There may have been great whopping millennia when just getting by was just fine. You don’t happen to be living in one of those. You’ve got yourself a life smack inside the Chinese double entendre “May you live in interesting times.” Not to be overly dramatic, but you have a responsibility to pull out every seed of wisdom, courage, and potential inside you, plant it, water it, and harvest it. Personal growth—striving for what psychologist Abraham Maslow called “self-actualization”—has always called for this. Our “interesting times” demand it.
  
 If you were to stick a pin in every point on a tabletop globe where there is danger or unease or an incipient threat, it would look like a spherical porcupine. What do think would happen to all that unease and unrest if each one of us tapped into who we really are? If “each one” refers to everybody earth, there would be a change like the world has never seen. The French scientist/theologian Pierre Teihard de Chardin predicted something like this when he wrote, “The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

But what if only a smattering of us, the people who read this, were to do it? Even that, if we were to fathom our true identity and commit ourselves to living up to the highest light that’s in us, could bring forth a gentle revolution, a surge of change. You have the right stuff already. It’s factory-installed.

The Gandhis, Mother Teresas, and Martin Luther Kings of this world aren’t qualitatively different from the rest of us. They just go deeper within themselves. They’re scared like we are but they keep on marching. No matter how many people tell them to be practical or grow up and deal with the way things are, they have the chutzpah to be impractical and change the way things are. You can join them. It is, in fact, your obligation to join them.

You are fully capable. You may want to acquire more facts or gain more experience before you take on the contemporary equivalent of Jim Crow or the British Empire. Nevertheless, you are capable today of impacting the world for good. Maybe you’ll only write a letter to an editor or pick up groceries for an elderly neighbor, but the ripple effect of an action like that cancels out the “only.”

It’s a great shock when you reach adulthood to realize that all those grown-ups you’d thought had been on top of everything don’t know any more than you do. Even the professors and the presidents are piecing it together as best they can. Here’s your job: piece it together better. Do that by tapping into the highest and best that’s in you, even when your self-interest would rather you do something else.

To celebrate your life every day, you have to acknowledge the immeasurable power inside you that can be put to good purpose. If you knew who you really were, you’d be starstruck. Not only are there atoms in your body that were in dinosaurs and Moses and Marilyn Monroe, you have a direct line to greatness. Your bright ideas (“Where’d that come from?”) and your right-on hunches (“How did I know that?”) are drawn from the same well of genius as Einstein’s and Beethoven’s. If they had brushed theirs off, we wouldn’t have heard of them either.

Everybody has access to what I think of as divine ideas because everyone has inside them more power and light than a good-sized utility company. Curiously, the very thing that may have made us feel most ashamed, most unsuited to doing anything spectacular, becomes the portal into the life we were meant for all along.

Until you realize this—and renew the realization as needed—it’s easy to feel like a nobody. It’s a big world. You spend a lot of your life working your way up and dealing with people above you who seem to have taken weekend seminars in how to make you feel small. It doesn’t matter if you’re the person who makes the coffee instead of the decisions: don’t let anybody fool you into thinking you’re nothing. In that state, you can’t access your brilliance. But you need your brilliance. So do all the rest of us.

Everything that’s happened to you so far is part of your journey. You have the option now to steer the journey’s course. To live sanely and serenely, you have a Higher Power and your inner power, which is basically the Higher Power filtered through you. With all that going for you, you can live a remarkable life. And you can make a remarkable difference.