The Rose That Grew From Concrete

Transcript

Welcome beautiful thinkers.

I’d like to talk about the rose that grew from the concrete.

Now some of you might know this poem by Tupac Amaru Shakur and it goes:

Did you hear about the rose that grew

from a crack in the concrete?

Proving nature’s law is wrong it

learned to walk with out having feet.

Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams,

it learned to breathe fresh air.

Long live the rose that grew from concrete

when no one else ever cared.

Now I know there’s a certain cognitive bias a lot of the time when we meet people, we might not be aware they have a past. We might just see them for what they are in the present and think they have always been this ambitious, kind, composed, confident or whatever it is. 

It is hard to see, hard to use those penetrating eyes and discernment to guess what a person must have been like to become the person they are today.

And of course we meet so many wonderful and interesting people.  I think a lot about the interview I did with Derrick Broze. A lot of people might see him as a leader, public speaker and accomplished event planner, an investigative journalist and documentary film maker among other things.

You might not realize just a few years ago he was at the lowest point of his life and in prison strung out on drugs, perhaps in some way the way he is today is because of the adverse experiences he had.

They form a complete picture.  Maybe if we do look a little closer we might see these little tics in someone we might see the remnants of the past.

If you look at me you might notice there’s this introvert that is still there even though I’ve tried so hard to become more confident, a better speaker and all these things. These parts of our past still remain.

In some interviews Tupac did make a note of this and he said “so many people want to criticize, they want to look at that rose that grew from the concrete and be like look the petals aren’t perfectly formed.  They might be deformed, they might be a little dirty. 

But if they could for the moment see the deeper context and see the history of the rose that grew from the concrete they would surely be amazed that someone could have done so much with so little to defy the obstacles.

In what way are you like the rose that grew from the concrete?