Really Lame and Corny Thought

I have always been fascinated by the idea that humans will someday have abnormal abilities beyond what our current stage in evolution allows us. As a child, my inspiration came from Sunday comics on TV such as X-men, where humans had evolved to be able to do such things such as read minds, regenerate quickly, control weather systems, and shoot lasers from their eyes (although the last one really didn't impress me). Someone once said to me that if you can imagine it, then it is bound to happen (or is that from Star Trek). Who knows, maybe there are already people on Earth that have leaped ahead of the human race, as the rest of us struggle to differentiate ourselves from the orangutans from which we came.

I became obsessed with the idea of what I would choose if I was able to have one of these given abilities. The earliest idea I had would be not to control people's minds, but rather, read them. The ability to see what people are thinking, especially as it pertains to how they are thinking about you, would be invaluable. Persuasion of the mind is much more powerful than persuasion of the physical, and by understanding what others are thinking, you could ulitmately alter your own behavior to elicit whatever result you want and then monitor the reaction.

I have seen people that have great skill in this area already. They are not mind readers, nor do they exhibit truly super human ability, but nonetheless, those people with high "EQ" tend to succeed greatly where mental prediction is critical: Business, politics, etc. It's too bad medical professionals don't have this skill--they would probably do a better job working with patients!

I've come to realize that reading other's thoughts is NOT a super power I would want. Rather, I have decided that the only super power I would like to have is the inability to care what others are thinking about me at all. Of course, this isn't to say I don't care about what people think, but I find that too often in life we pay attention closely to the way others perceive us. It is exemplified by our need for attention, our obsession with image and materialism, and our unending need to impress others.

I have met great people that "don't give a f*ck", but often times, it comes across as negative and selfish. Other times, it so characterizes the person so much that they are either ineffective in life. What I'm talking about is different. Creativity, idea generation, and a healthy level of risk-taking requires the person to diverge from the norm and acceptable. This is what makes us move forward. Vision comes from having an idea, then nurturing the idea despite the criticism and doubt the world throws at us.