It’s Not What You Have; It’s What You’re Able To Do With What’s Available To You

When was about 17 (back in the opulent 1980’s) I used to love skiing and I was good at it. At that time skiing was expensive, so there was a high cost of entry to get in. I would frequently see my peers on $1,000 skis, hand made in Switzerland, with $500 boots to match and their racing jump suits and so on. I came from a working class family, and we certainly did not have money like that to throw around, and my part time job after school at the local pizza place would not subsidize such extravagance. So, I had a pair of broken down planks that had served 5 years in a ski rental store that my buddy worked at. I got them for free because they were going to get thrown away. My boots were also broken down and salvaged ex-rentals and my outfit was jeans and a wool coat with gardening gloves: whatever I could find or scare up. Routinely I would get teased and ridiculed on the lift up the mountain:

“Hah, look at those skis! Those suck! What a joke!”

You’d think that this would bother me, but it only did the first couple of times it happened; because I quickly realized that I could always ski rings around anyone with expensive equipment who made fun of me. The people who had the finest equipment handed to them rarely knew how to use that equipment well. Whereas, for me, on inferior equipment, I was required to work real hard to ski at all so I was more committed to the sport. Once we got off the lift and started down the mountain they’d be struggling along in their $1,500 gear, sometimes in a wedge, and I’d blow right by them. I’d smoke them every time on my beat up rental skis that I saved from the dumpster. Once they saw how I skied the comments from those particular kids would stop, and sometimes we'd end up friends.

So in a very real way I learned that life is not about the equipment; it’s about what you’re able to do with the equipment.

In life, it’s not about what you have- it’s NEVER about what you have: it’s always about what you’re able to do with what’s available to you. From Benjamin Franklin, to Thomas Edison, to Steve Wozniak, it was about “what can you do with what’s available to you”, because nobody gave those guys anything when they got started.

You don’t need money and you don’t need things to manifest something extraordinary; and that goes for extraordinary moments or extraordinary things.

What you DO need is a creativity driven by curiosity. In the absence of money and proper tools, the creative mind always manifests the extraordinary.