If you lift weights once, are you strong enough to lift a car immediately afterwards? No, of course not. What about the second time? Still no. But if you keep lifting, if you consistently put in effort, one day you will be able to, a day will come where you'll just find that you're as strong as an ox.
The same goes for happiness…
We all have hidden talents. We all possess abilities that others wouldn’t expect of us. Nobody is ever going to know everything we can do or know everything that we are. As such, there are times when people don’t expect much from us. It’s not malicious or nasty, they just don’t know. Yes, there are certain people you meet who will look down on you and that can be incredibly irksome. The idea of a person thinking less of you than you are may sound like it is a bad thing but I think that often it can be a good thing, you can use it to your advantage.
Whenever I want to accomplish something in life or when I want something to happen, I find it incredibly irksome if someone says "it's not meant to be just yet" or "it will happen at the right time". Recently I realized a reason I find hearing this particularly frustrating: because annoyingly... it's right.
I recently began a very, VERY exciting new chapter in my life - my voice acting career has taken me from England to the USA. I am having a lot of fun so far and though TV and movies have taught me well, there is still a lot about America that I have to learn and figure out. Now based in the United States, with today marking one week since I flew out here to Los Angeles and tomorrow being Independence Day, I thought I would take a humorous look at all the questions I have about this great country.
Waiting is hard, isn't it? It's like the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers song goes, "The waiting is the hardest part." When there's something you really, really want, having to wait for it can be tough and the longer you have to wait for it, the tougher it can be. I have been interested in writing a blog post about waiting for a while, yet in a weird way, I have kind of waited to write this blog post. Nevertheless, I have been thinking a lot about waiting recently. For a start, I think there are different types of waiting.
There's something that I personally feel is incredibly important and try to hold onto in life, a motto I'll occasionally remind myself: never lose your ability to be grateful.
Cartoons are very popular. I mean they are really, really popular. Not a day goes by where some animated show or feature isn’t on the television or even at the cinema. Cartoons have evolved greatly from the days when they were just humble and quirky animated shorts. Now, a cartoon can be just about anything.
There’s hand drawn and computer animated; family and adult; shorts, shows and feature length; serious and comedic; brightly coloured and subtly shaded; realistic and just all out crazy. Even a single studio can produce a plethora of animated delights. Look at Studio Ghibli – they have both animated features that are highly grounded in realism and others that… well… that really are not.
There is such variety that you may find the idea of me trying to suggest that there is a common trait that they all share while simultaneously also being the reason why so many people love animation is utterly mad. To be honest, you’re right. But just hear me out anyway.
There is an important distinction that I personally like to make between being DEPRESSED and having DEPRESSION.
Due to its many ways of being undetectable, depression is a funny topic for people to understand and thus it makes it even harder for them to talk about. A disease that makes you think irrationally sounds irrational to a rational person. A lot of people just don't really even comprehend what it is, how severe their problems are or even recognise that they (or someone else) have even got it.
All this naturally led to me thinking up this distinction. It is my personal way of understanding it all, both for myself and for others.
Deciding whether or not to go to university, can be one of the biggest decisions you ever make. With university fees increasing (in the UK), it's more important than ever to know beforehand whether going will be worth it.
I am a person who on the surface, looked like a great university candidate – I was an academic, hard-working kid who liked Maths. However, my time at university was quite disastrous and – despite getting a good degree in a good subject – it set me back very far. Maybe I wouldn't have gone on to accomplish all that I have done or be the young man I am today without the hardship, it's hard to tell. Nevertheless, I have very mixed feelings about whether my university experience was ultimately a liability or an asset.
It is my wish that young students going to university not only feel that they are making the right choice but also that they are proved absolutely correct throughout the rest of their lives with no regrets.