We Are All Made By Accidents

at some point all the children who are told they can do anything if they just believe hard enough turn into adults and for the majority of them whose hopes and dreams don't come true the fall back down to reality is oftentimes painful and sometimes lethal like most children felix had been brought up extremely high by this idea in the early part of his life he was told that he could do anything he wanted if he just believed and worked hard enough that he was the sole driver of his successes or lack thereof that he was either going to make it and achieve greatness and worthiness in the world or he was not and in both cases it would be him who was solely responsible or to blame now in his mid-30s having worked a series of jobs in a variety of industries starting in mostly service jobs then going on to different labor and contract jobs and most recently a series of office jobs felix had felt himself falling further and further from the heights of his hopes and dreams approaching in his view the ground floor of failures and losers felix always did his jobs well and with integrity but hated just about all of them like many people he wanted more than a job as a child and teen he formed the deep desire to be famous which he still had not yet shaken growing up in a single parent household with a mother who had to work all the time just to get by felix was both in a somewhat disadvantaged position to become highly successful and famous while simultaneously a position that made it all the more desirable and important to him he wanted greatness he wanted personal ownership and creative distinguishment he wanted independence and legacy he wanted love in the form of wealth and blind public admiration but he had yet to find anything close and his self-worth inextricably linked with his achievements or lack thereof now hung in the balance of his life's aimlessness he felt as though he was an oncoming failure who deserved the title [Music] it's not as if felix had not tried he had tried many things many different ways however everything seemed to just lead to dead ends he was too small and slow for the sports he pursued in high school his attempts at rapping and singing went nowhere and his paintings never sold the only real surviving dream he had left was filmmaking which he had formed as an interest in the middle of high school and held on to ever since however his film projects weren't getting him anywhere either and he couldn't afford much equipment which made it hard to appeal to freelance clients financially and realistically college was also not in the cards for felix and so he couldn't leverage any of the opportunities that might have existed that route either as he aged out of high school further and further into early adulthood and none of his dreams were paying any of the bills he inevitably had to get a more stable income inciting the start of him working more traditional long-term jobs during and following this time though felix continued to pursue his personal goals in film production around his work schedule at around 23 for the first time he saw the beginning of a real potential path forming towards this dream getting hired as an unpaid intern as a weekend filmer for a local tv studio it was at this point that felix planned to double down on his goals of filmmaking and getting into the world of hollywood [Music] one year later however felix's mother was diagnosed with breast cancer fortunately within three years time she would make a full recovery but this monkey wrench of unforeseen financial burden forced felix to refocus his entire attention on better paying regular jobs in order to help support his mother and younger sister during this time soon the majority of his own time would be taken up his free time becoming mostly dedicated to sleeping and preparing for work the occasional off days spent just trying to enjoy the small amount he had with friends and family and so forth even though his mother would go on to recover felix would for all intents and purposes become caught in this routine of life the stress of his work increasingly draining him to the point of almost complete deflation he couldn't help but get further and further into the implications of everything and lose almost all remaining motivation and self-belief finally hitting the ground floor felix would continue on through his life from here working doing his best and living with his wife marie and their dog sammy by his late 30s he had climbed into slightly better job positions making and saving better money and creating an okay life for himself but he was bored tired and entirely unfulfilled by the mindless tedium of it all he loathed himself and he loathed himself for loathing himself knowing that he had it all right and had no excuse it was around this time that he had begun to more seriously consider the idea of ending the whole thing frequently ideating on the notions of failure and pointlessness and the particular extreme conclusion that can sometimes be drawn from such a line of thought one day around this time while cleaning out the gutters on the side of his and his wife's house felix clumsily missed his step on one of the rungs of the ladder and slipped forward off the side falling onto the ground where the yard met the edge of the driveway fortunately the height was fairly low and he fell safely enough to catch himself before landing too awkwardly with exception to a few mild scrapes on the left side of his torso and thigh he was fine a close call perhaps but nothing more it did however strike felix as he got back up and finished the job he thought to himself about how life was funny like that how fragile and malleable it is and can be in one moment everything is one way and then in the next with one small wrong step everything can change and tragedy can strike suddenly felix felt a resurgence of motivation run through his veins scheming in his head a plan of action to getting back into camera work and video production more seriously he imagined and plotted a scenario where he would soon be able to quit his job and go full time on his own pursuing a higher promised land of individual greatness and success a few days later while at his office job felix began to feel a horrible sudden fever becoming terribly fatigued and unable to properly hold himself up it got so bad so quickly his co-workers called 9-1-1 at the hospital it was discovered that felix had mrsa a flesh-eating staph infection while diagnosing the situation it would become evident that the source was those small scrapes he received from the fall off the ladder that minor commonplace injury had in fact exploded into catastrophe the infection spreading through his bloodstream and into other areas of his body the doctor informed him his wife and younger sister that it wasn't clear if he would survive and it might be wise to say anything they might like to say to each other as soon as possible furthermore the doctor went on to say that if he did survive it wasn't clear if he would ever be able to walk talk or function properly as himself again felix immediately underwent two separate back-to-back surgeries in hopes of saving him and removing and repairing as much infected damage as possible despite the high level of uncertainty and doubt felix would survive somehow he came out the other side mostly unscathed in comparison to the expectations a stroke of unbelievable luck according to the doctors and nurses he was essentially as good as before with exception to one thing the infection had gotten into his brain tissue and subsequently his optic nerves now and almost certainly for the rest of his life he was blind once felix returned home and had enough time and space to sufficiently realize what was happening he quickly began to sink into the reality of what he deemed was the final straw of the tragic drama that was his life he realized that he would no longer have any possible chance in doing much of anything especially the one thing he still held some semblance of hope towards he of course could not pursue camera work and filmmaking blind in fact he couldn't really do his regular job anymore either seeing as how it was primarily paperwork and computer files felix thought about how horribly and astonishingly unlucky he was a failure ruined by the gutters tragic poetry he thought felix essentially called it quits on life at this point sinking into his living room couch with no plan to ever get up over the course of the following several months the only thing he could bring himself to do was continue to shrivel into the couch cushions and watch endless marathons of movies of course felix could not watch the movies but he could listen and that's what he did all the time at some point early on he would receive entitlement to social security disability checks each month essentially absolving him from having to work or worry about making money allowing him all the more easily to just continue watching endless amounts of movies focusing on anything or nothing eventually he would run through so many movies good and bad that he began to just re-watch his favorites over and over he watched some of them so many times that he was nearly able to recite the entirety of the dialogue's verbatim while watching despite how strange this little activity of learning the lines of movies was it helped felix keep busy giving him something to do and focus on filling his days with purpose and keeping him from the alternative it eventually got so concentrated and important to him that for several of his favorite movies he actually tried to learn how to play along with the music as well playing the melodies on an old keyboard he was given from his cousin as a hand-me-down gift in elementary school even though he never really played it much as a child or any time after strangely he seemed to pick it up fairly quickly able to almost mimic the melody of the songs in the films with only a small amount of trial and error he found that he could almost feel the music with a certain intuitive clarity knowing exactly where the sounds were even though he didn't know what he was playing or any of the music theory behind it over the following months felix would get better and better adding more instruments and equipment into the mix and learning the entire soundtracks to a number of films he would soon move on to creating his own original pieces playing over scenes that didn't already have music creating songs based on the particular emotion and pacing in different films one year later with the help of his story intriguing the director enough to initially get him in the door felix got his first real break in life selling a collection of background score music to a small production for a series pilot a year later the show took off another year after that felix began working with other similar productions creating more original pieces for small shows ads short films and the like over the following decade felix would find himself evolving through the ranks of hollywood astonishingly becoming a world-renowned famous film score composer for the first time in his life felix felt successful and worthwhile at 58 years old while promoting the premiere of a feature film that he composed the original score for felix was asked to speak as part of the film's press conference panel like he often would at these types of things he introduced himself and shared his story he shared how the unluckiest moment of his life somehow became one of the luckiest that in some strange sense the accident that almost killed him saved him make no mistake he always added the loss of his sight posed a vast array of miserable consequences but without it he would have never discovered his greatness as he put it and he would have never been there on that stage later in the night the conference opened to a q a with the entire audience several questions in one audience member directed one at felix asking i know this might sound strange to ask but based on what you said earlier do you think as though losing your vision gave you the ability to make music like this and it was sort of almost lucky and if so what role do you think luck plays in success in general felix took a moment and thought to himself before answering grunting out loud to signify that he had to briefly think about it sort of pressured by the need to say something he began thinking out loud you know i know my story can sometimes come off as a typical hopes and dreams always come true kind of thing that everything always works out but it isn't and it doesn't not really people up here are typically supposed to say those sorts of things and people up here seem to often believe those sorts of things because of course the world is always fair to those who win but my case is somewhat unusual this sort of hybrid lucky tragedy of losing my vision can for the most part be clearly pointed to as the cause of my discovery of musical posing and my eventual being up here but it was an accident if it wasn't for that misstep on the ladder none of this would have happened for me and i think far more often than we'd like to admit we are all pushed and pulled by accidents equally as significant as mine but far less obvious or apparent if at all we are rarely aware of or accounting for the good or bad luck in our stories because it's never really something we do or see i've obviously thought a lot about this and i realized that bad luck isn't just what happens to us but also what doesn't and we never know about it and likewise so is good luck so in that sense i would say yes in some strange way i am lucky and luck does play a big role in one success but at the same time the ability to do this to be a successful music composer was inside me the whole time the potential energy of my success and skill was just sitting there waiting to be made kinetic by the random variables of the world and my personal circumstances and so it's really both luck and skill i would say because of course no one ever succeeds in anything hard by not trying not having talent and not working hard one has to have all of those and have them in order to have any shot at all but plenty of people who work hard have talent and try their best never succeed in any grand thing luck only finds those who work hard and or are talented but it doesn't find all those who are or do and i think this is important to realize because if i'm in large part to credit my being here tonight to the arbitrary circumstances of my accident then how can i have been totally and personally to blame for not having been here before my accident or if my accident never occurred in truth the majority of us are going to live an ordinary life never knowing precisely where the good and bad luck lurks but having been blind for the second half of my life now it is clear to me that an ordinary healthy life is just as noble and worthwhile work hard try your best and enjoy the good fortune if it comes your way but don't depend on it and don't think if it doesn't you are somehow less worthy or solely to blame i see that now felix gestured with a slight head nod to the crowd to indicate that now he was finished thank you so much for watching for anyone interested there is now a brand new line of pursuit of wonder merch available on pursuitofwonder.com this line includes a hoodie a crew neck and a long sleeve tee featuring a realist approach to our classic brain blender tee additionally two poster collections inspired by the original artwork and ideas featured on the pursuit of wonder instagram are now also available again if you're interested you can find everything new and previously existing at pursuitofwonder.com or by clicking the link in the description below if you like any of the items and do choose to purchase anything thank you sincerely in advance the support means a great deal and of course thank you so much for watching in general and see you next video

Channel: Pursuit of Wonder

Views: 170,823

Rating: 4.9587231 out of 5

Keywords: pursuit of wonder, school of life, success, failure, loser, losers, ordinary life, simple life, good life, lucky, luck, nova effect, the tragedy of good luck, short story, animated story, ted, ted ed, how to, inspiration, inspire, motivate, motivation

Id: u0Gj87Qhux4

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020