Not long ago, on my way to Boston, I was thinking of an article I called “Just Before You Kill Your Wife.” At STOP signs, traffic lights, hold ups, I would get a pen and scribble few lines that came to my mind that I might forget by the time I get to Boston. At a Rest Place, I stopped the car and wrote a page.

Then all of a sudden, I was overcome by the same struggle. I told myself, “You know what, I give up writing. I won’t do it again. Never. Not even an email.” It was strange because one of my greatest quotes had been “Men don’t fail, they only give up trying.” Unlike before, I was not worried that it is easier to say I quit than to actually quit. It helped to know that only one person would be disappointed to hear that. Many would actually pop champagne in celebration.

Then I thought about the article I was writing. I told myself that all I had read about men killing their wives in America none had looked like what I was writing. One mind said to me that if I do not write again, my voice would be silenced and nobody would write the kind of thing I write. Then, another voice immediately said to me that the world would continue very well without my voice.

Then I got to Boston and told my friend, Obeke Johnson, “Let us go and see ‘In Pursuit of Happyness.”

It was my first time in a movie theatre since Lord of the Ring (Part 1).

At that scene where Will Smith’s character, Chris, was playing basketball with his son, I had my epiphany. Chris had said to his son that he would just be an average basketball player like himself or a little bit more but would not amount to anything. Disappointed, his son threw the ball away and refused to play anymore. In a reflective moment, Chris said to his son, “Don’t ever let somebody tell you you can’t do something, not even me… You got a dream, you gotta protect it… if you want something, go get it. Period.”

If we calibrate the obstacle Chris faced in the movie, spreading it through one to ten, people like me would give up at point three.

I walked out of the theater and told myself that what I had been doing all these years was fighting to protect my dream. Then I made a resolution that “I will always protect my dream and I will not let anyone tell me that I cannot achieve my dream, including myself.”

Protect your dream for when your dream dies, so dies that thing that makes you special. And you don’t want to be ordinary. Ordinary is not something you become, it is something you already are.

In the words of the Dean Witter Intern Coordinator in the movie, “Some of you here think you are somebody. Some of you think you will be somebody. But only one of you is somebody.”

I am somebody.