I learnt this from Chad…

As the topic infers, I learnt something crucial from the life of Chadwick Boseman, or more specifically, from a particular occurrence in his life.

As an introduction, I have learnt something from every major life event and from every situation which resonates deeply with me. That’s a sort of burden that I have been destined to carry. Whenever something good or bad happens, it seems as though I am made to see the lessons while or immediately after I celebrate or mourn the situation. My onus is to share these lessons with as many as are interested.

I promise you; I will try very hard not to be a bore.

The day after the passing of Chadwick Boseman — or Chad, as we used to fondly call him — an occurrence which has thrown the entire social media into an uproar and has kids, young adults and full-grown adults alike mourning the fall of one of our most darling ‘superheroes’, I saw a video on the ’Gram. In it, Boseman was called to receive his MTV Award for ‘Best Hero’, possibly for his sterling execution of the Black Panther character in the movie. Amidst deafening applause and hoorah-ing, he happily skipped to the stage, waved to all and called on a certain James Shaw Junior.

Personally, I don’t know this guy, and I’m suspecting that except you practically live on CNN or just Google’d him, you don’t either.

Long story short, The Boseman, while holding on to his plaque, called James to stand with him, spoke of his heroic act of fighting off a gunman in Tennessee, thereby, saving lives; and handed over his award to James Shaw Junior as being more deserving.

Now, personally, after reading Chad’s story and recently, knowing that he gave us so many great movies while fighting colon cancer, I consider him to be a hero already.

You can’t tell me nothing. Guy’s a hero.

But the selfless act of shining the spotlight on someone else just got me.

Now while all of what I’ve said so far is great for laying a foundation, here’s where I’m actually headed with this.

Some of us are designed to thrive where others will see. Some of us are designed to thrive where others won’t see.

I don’t think I phrased that quite right. I’m a Christ-believer so I’m going to phrase this in such a way that you get my perspective even better.

Here’s the meat: “For some people, their GOD-given gifts put them right at the forefront, smack in the limelight. For others, their GOD-given gifts put them in the background, where you probably need to light a candle or a torch to really see how they are touching lives, where there is no applause or loud recognition given.”

Now you are probably thinking about how unfair it is for the people who have to work undetected. Oftentimes, these people who have gifts that thrive in unseen places seem to be the ones laden with the ‘dirty work’; the grime-y part of the work which, most times, are directly or indirectly saving lives.

A relatable basic example of this would be the work of a back-end developer and that of a user interface designer of a platform. Not a lot of people understand the import of the work that the back-end person has to do, talking about setting up impenetrable firewalls, ensuring round the clock security against hackers, and all the other complex coding stuff that is the foundation without which the platform would undoubtedly crumble. However, you and I log in to the system and what captures our attention first, is the beauty of the platform, skilfully designed by the User Interface designer.

Now, imagine a scenario where a back-end expert sees people seriously gushing over the work of the UI expert and thinks, “Okay, I’ve had enough. I am the star of this show and I deserve to be seen. I’m done building firewalls and secure servers. I want to be seen. It’s time to pick up some UI design skills.”

Guess the number of users that platform is about to lose as a result of insecurity and a horrible user-experience?

You guessed right.

In the same way, if our metaphorical User Interface expert decides that he’d rather do the work of the back-end guy because it looks much cooler as he gets to keep off the bad guys… now I don’t know about you, but I cannot abide ugly looking apps or websites…

In every system, all parts count.

Ever tried using your laptop with a key missing from the keyboard? The height of frustration that you will experience as a result is unprecedented, trust me. Individuals who use a touch-screen laptop may freely leave the group chat for this one.

Seriously though, all parts count. Organisations — religious, professional, political and educational — who understand this or make this their mantra are more likely to thrive than those who don’t.

Now, here’s my landing pad, and I really hope that it’s been a great flight:

Everyone can be a hero, and there is no hero more special than any other. I am an avid follower of the series ‘The Good Doctor’ and watching it, I constantly marvel at the genius and selflessness of medical practitioners — I’m talking about the parts where they were actually being doctors, not when they were all swoony-eyes and kissy-faces.

Notwithstanding where your gift(s) have you functioning, know that no one’s gift is more special than another’s.

What matters the most, should your gift place you at the foreground or background, is that you are actually working for good, and not just performing for applause or recognition.

Maybe what you need to do is take a couple of steps backwards to understand the impact that you could be making by committing to apply yourself to your work. And I’m telling you, you will get an epiphany, and that epiphany will bring you to an astounding conclusion:

You count. The whole part would suffer without your unique input. You are the best version of you that there could ever be and your gift is the best version of it that there could be.

The show is over. You can now stop the performance and get right down to business because, believe it or not, destinies are counting on you — though they may not even know it (NO PRESSURE).

Limelight or not, you matter, as does what you have to give.

Ever imagined what our lives would even look (smell) like if we had no one to take out our trash and recycle it?

Yet we spend half the time looking down on people who do this job, convinced that what we have to do matters more than what they are doing. Without the contribution of the heroes who carry out our trash, and of the heroes who recycle it, we would be living in trash!

Our lives would be a literal, trashy junk!

If your gift puts you in the limelight, you can borrow a page from Chad’s book; you can decide to be selfless and put the light on your contemporaries backstage every now and then. Don’t hog it all. This also adds meaning to your life and helps keep you grounded.

Better still, in doing so, you are humbly submitting and acknowledging that there is something, SOMEONE, far greater than you, who is responsible for your genius.

And that is most definitely, not a bad thing.

I’ll conclude with the following — non-Christians, please read it with an unbiased mind, and see how it may apply to you:

“God works in different ways, but it is the same God who does the work in all of us.”

“But our bodies have many parts, and God has put each part just where He wants it.”

“In fact, some parts of the body that seem weakest and least important are actually the most necessary, and the parts we regard as less honourable are those we clothe with the greatest care, so we carefully protect those parts that should not be seen…”

“If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it, and if one part is honoured, all the parts are glad.”