When you stop and think about it really everything in life is the sum of its parts, as one of my favourite bands “The Herd” says “you are the sum of it all”. Everything we do in life adds up to make us the person that we are, ‘The Herd’ pulls together ideas in their track ‘sum of it all’ that discuss the imbalance in modern life that we all face, we are the sum of it all and each and every day we make decisions that make us who we are.

It’s time that people start to ask the question of themselves ‘what is the trade off in your life? What did you pay, what was the price?’ and most importantly was it worth it? We all have dreams and ideas things that give meaning and purpose to our lives, but too often we trade away our dreams to ensure a security in the day to day. Does this lead to the satisfaction that we desire or does the action of compromising erode the core of who we are out from under us? Continual action in this direction appears, in my opinion, to lead to a hollowed out version of ourselves with diminished dreams and goals. This kind of action is encouraged by society as the diminished human is the average human, compromising on your dreams and ideals for the comfort of society leads to a certain uniformity within the community. This is important in some regards as it allows our society to work but in others it results in the loss of the very things that make humanity great.

In science the mantra of the ‘sum of it all’ is just as true, everything I do is the sum of what I know from work that I have done before, the actions and experiments that I do add to the sum of my knowledge and are built on the sum of human knowledge. In order for me to make a useful advance in scientific knowledge I need to take the sum of many experiments and understand the implications of each of them, each experiment is the sum of a series of data points and each data point is derived from the average of a series of repeated measurements. Without the sums involved in this process the results are unreliable and without the complete picture provided by many experiments and many data points the results are uninteresting. Each experiment tells part of a story but it is the sum of it all that leads to the bigger picture. This is the same in life, the actions that you do each day shape and change you to make you the person that you are, we are all the sum of our past. So the question I start to ask myself is do I want these things to be part of who I am? Do I want become what these actions will make me? The question really is what have we paid to get where we are and was it worth the things we had to do along the way?

Tell us what the trade of in your life is and whether you think it was worth it. Let me challenge you that if you don’t think it was to ‘wake up and leg it’ chase after you dreams and grab them with both hands. There are too many people that believe their dreams are out of their reach but the truth of the matter is that we can reach it all you just need to make the right sum of hard work, people and inspiration. So chase after you dreams aim high and let them change as your life goes on, aim to live so that the sum of your life makes you into the person you want to be!

Cheers,
Daniel