March week 3 post 1

The Rise of Awesome

By Robert Lane Greene

Central Argument: As we and the world around us evolves the way we perceive different things changes.

Robert Lane Greene’s article The Rise of “Awesome” is more than just about the word awesome its about the change that takes places in the world between two time periods. The world in which we live has been and continues to change as time passes; with this our own ideas and mindsets change as well. Women's right is a big change that took place not too long ago, there used to be a time when women were not allowed to vote and now there are a number of countries in which a woman holds a position of power. Sports is also an area were a lot of change has taken place, as a couple centuries ago people were only amateur sports men and took part in it as a hobby however now sports has oped up a lot of careers where people get paid a ton of money for being professional athletes. Aside from these there are also various changes in mindset that took place within you itself.

Up until the early 1920’s the mindset about women was pretty much that they are meant to stay in the house, do the chores and raise the kids. This is no more the case in most of the world today, as now women can be found in all walks of life from the factories to the business offices. In some countries they also hold positions of power with in the government such as in Australia where the prime minister, Julia Gillard, was elected in 2010. This is a major change from the idea of a woman doing the chores in a house to one running a developed country such as Australia. 

Being a professional athlete is a fairly new career option when comparing against the like of say an astrologist or physicist who have been around for millenniums. Being a professional athlete however was not considered a career option until very recently and now it could be considered one of the highest paying careers, at least for the elites of a particular sport. Before this career option opened up people considered sports to be nothing more than a hobby and most probably any person who thought about only playing sports for the rest of their life was considered to be a quitter as he did not need to receive a degree of some kind.

Some people might believe that their own mindset does not change, this unfortunately for them is not true. A simple example of a changing mindset is when as a kid you were told and therefore believed that babies were delivered by storks. However as you grew older you found out about childbirth and so your outlook on the subject changed. Another such example would be in the belief of say Santa Clause or the Tooth Fairy who in reality do not exist but as a kid you firmly believed that they existed and brought you presents on different occasions.

The above stated ideas are just some that have changed over time, but are enough to show that our perspective changes as the the world and we continue to evolve and change. Greene also believes the same thing as portrayed in his article, he just happened to be able to condense the whole idea and relate it to the word awesome.