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Disclaimer: Berserk and its related characters and situations belong to Miura Kentarou, not me. I'm not making any money, from this or anything else, so suing me would really be a waste of your time. C&C is ALWAYS appreciated; flames will be cheerfully used to roast marshmallows. Every man should have a dream. All my life I have been driven by ambition, by a need to become something better than my lot in life had decreed. I have a dream, a dream in which a man can rise above his status, can change his life through determination and perseverence. I have a vision that encompasses all the world and everyone in it. Many call me arrogant. Others say I am greedy. Perhaps. I am as human as any other, and I have flaws. But what they call 'arrogance' I call confidence in my own ability, and I have found that those who shout of greed in others are most frequently those who stand to lose something to the 'greedy' person. I do not understand how others can exist without a dream that fires their soul and makes them burn with yearning. How bleak and dreary their lives must be. How hopeless their very existence. You achieve that which you strive for, and nothing more. If you strive for nothing, then you become nothing. Your dreams define the shape of the man you will become. As a child I struggled always to be stronger, faster, smarter than everyone around me. I frequently failed, of course. But rather than allowing failure to defeat me, I learned from my mistakes and continued to struggle to improve myself. I had a dream for myself, and failure was not an option. The only true failure, I learned, was the failure to keep trying. Not to say that lesser failures do not eat at me, for they do. I am fiercely competative by nature, and I do not take well to losing. Yet even this benefits my ambitions, for as a result of my loathing of failure I have learned both how to plan ahead, and how to be flexible in my plans to accomodate the unexpected reactions of my opponents. This is what makes me such a good tactician and strategist, and what has allowed me to be so successful as a general. Let others hold to their rigid battle structures, their tactics full of formations and centuries of tradition. My troops are flexible, my tactics more so, and we have all learned to think in unconventional ways. All because I have a dream and I refuse to fail. Your dreams guide you on the path to your destiny. Every man has a destiny. I believe this with all my heart. Some destinies may be greater than others, but every man has one, and it is something above that which he started with. But destiny is not something that happens to you regardless of your actions. Destiny is something you must work towards, that you must earn with your actions and efforts. If you are a farmer's son, and you do nothing with your life but follow in your father's footsteps despite your own desires to break away and do more, then you will remain a farmer all your life. Who knows what you could have accomplished, if you had only followed the call of your heart and tried to reach your destiny? Some people do not want anything more out of life than that which they were given to start with. I do not understand these people, and yet I recognize that the world needs them. After all, if we did not have farmers and labourers and the like, our lives would fall apart very quickly. I have come to believe that such people are a necessary foundation upon which people like myself can build. A building without a foundation will surely fall to ruins, after all. And so I use them, and I appreciate them, even though I pity them for their lack of vision. Your dreams give you the strength to overcome obstacles in your path. Almost everyone would like for their lives to be better, to be improved for some way. They will reach out for this improvement, and they will inevitably meet an obstacle. Because their desire for what they are reaching for is only a want, and not a need, they will conclude that the obstacle is too much effort for the want to be worth it. A man with a true dream, with a vision that drives him, with a desire so strong he can taste it, will not let anything stand in his path. My plans for the future are the last thing I think of each night, and the first thing on my mind every morning. Everything I do is designed to further my ambitions in some way. If I meet an obstacle I cannot overcome directly, then I will plan until I find away around it. I will not give up, no matter what thwarts me, and so I will inevitably succeed in the end. If you simply refuse to stop trying, and allow yourself to learn from your mistakes, you can accomplish anything. Your dreams will attract those who will help you to achieve them. People are drawn to a man with a vision. This has been proven again and again throughout history. Empires have risen or fallen on the strength of one man's charisma. People say that I am charismatic, and so others are drawn to me. I say that I have a vision and a purpose, and so those with no vision and no purpose will adopt mine as their own in order to give their life meaning. I took a ragtag band of theives and turned them into an army of legend. They will be singing ballads of the Taku no Dan for decades, perhaps centuries to come. Nearly every one of my commanders would have been laughed out of any other army; but I saw the potential within and with the strength of my vision I guided them from rough cut stones to shining gems that are the envy of every general in the land. Guts, my prize possession, the one man I would do anything to keep by my side. He alone has done more to further my ambitions than the rest of my entire army. I would be lost without him. Caska, who would have been nothing more than another abused peasant drudge, is now a shining light of intelligence and determination. She would do anything for me, to help further my dream. Judeau, Rickert, Corkus, Pippin... all of them fight for me, for my dream, for my ambition. Your dreams will raise you above the crowd and set you apart. Once I thought that in my efforts to rise above my lot in life, I would surely encounter others like me. Other men who had ambition, purpose, vision. Other men who understood the need to do whatever was necessary to achieve those dreams. I assumed some would have dreams that opposed mine, and so become my deadliest enemies; but I also thought there would be those whose dreams coincided with mine, who would become my truest friends. Instead I have discovered that I walk alone, or nearly so. I have never met another who shares my intrinsic belief in the necessity of using dreams to guide your life, of the ability of a man to change who he was born to be. Some have great ambitions, but lack the intelligence or determination to reach them, and so they fall by the wayside. They do not truly understand. Others reach for only those dreams they believe they can achieve, and do not stretch themselves to accomplish more than the world would have them believe they ever could. They do not truly understand either. Still others create dreams based on my own, allowing them to follow me and be caught up in the wake of my vision, carried along to victory. They come close to understanding, but do not truly reach it. And the vast majority of people simply do not dream at all. The ability to dream, to strive and reach beyond your limits, is what truly sets Man apart from the animals. 'The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer,' people say, as if to comfort themselves. This is true because people allow it to be true, by continuing to follow the patterns which caused it to be so in the first place. If you do nothing to reach beyond the circumstances you were born into, if you do not strive to change your life, then of course nothing will change. How can it be otherwise? The cycle will continue unbroken, unchallenged. 'Successful people are lucky people, and I just never got any breaks'. Luck has nothing to do with it... what others perceive as 'luck' is simply a determination to continue to search for a break until you find one. If you refuse to give up, eventually you WILL encounter a 'break' that will allow you to continue to rise. Never give up, never take 'no' for an answer, never believe that any decision is truly final. Every man should have a dream. Without a dream, there is only despair. Without a dream, there is no hope that the future will ever be better. Without a dream, you are nothing more than what you started as. I do not understand how anyone can live like that, and I never will. | |
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