40+FAB Blog
The statue of David
There is a famous sculpture by the artist Michelangelo of the biblical character David, who killed Goliath. The statue which stands at over 17 feet tall was sculpted from a large marble rock which was discarded by two previous artists before Michelangelo finally found it and created the masterpiece. Over the last 500 years, millions of visitors have gazed upon the sheer magnificence of this piece of work.
When lauded for his talent to create the sculpture, Michelangelo said the statue was already in there, locked behind the slab of marble rock, and he had only released it through years of hard work chipping away at the rough edges. It took Michelangelo a while to discover that stone which became the statue, it took great insight on his part to see the form in the formless, and it took great perseverance to work at it until it became what he had seen. That stone on the other hand waited for years, decades, centuries and possibly even millennia for someone to discover it and release the potential that was always in it.
Our life could be described as a mass of potential, just like that stone, but the one difference is that most times, we are blessed with a vision of what our future could be, so we don’t have to wait for years for someone else to spot the potential in us. We can begin to chip away at our own rough edges as we look out for great artists, I mean mentors, who we can place our potential with and together unravel the greatest of forms that would make the world around us marvel at what we have become.
