We are young. We are beautiful. We are naïve. We are responsible. Inspired by the many other young people in the world who have chosen life, I stand humbled and in awe. So many people under 30 are breaking out of the mold everyday and challenging the status quo to prove that the world is not yet out of ideas, inventions and success stories. Like the young doctor from Iraq, Luqman ‘Luke’ Jubair, who was featured on CNN’s Young People Who Rock, to live is to choose the path that others avoid and doing so simply because there is a need you can fill. Success is not easy, and it is risky but it only knocks at your door if you’ll welcome it.

I started reading the book Take the Risk by Ben Carson (You’ll soon find that he is one of my favorite people). In it, he explains how we have become a society that is so risk averse that it has become crippling. We buy insurance for everything for fear that something might happen to it; we get a warranty on everything and will pay more for it because we want an assurance that what is ours now will be ours forever. Fact is: we don’t get to live forever and we cannot get back lost time. And it might seem harmless, even beneficial (and it is if you live in a flood zone and insure your house), except for the fact that we tend to want to insure our success too. Afraid to take a leap for fear that the ground will not be there when we want to land. But no one who ever did anything significant was so fearful. The Henry Fords and Thomas Jeffersons of the world understood failure as a way to determine what pathways to eliminate so that there are fewer choices to find the right one. We don’t waste time by trying, we get ahead, and we eventually thrive.

I knew when I was 9 that I wanted to be a doctor. Perhaps the naïveté of childhood got me this far in my journey. I have graduated college with a Bachelors of Science in Biology and I currently work 2 jobs in the field of Emerging Diseases so that I can learn a little while I try to get into Medical School. I will have a health post one day in Nigeria that is open to the poor for good treatment. I will not be the first person who does this, but I’ll be one of the first who have done it there. I have taken the MCAT twice and gotten the exact same score both times (needless to say, it was not a good score and I was greatly humbled). I say ‘humbled’ and not ‘disappointed’ because I understand that priceless gifts always come at a great cost, one I have not yet paid. You would say that a gift shouldn’t cost the receiver anything, point is, we are not given our talents for personal gain, and thus we are the givers. But this is just the beginning of a story that will have a wonderful end. Call me a hopeless optimist, I’ll still believe it!

There will be times in my journey when I get afraid and want to stand still. There will be times when I think I’ve come far enough. But I hope the day never comes when I doubt that I have what it takes. So I am embarking on my own journey. I know there is a need in this world I was born to fill. I am going to be there to restart a heart when it wants to stop beating, I’ll be the one who knows what will stop someone’s aching and it is going to be a long road before I can do that legally but I’ll get there; hopefully, still young, still beautiful with a healthy dose of naïveté and much responsibility.

What need were you born to fill?

-O