Burn Your Certificates!

Let me start off, by using the famous Spiderman movie quote – “With great power comes great responsibility”. You can translate that to – “With every power, comes its own responsibility”.

We may not receive superpowers like Spiderman but we receive certificates that provide us with the power of social status. You may be valued highly for the certificate you’ve been awarded.

But the certificate or any title that has been awarded is not just for the sake of how much people value you, in other words, it’s not just for the sake of social status!

The certificate or the title has been awarded to you for your work, to provoke and promote your work for the future. Not just for what you’ve already done.

If you’re seeing it the other way around, then, BURN YOUR CERTIFICATES!

Let me dive in a little more. There are 2 aspects to this. And that is, before and after you’ve got your certificate.

Before:
Before you’ve got your certificate, i.e when you’re in pursuit of a certificate/title, you’ve got to ask yourself these questions. Is this pursuit withholding me from serving? Am I delaying the responsibilities, as an after the fact of acquiring the certificate?

If yes, you’re not doing the best at what you do, and you don’t deserve what you’re pursuing in the first place. Because remember this, nothing changes after you’ve got your certificate except your social status.

The pursuit of receiving a mere certificate or a title shouldn’t withhold or make you procrastinate your service to humanity. Your contribution must start as soon as you intrinsically realize your potential and feel the urge to create/change/serve!

Let me give you an example. Suppose you’re pursuing an arts degree certificate. It might be a master’s or a Ph.D., you must not wait until you’ve got a ‘Dr.’ behind your name, to start making art.

However, I’m not saying or promoting you to do anything before you’re qualified. I’m saying, you’re qualified when you intrinsically know so, not when a piece of paper is awarded to you.

And there are of course jobs that require specific certificates to ensure public safety, like doctors, pilots, etc. So I’m not saying that if you’re a medical student, go and inject something into a patient before you’ve got your certificate. I’m trying to say is when you know you’re ready to serve, just do it. Serve with what you’ve got! You may not treat patients, however, a medical student could start a podcast with his/her friend talking about how the human body works through it serving not only the general audience but also helping many of their fellow aspiring medical students.

After:
The second half of the story is what you do after you’ve been awarded the certificate. Let me start this off quickly with a simple example, If you’re a Ph.D. in mathematics and you’re not contributing anything to the fields of mathematics, you might as well burn the Ph.D. certificate!

This applies to every stream of professions. You have an MA in music and not gifting people your music, just burn that certificate!

If a piece of paper is stagnating you, then it was not worth acquiring, isn’t it? If a piece of paper or a title before your name makes you feel like you can retire and rest now, that means you’ve reversed your priority, isn’t it? It means you value social status more than the ability, the power to serve, isn’t it? What kind of life is that? The whole point of life is to explore & figure out our powers, and use them to serve others, isn’t it?

Spiderman would be bored to hell and would not even like to receive the power of spiders at all if it wasn’t to serve humanity. It would be completely pointless. We wouldn’t even be depicting him as a hero then. He’s depicted as a hero not because of his powers, but because he uses what he’s got to serve people!

It’s a similar case for all of us too. We do not become fulfilled because we have extraordinary powers, we become ‘great’ because we use our powers to serve humanity!

Thank You,
Yours Loving,
Sanath Kumar Naibhi