I have never heard of this word in all my years as an English student, until a few months ago.
I applied at a portfolio school inside the U.S. called Miami Ad School (MAS), it was awesome because I learned a lot of how an account planner should function and how our minds, feelings, thoughts and ideas are all connected to the shopping process.
During one of many workshops I've been at MAS, I heard this word for the first time and since then it kept haunting my mind, because it sounds so good and its meaning is incredibly beautiful.
For anyone who doesn’t know what it means, according to the Merriam Webster online dictionary, it’s “to grow vigorously (flourish) or to gain in wealth or possessions (prosper)”. It’s fun to think about thriving in a world as complicated as the one we live in, because there’s a lot of unemployment, violence and an epidemic in the lack of empathy between each other. Some days we are right in feeling this way, and a lot of people who talk about positiveness and success, usually forget to mention it, we need to feel bad, fail and feel as hell in order to be happy, because happiness comes when we overcome struggles, not when we succeed. It's the road, not the destination.
We deserve to feel bad and properly say " I feel so fucking bad today" or "I'm having a shitty day", because it’s part of what it takes to thrive, knowing, understanding and accepting that bad days will come, and that tomorrow will be a better one, but also accepting that mistakes, failing, all that "crap", It's crucial in the road to thrive.
One of my teachers at the MAS bootcamp articulated this word, I don’t remember who was it, but it gave my life a meaning. In all our years living, this is what most of us are looking for, but why is it, that the vast majority of us never quite reach it? I haven’t thrived yet, guess I’m on my way to determine on which side I will end up, hopefully on the minority, but leaving aside my road ahead, I wonder if we as individuals will ever be able to identify which decisions are leading us towards the right road? Asking questions about how to live is a requirement for being alive, but nowadays introspectiveness is like finding a Giraffe in the wild, very unlikely. My life is full of blessings that are taking part of my thriving process, and I always try to make my days a plethora of positiveness, is hard to stay that way without a professional path to follow, being unemployed and not able to "show off" my skills, has been one of the hardest emotional challenges I’d have to go through, but life prepared me for this; Being patient and fighting is my only choice. I know that someday someone will notice me, and deposit his/her faith on what I'm capable of doing.
I know what some of you may think, "Nowadays entrepreneurship is the new trend, just be a freelancer or something", but before ‘swimming in that pool’, I want to meet someone that shares their knowledge about business and life with me, I need to learn better to be better at life, I need a mentor, and that someone is out there in the street, in some advertising agency, a marketing department or even a film production company, I don’t know where, but he/she is out there, and that person may give me the tools I need to keep on thriving.
Life is also a compilation of advices, and experiences from ourselves and others, and getting to thrive in life is not an exception.
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