With great power comes great responsibility

By Manzi Mugisha Prince.

'With great power comes great responsibility.' These are words from no great philosopher, but from a scene in the 2002 Spiderman movie where Spiderman's uncle Ben was about to die, they are the exact words I will be focusing on today. At that time, the words did not make much sense to me, probably because I was more infuriated by the robber who later murdered Toby's uncle in the movie, so I did not heed them that much. Later, I got the chance to read them and linked these famous last words to everyone's daily life.

When you are born, you are with little to no responsibilities. The best you can do is cry for food and care; you name it. Everything is done to ensure that all your demands are met. Then you join nursery school, you get home with homework, you are expected to do the homework, take a shower, and sleep. We move on to primary school. All I am saying is that the responsibilities get more significant as time goes on. But now, it is a whole different case when you complete high school, and I do not want to get into the details of that. I want to emphasize here that as we keep growing and the responsibilities get bigger, we tend to divert from them instead of working on them.

I want to ask you, what is more, appealing to you? Taking ten minutes to read an article from the newspaper or spending two hours on a T.V series? Now consider what is more beneficial to you after you answer that. Initially, I was not too fond of green foods, and it was always a battle to get me to eat them. Of late, however, I have tried to adopt them into my life. So, did I hate them because I did not know their benefit in my body? Of course not; I knew that they were crucial. I wouldn't say I liked how they tasted (which is bitter, to be sincere). I wanted appealing junky foods. In the long run, what are the side effects? Poor health. The science of the healthy and junky foods can be applied to how we go about our lives.

We are all human beings, and it is in our nature to go after what is more appealing and pleasant. Is it, however, the best for us in the end? I am going to give an example my mentor always gives me. He always asks me who I think is the most successful and well-off person in this country. It is our president, of course. Then he asks me how many hours of sleep I think he has. Come to find out; they are not more than four. He concludes by asking me why I sleep my seven hours then. If this is the case for you, it is because you have not yet found your sense of responsibility. I know responsibility does not lie in your hours of sleep only, but I believe once you have what drives you and pushes you, you will see how the two are intertwined.

What are our takeaways for today, therefore? We all wish for the best and even dream about it. 80% of my readers are familiar with the term 'DREAM BIG.' If you desire big, though, it will be useless if you don't work on it. And how do you work on it? It is through the responsibility I talked about, without forgetting the concept of self-start.