Just One Joey: Have You Got The Minerals?

If you are not a fan of the 2001 Guy Ritchie movie, Snatch, or from England, you may have no idea what I am talking about.

Have you got the minerals?

If it was filmed in America, the question would have been, “do you have the balls?”

I think minerals is much more fitting.

If you look throughout history, the greatest triumphs have come through adversity, pressure, no win situations. We are drawn to them because the parties involved remind us of us. They are a normal person just like you and me, yet they were able to accomplish, produce, and endure so much.

How do they do it?

Could I do it?

Do I have the minerals for something great?

Just like the most precious stones, extreme situations can bring out something we didn’t even know was possible.

Common minerals, pushed, crushed, heated up, cooled down, tossed and turned, chewed up and spit out in the most unbearable situations on the planet produce some of it’s most valuable gems.

Diamonds. Pearls. Rubies. Sapphires.

What does pressure do to you?

How do you handle heat?

What do you do when you are faced with adversity? With chaos? With a situation that melts

everything else around you?

Do you melt with it?

Or do you become something precious?

Shine Bright Like A Diamond

The most valuable natural resources on the planet are nothing but minerals.

Nothing special.

Barely worth their weight.

Maybe you feel like you are nothing special.

Maybe you feel like you are worthless.

But what if you dug deep and found out what you were really made of?

After all, precious stones aren’t anything until they are put under extreme conditions.

The pressure, the heat, and the time cause a complete meltdown of everything around them, but not them.

They have the right minerals.

Those ordinary, common, minerals become diamonds, pearls, rubies, and sapphires. Precious stones worth thousands, millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars. Used to symbolize love, show appreciation, and admire greatness. They are the minerals of kings, and the treasure of queens. The trophies of champions, and the symbols of power.

From nothing to something.

With a little help from life.

Which Mineral Are You?

A Diamond?

It starts as nothing more than an exhale. We give it away 24 hours a day, just breathing. Carbon Dioxide. That’s it. This overly abundant gas, when buried deep in the earth, heated up to 2,200 degrees, squeezed under 725,000 pounds of pressure per square inch, and then thrusted to the earth’s surface to cool, becomes a diamond.

You may think of yourself as ordinary, but what have you overcome? What are you going through now that you are going to overcome?

What does the pressure feel like? Can you take it?

Can you handle 725,000 pounds of pressure? Are you having to handle it right now?

Will you melt down, like all of the others minerals around you? Like other minerals would in your situation? Or are you ready to push to the surface, and let the world see the diamond that have become.

From carbon dioxide to the hardest and most beautiful mineral on earth.

It didn’t break you. It brushed away the ordinary and exposed the extraordinary.

Is it work? Home? Kids? Bills?

You decide how to react. You aren’t like a diamond. You are better. You decide.

What is the pressure? The heat? Is it drinking? Drugs? Gambling? Cheating?

Use it for good. Use it to make yourself better. Remember this pressure, this unbearable heat. Remind yourself of the time you were buried. It didn’t stop you.

And if you are buried right now, focus on coming to the surface. Absorb the heat and pressure, use it to build yourself up.

This is your opportunity for greatness.

This is your success story.

Don’t let it pass by, claiming that the pressure was too much. It is situations like yours that they write novels about, make movies of. Show them you can take it. You are a diamond. Shine bright.

A Pearl?

It all starts with irritation, usually a parasite. It somehow found it’s way in.

How familiar does that sound?

Not everyone can take it. In order for an oyster, mussel or clam to turn this parasite in to something spectacular, it has to be mature.

How familiar does that sound?

You starting to see the connection?

Think of all the things you couldn’t handle when you were younger that you can handle now. Things you learned to deal with, things that don’t irritate you anymore. That only comes through maturity.

Things do not develop overnight. Part of your maturity is the ability to endure over time. It takes 3 years for an irritant to become a pearl. Have you had to endure something for a long period of time?

That takes maturity. That takes patience. The younger you couldn’t have handled it. Hell, there are people that are older than you that couldn’t handle it now! Maturity is not an age, it’s a mindset.

Are you a pearl?

Can you take that irritant, that parasite, and embrace it, cover it, endure it for years, and turn it in to a pearl?

Or are you..

A Ruby/Sapphire?

Rubies and sapphires are made exactly the same. One is red and one is blue. I know the red and blue part (obviously) but not the fact that they were created in the same process. The only difference being chromium for the red, and titanium and iron for the blue.

They go through just as much, are just as precious, but look different.

Think about that for a second.

The common belief is that rubies and sapphires were formed by tectonic plates smashing together, forcing limestone deposits deep in to the earth where the intense heat and pressure metamorphosed the limestone in to sparkly marble. Then molten granite bubbled up in to the marble and metasomatised the stone, leaving behind the gems.

Whew.

Tectonic plates?

Worlds colliding. Earthquakes. Destruction. Fire. Lava. Pushing, pulling, and burying. Then comes

the heat, then comes the pressure, and before it cools down, even more heat.

Has your world fallen apart? Did it feel like it at least? Does it feel like it now?

Did it seem like it would never end? The pressure and heat, coming from all directions, one after the

next?

Maybe you are a ruby.

Maybe you are a sapphire.

Please Take This Away

Bad situations are the breeding grounds for greatness.

Think of what these precious stones would be without the pressure, without the heat, they would be nothing.

If you have gone through something or are going through something, recognize what it can do for you. It can make you the hardest, most beautiful, precious gem on this planet.

Take that thing, that pressure, that irritant, that heat, and use it.

You have the minerals.