to be merciful, we need to
be just. We need to be loving. We
need to be generous.
But they're telling us that our sense of
worth is based off of what it is
that we drive and how big of that
thing it must be.
So you'll learn how to be a doctor,
you'll learn how to be a lawyer, you'll
learn how to be an engineer, you'll learn
how to be an artist, an activist, an
academic.
But as you're learning how to be a
worker,
most of us aren't really learning how to
be thinkers.
We're not engaged in spaces where we're understanding
why do we love what we love, or
why do we hate what we hate, or
why do we desire the things that we
desire.
And your story is not your story
when you force yourself to become someone else's
story.
You are where you're coming from,
and you are where it is that you're
going to.
The only person you need to compare yourself
today to is the person you were yesterday,
and if you wanna have a competition with
anybody,
then make it between those 2 people.
You'll find yourself in the space
where the person you are today
is no longer afraid to meet the person
that you can become tomorrow.