VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 3

VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 3

You Are Still Alive Today, Which Makes You a Champion

Did you take hold of them, the last few sections? The law protects people, you are a person, you will not die. You do not earn the right to live by being useful. Being a person is enough. If you have them, then in this section we are done arguing. In this section I want you to lift your head and see clearly who you actually are.

Right now you probably feel like a failure. The job is gone, or nearly gone. The house may not hold, the car may not hold. You sit there feeling worthless, feeling like scrap from this age of ours, scrap the machine sorted out and threw away.

Let me tell you: you are looking at it wrong. You are not scrap. You are a champion. You do not believe me. You say, I cannot even hold down a job, what kind of champion is that. Then let me ask you one thing. How did you come into this world?

That one time, your mother and father, hundreds of millions of them raced for a single egg. Hundreds of millions. Picture that number. A whole city holds only a few million people. Hundreds of millions is the population of dozens, of a hundred great cities, all of them crammed into one narrow channel, all racing for the same finish line with everything they had. The vast majority died on the way, sank down, and there was no after for them. Only one broke through that door and lived.

That one is you.

You are the single one who fought through hundreds of millions of rivals. From the very first second, your life was a one-in-hundreds-of-millions winner. Before you were born, before your eyes opened, before you even had time to be afraid, you had already won the biggest fight of your whole life. In that fight, hundreds of millions lost. The one who won was you.

This is not flattery. It is fact. Go home and look in the mirror, and the person looking back is the one who fought through hundreds of millions. You just forgot.

Sit with how staggering that number is. What is a one-in-hundreds-of-millions chance? When you buy a lottery ticket, the odds of the jackpot are about one in ten million, one in a hundred million. People buy tickets their whole lives, dreaming of that one win, and never hit it. And you? The day you were born, you had already hit a prize rarer than the jackpot. Your very life is a winning ticket, one ticket out of hundreds of millions. You carry that winning ticket every day and think you have nothing. You did not fail to win. You won the biggest one there is, and you won it before anything else had even begun.

Look around at the living people near you, on the train, in the street, at the market. Every single one fought through hundreds of millions. Every person who can breathe, walk, say a word to you came into this world the hard way, every one of them a winner out of those hundreds of millions. A human life was never a cheap thing. It was always a rare treasure. And you are one of those rare treasures. How can you hold it as worthless just because you lost one job?

And after you broke through, was it smooth from there? No.

You learned to walk, and how many times did you fall, each fall in that moment the end of the world. You cried, you got back up, you fell again, you got back up again, and in the end you walked. You learned to talk, to read, to ride a bike. Your first day of school you cried like your heart was tearing, sure that was a hurdle you would never clear, and you cleared it. You grew a little older: exams, heartbreak, turned down for jobs, looked down on, let down, sickness, spills, shame, and a handful of nights you were certain you could not survive.

And here you sit. You carried through. Every hurdle, every one you were sure would bring the sky down, every one you were sure you could never clear, in the end you cleared it.

You say those were different, this one is unprecedented, nothing has ever been this hard. Yes, it is unprecedented. But let me tell you a quiet little thing. Every single hurdle you met in this life, in the moment it arrived, was unprecedented. The first fall was unprecedented. The first heartbreak was unprecedented. The first time life ground your face into the dirt was unprecedented. Every hurdle came wearing a face you had never seen, and every one made you think, this time it is really over.

And every time, you got through. Every time. Not one slipped past. If even one had not, you would not be sitting here reading this book. That you can sit here at all is proof that every hurdle behind you, not one left over, was cleared. So this hurdle, by what reasoning does it not get cleared too? It is hard. It is unprecedentedly hard. But which one was not. And who are you. You are the one who fought through hundreds of millions, and then carried through hurdle after hurdle, not missing a single one. You are a veteran of a hundred battles. You are not a raw recruit. You have fought more fights than you yourself remember.

Have you heard the story of Robinson Crusoe? One man, his ship went down, and he washed up on a deserted island. No people. No house. No store. No power. No hospital. Not one living soul to speak to. Nothing at all. And on that island, alone, he lived for twenty-eight years. Built his own shelter, grew his own food, kept his own animals, wrestled his own loneliness, and lived.

Your situation is far better than Crusoe's. You have a roof over your head, and even if that roof may not hold much longer, right now you are still under it. When you are hungry there is still something to eat. You still have this phone in your hand. You still have people around you who can talk to you, even if right now you do not want to talk. Next to Crusoe, you are rich as a king. He had nothing and lasted twenty-eight years. This hurdle of yours, by what logic can you not last it out?

People compare themselves to people and it eats them alive, but turn that saying around and it can save a life. There are people in this world far worse off than you, more than you could ever count. People fleeing a war. People who lost their whole family in an earthquake. People carrying a grave illness and still gritting their teeth to hold on. People ten times, a hundred times worse off than you, at this very moment, are all still living, and living bravely. They have not given up. By what right would you?

Staying alive is how you win. Set those words down heavily, right here. Do not make light of them. You think staying alive is caving in, is having no spine, is a loser hunkering down. Wrong. Staying alive is the most defiant thing there is. Think about it. In a person's hardest hour, the ones who hold are the ones who grit their teeth and refuse to fall. The ones who do not hold are the ones who gave up on themselves first. The trouble is the same trouble, the hurdle the same hurdle, but as long as a person is still willing to live, still willing to endure, there is a turn in the road ahead. And the person who calls himself beaten first, who lets go first, that is the one who is truly finished. So staying alive is not caving. Staying alive is the greatest defiance there is, keeping your spine straight, refusing to bow to a mechanism built to drive you into the ground. Hold out through today, through this hardest of nights, and you are already harder than that mechanism.

Think about who, exactly, is hoping you cannot go on. It is the mechanism that treats people as scrap to be sorted out. The ones seated high above, untouched by the fire, the ledgers that count only profit and never a human life, what are they hoping for? They are hoping that people like you, sorted out and cast off, will take the hint, quietly accept it, quietly disappear, make no trouble, be no eyesore.

So you will not. You will live, and live well. You will eat your fill and sleep sound, and when the sun comes up tomorrow you will open your eyes and stand. You do not have to do a thing. Just by living well, that one act, you smash the scheme that was built to drive you into the ground.

Capital wants you gone. It counted up your job, your house, your car, and it figured that once it pulled those away one by one, you would collapse, you would give in, you would take the hint and vanish from the world. It miscalculated one thing. It could not reckon that this life of yours is a life fought through hundreds of millions, a life that carried through hurdle after hurdle. This life does not collapse so easily.

As long as you are still alive, you have won. Live one more day, and the scheme to drive you under fails one more day. Live one more year, and the ones hoping you would fall have one more year of it. Let them tremble.

This is not spite. It is a real contest. That mechanism wants you down, wants you resigned, wants you gone, so its ledger balances clean. As long as you do not fall, its ledger never balances. You do not have to go fight anyone, do not have to win any test of strength. You just live, steady and calm, eat your meals, sleep your sleep, look after the people near you. Just living like that is the hardest blow you can land on that mechanism. The more it wants you gone, the better, the steadier, the longer you should live. That is the biggest card in your hand, and no one can take it from you.

So this is the third thing for you today. You will not die, that was the first. You are a person, you deserve to live, that was the second. And this third: you are not a failure, you are a champion, a champion who fought through hundreds of millions, a veteran of a hundred battles who carried through every hurdle without missing one. This hurdle too, you will carry through.

As for exactly how to carry it, where to turn when this road runs out, the sections ahead will tell you. A road is never only one road. Blocked ahead, you can go back, you can turn, you can go around. One job gone is not one life gone. One door shut does not mean every door in the house is welded tight. Use your head, lift your eyes, and you will see other doors. A champion does not sit down at the shut door and wait to die. He gets up, walks the room, and tries the other doors one by one. You are a champion. Walk it that way.

But for tonight, nail this one down. You are still alive today. You are already a champion. Let the ones hoping you would fall tremble.

Before you lie down tonight, say it to yourself once more: I fought through hundreds of millions, I have carried through every hurdle in this life, and this one I will carry through too. Do not make light of that sentence. The first section loosened the dying breath in you. The second had you own that you are a person who deserves to live. This one has you own that you are a champion. Each section lifts you a step higher, and by here you should be up off the ground, spine straight. You are not discarded scrap. You are the one who has won every battle of his life and is still standing, steady, today.

Stand up. Straighten your back. In the next section, I will show you the road no one has ever told you about.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.