Monday, January 10, 2011

Potential

Have you ever heard of Craigslist?


The short description goes like this: Anyone can put up a post on the website, which you can categorize into fields such as jobs, for sale, personals, services, and others. When you visit the website, all of the articles immediately presented to you are grouped together based on where you live - I'm not entirely sure how the website knows where you are located, but it is nice being able to only see things in your neighborhood. It's more or less a child of Ebay and Amazon.


I glossed over the website for a while today, and I am stunned at the potential that Craigslist has - of which anyone can take advantage. People are selling homes on Craigslist. They are trading their homes for other homes. They are meeting people, finding oddjobs, making money... and using the website is free. Save for the scam artists floating around (which, according to Craigslist, are filtered out as best as possible), the power behind this webstite is huge. To me, it is almost unbelievable. An example that will blow your mind is that of Kyle MacDonald, who managed to trade for something "bigger and better" enough times to finally get his own house - starting from a paper clip. You can find his story here.


Its amazing how something with a simple framework like Craigslist can lead to so many different outcomes. The simple things in life are sometimes the most rewarding, mostly due to their basic nature that everyone can understand and relate to. That's the weird thing about the most innovative ideas today - they don't all come from innovative minds. Someone with average intelligence with minimal resources can sill think of a groundbreaking idea. Great things can come from almost nothing.


People often talk about potential like it is something that only gifted people have. A fourth grader in a Calculus class would often garner remarks such as "Wow, what a smart kid! He has so much potential!" Sure, it might be a smart kid. But everyone else in his class has potential too. We all have potential, in all stages of our lives. We have the potential to be good or bad, the potential to work hard or hardly work, and the potential to make the right or wrong decisions. The future is unwritten, but we're all holding pens.


It's one thing to have potential. But fulfilling it is what counts.

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