University of Tennessee Athletics
Dwight's Insight: Seed of Greatness
September 26, 2011 | Men's Basketball
Sept. 26, 2011
I always try to tweet things as soon as possible after they come to mind. I started doing that after reading Russell Simmons' book Do You. I do not remember the exact quote from the book, but I remember his point of emphasis where he said, "There is no such thing as a `bad idea.' Any idea is good because you thought of it, and your mind is more beautiful than anything that you could ever imagine."
Those were not his exact words, but my interpretation; that is the beautiful thing about the mind, you can dream up anything you want to be and be it, if you really want to achieve that. Many people don't give themselves credit because they feel as if their ideas are not valuable. But I pose this question to them: What if no one had ever imagined the telephone, school, alternate transportation or even a fork and a spoon? What if God never had the idea to create us? Perhaps the greatest gift that God gave us was the ability to reason and imagine.
Any man or woman who has ever been great may have a lot of things in common on the surface, but what people take for granted is the fact that they were great because they decided to wander away from the status quo of society in search of a nirvana and enlightenment of their own. The best way to grow a tree of greatness is to first plant one tiny seed--an idea. The mind is so amazing in that it can take that one tiny, barely visible seed and turn it into a network of greatness.
The movie Inception explored this idea, and many people let the lesson fly completely over their heads. I didn't always know that I wanted to be a basketball player, but I did know from the day I was born that all I wanted to be was great because my mother and other people around me planted that seed and spoke it into my life--a great servant, a great man, a great father, a great teacher, a great listener, etc. I knew that once I strived for greatness, then everything else would come to me in a matter of time. This is the beauty of life.
Albert Einstein was a great man, credited for many contributions to science, in particular, his theory of relativity. But the real genius of Einstein is the fact that he said, "My ability to imagine is much greater to me than my ability to absorb absolute knowledge." When you think about it, all of the knowledge we absorb daily is really the product of someone's imagination that gained worldwide acclaim and recognition. Radical ideas have shaped the world from the invention of the wheel to the invention of the Internet. Unfortunately, not many people are willing to withstand the scrutiny involved when it comes to introducing a new idea to a world that already thinks it has it all figured out.
Go Vols! Dwight Miller
Follow Dwight on Twitter at @dmiller242.
Check out Dwight's previous blog entries
Sept. 20: Student of Life
Sept. 12: Endangered Species
Sept. 2: Football Time
Aug. 27: Welcome to Tennessee
