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The Giants We Chase

In this episode, The Gleam Within

We grow up steeped in fairy tales and grand mythologies. From a young age, we are taught to scan the horizon for the hero—the knight, the savior, the titan who will arrive to make sense of the world. We marvel at the mountains' beauty and nature's majesty, yet, as the old wisdom goes, "we pass over the mystery of ourselves without a single thought."

I remember being the little guy from a small town in rural Illinois, looking up at the world and seeing only Giants. I would listen to Earl Nightingale’s Our Changing World broadcasts, mesmerized by the towering figures of success and intellect he described. When you feel small, you naturally seek out those Giants for a glimpse of their light—hoping some of it might rub off on you, preferably without having to do whatever it was they did to earn it.

In 1985, while I was earning my G.G. credential, I met Richard T. Liddicoat, the Patriarch of GIA. To everyone in the industry, he was the Father of Modern Gemology. When he signed my copy of his Handbook of Gem Identification, he wrote: "With best wishes to Patrick Ball for a successful career in Gemology." I was profoundly grateful. At the time, it felt like more than a signature—it felt like authorization. As if success might now be official, notarized in ink.

Over the years, I collected more of these talismans—apparently under the impression that enough signed books might eventually assemble themselves into a personality. When Lori and I became members of the Crystal Cathedral, Robert Schuller penned the words, "Welcome to the family today!" In the winter of 1988, Zig Ziglar signed a book for me with a verse from Romans. In those moments, I was looking to these men to validate my place in the world—like wisdom might be something handed out between handshakes and book signings.

But looking back, the magic wasn't in the signatures of giants. When Richard Liddicoat wished me a successful career, he wasn't handing me a gift; he was simply pointing to the potential to become an educator that was already there.

As I continued to absorb Nightingale's core message—that we become what we think about—the illusion of looking outward began to fade. We spend so much of our lives waiting for a giant to hand us a pen, as if clarity were distributed at conferences between coffee breaks, failing to realize, of course, that we’ve been holding our own the entire time.

As William James, the father of American psychology, so profoundly observed:

"The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes."

The Giants we so deeply revere do not possess a magic formula; they have simply mastered their own thoughts. Yet we continue to glorify individuals, movements, or deities while ignoring the quiet, profound intellect within our own minds. Today, we don’t just look for giants—we follow them, like them, and occasionally argue with them in the comments.

Ralph Waldo Emerson perfectly captured this tragedy of self-dismissal in his essay Self-Reliance:

"A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his."

The hero we spend our childhoods looking for isn't riding in on a white horse, nor are they waiting behind a podium with a pen to sign your book. The hero is found in that sudden, unprompted flash of intuition, the quiet confidence of your own lived experience, and the unique method of your own mind.

It is time we stop dismissing our own thoughts simply because they are ours. Catch that gleam of light. The world doesn't need you to find another giant; it needs you to trust the wisdom you've been carrying all along.

This is On the Fly. Stay curious, ask questions. I’m Patrick Ball. See you next time.

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