Monday’s Meditation: On Growing from Small Beginnings

August 27, 2012

I have been thinking a lot lately about beginnings. As I get settled in a new place, as schools everywhere resume their lessons, as new businesses crop up, and a new Youtube channel is created.

One of the more basic and nonnegotiable facts of life is that we all start off small. Even Benjamin Button– the fictional creation of F. Scott Fiztgerald who was born an old man– arrived in an infant’s sized body. This, we understand, is how it works: it takes a great deal of time to develop and grow bigger, it is a process to learn how to crawl, how to walk, how to articulate our thoughts out loud.

And while anxious parents the first-world over continue to stress over whether their baby meets every developmental milestone, we recognize preposterous expectations as such. We would never, with rational minds, expect a newborn to stand upright on her own two days after birth. We would never expect a toddler to be capable of delivering a fifty-page thesis, nor hope that our five-year-old’s musical compositions could oust those of Vivaldi. We see that with bodies, with the forming and growing of people, it takes time.

Yet we forget to apply that same nonnegotiable to other newly formed entities.

In a world where instant gratification is delayed delivery, where internet pages that load in 1.7 seconds is markedly too slow, our concept of time, of how long it should reasonably take to see results, has become skewed. And paired with that is the ever-booming presence of the big-time. We have now seen the measures of massive successes practically applied. We know what it looks like to be worth $20 billion, we have real-life examples at the ready of corporations that grew from nothing to being featured on the cover of Time magazine, we have heard every mouth-gaping rags to riches story.

So we want it all now. We expect it to happen now, and we berate ourselves that it didn’t happen that way yesterday.

Back to that Youtube channel mentioned previously. This weekend I learned of a certain “Youtube Sensation.” She’s the number one most subscribed to vlogger from her entire country, among the two dozen or so most subscribed to channels of all time, and has had approximately 406 million video views to date. Because of her success with Youtube, she’s also been profiled by a large number of prominent media sources, has been nominated as “Best Youtube Channel or Personality,” and in 2010, an analytics firm counted her among their ten top earners from Youtube advertising, citing that she earned approximately $100,000 that year.

Intrigued, I decided to dig further. How, I wondered, did she get to this point? Was it some video that just happened to go viral by a rare stroke of luck and hyper-speed page loading?

Of course not, silly gumdrops.

Senorita Sensation got to where she is today by making videos on Youtube every four days or so for the past six years- diligently- back before people even knew what Youtube was (it wasn’t all that long ago). I scrolled through page after page of videos, all the way back to the beginning. To video 1. And you want to know what I found? A pig-tailed girl filming herself in what looked like a poorly-lit college dorm room, and an intro in a soft and unsure voice that went something like, “um, okay, hi, this is a video I guess, yeah, I don’t know why I said that.”

Naturally, there are countless examples of this scenario– and those on a much grander scale– but I thought it telling that even on Youtube, a platform most closely associated with insta-fame, a “star” is one who has been quietly making videos almost since the website’s inception, whose first few videos were nothing more than a girl alone in her room, tripping over her words; unrefined, her low definition camera causing her face to appear pixelated.

When you see others who have already passed Go many times, have collected $200 to a number higher than you can count, and who are chillin’ on the metaphorical Boardwalk of life, do not forget to factor in their trajectory. Do not forget that whether or not you’re aware of it, whether or not you saw it all go down, there was undeniably a long and windy path that person walked to get to where you’re admiring them today.

And as for your own endeavors: be patient, be persistent, and remember that every great thing was once very, very small.

Image credit: Natalia Frigo

5 Comments

  1. Foley on August 27, 2012 at 11:56 am

    fantastic! everybody’s looking for that lucky strike. They keep going for the knockout punch (missing it) and forget to just box. patience, the walrus said ;). U nailed it. Amen.

  2. Dawn {The Alternative Wife} on August 27, 2012 at 5:41 pm

    Hi Annie! LOVE the new space! I’ve been so crazy…sorry I haven’t been by in a while. So happy to be back and to be trying to have a bit more normalcy. I’ve missed your post and always love your thought provoking Monday Meditations. I just watched my friends give their four year old daughter a lesson in patience this weekend and it was something to watch. I actually even said to them that it’s something I need to learn to be better at myself 🙂

    Hope you’re having a great start to the week! xoxo

    • livesimplybyannie on August 29, 2012 at 11:00 am

      Thank you so much for this sweet comment, Dawn! So happy you’re back around.

  3. Rachel {little bits of lovely} on August 27, 2012 at 11:47 pm

    Oh wow, I can’t believe that we posted on topics with such similar sentiments today! I couldn’t agree more on this Annie. Baby steps + a whole lot of determination and perseverence are needed to succeed! xx

    • livesimplybyannie on August 29, 2012 at 11:01 am

      wavelength strikes again… 😉

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5 Comments

  1. Foley on August 27, 2012 at 11:56 am

    fantastic! everybody’s looking for that lucky strike. They keep going for the knockout punch (missing it) and forget to just box. patience, the walrus said ;). U nailed it. Amen.

  2. Dawn {The Alternative Wife} on August 27, 2012 at 5:41 pm

    Hi Annie! LOVE the new space! I’ve been so crazy…sorry I haven’t been by in a while. So happy to be back and to be trying to have a bit more normalcy. I’ve missed your post and always love your thought provoking Monday Meditations. I just watched my friends give their four year old daughter a lesson in patience this weekend and it was something to watch. I actually even said to them that it’s something I need to learn to be better at myself 🙂

    Hope you’re having a great start to the week! xoxo

    • livesimplybyannie on August 29, 2012 at 11:00 am

      Thank you so much for this sweet comment, Dawn! So happy you’re back around.

  3. Rachel {little bits of lovely} on August 27, 2012 at 11:47 pm

    Oh wow, I can’t believe that we posted on topics with such similar sentiments today! I couldn’t agree more on this Annie. Baby steps + a whole lot of determination and perseverence are needed to succeed! xx

    • livesimplybyannie on August 29, 2012 at 11:01 am

      wavelength strikes again… 😉

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