“It-getters” is what a good friend of mine by the name of Isaiah calls them. Usually followed up with an “It’s just people who get it ya know?”. I’m guessing you’re a little confused by now but if you stop and think about it you already know what he means. My own personal interpretation of this intrinsic knowledge we all seem to already know is that it’s people with common sense. It’s people who understand what you’re saying before you say it. It’s the people who can put themselves in your shoes for the duration of the conversation and truly understand the meaning behind what you’re saying as it comes out of your mouth. I find myself gravitating towards these people naturally; interacting without effort. These conversations will seem to flow naturally as if they’re actually listening before they try to think of their responses.
Does that make these people next generation humans? These people are probably not consciously making the decision to be this way. They may strive to strengthen certain human traits that could add to this for them, but they probably aren’t actively trying to be an it-getter. I wish I could create a list of traits and attributes that comprise people of this nature however I don’t believe it can be boiled down to a list of requirements so-to-speak. I believe to be qualified as a person of this nature they can have many different combinations of traits and attributes. So how does one end up having a mindset they never actively tried to obtain?
The same way every other person ends up the way they do. We can boil it down to nature versus nurture if you want to get philosophical but I’m going to believe that this happens based on the nature side of the equation. I am now going to try to explain how a person ends up here and I’m just going to take a wild guess and say that if you’re on this blog reading this article you may relate to this more so than most. Let’s take a journey through a thought experiment for a minute and I’ll let you decide if this applies to you or if this applies to those you surround yourself with.
Think way back as far as you can remember, deep into your childhood to start. You faced some sort of adversity in life that most didn’t have to face. Maybe your parents were split (or like me where one may have passed away). This caused life to take a different path than the stereotypical American household family. Maybe money came from multiple sources or maybe you had more family in your household to help with things than a typical two parent family. This meant when you started to grow into social situations such as school or going to the park with friends that others had a different perspective than you. By this I mean that when you brought up certain topics like holidays, sports, or family traditions they had drastically different expectations and experiences than you had. This made you start to hesitate when discussing these topics because you quickly realized you were different than them. This doesn’t have to be in a negative way either. Perhaps this just made you curious, determined, or even aware. But regardless of how you felt, you still realized life was different for you at a younger age. Sometimes this could be referred to as a child who had to “grow up early” or is just simply “mature for their age”. Perhaps you had older siblings as well or could have been the older sibling which meant when you came home after these different perspectives were displayed to you, you knew that you could count on them and that they could count on you in ways that most don’t need.
As life goes on, you take this attitude and mentality with you in everything you did and do. You try harder in school or give up easier than most because you know you have to or because you had other priorities going on elsewhere that take precedence on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; ultimately leading to you being outcasted (again, maybe not in a negative way). Within conversations you have a different set of social skills and your curiosity in things is like looking through a different pair of glasses than everyone. Within conversation you tend to want to know more about the person before you speak. You can relate to people when they don’t think you will. You pick up on subtle social cues because you’ve experienced a feeling and recognized these cues within yourself even if the other person is trying to mask them. This means you react differently with them than most do. People will then react differently back and either you yourself or the two of you have an awakening moment where you both relate to each other in a way that makes you feel positive emotions.
It’s this moment here. This is when you realize, or they realize within you, that one of you (or both) is an “It-getter”. People who have faced adversity that then shapes the very fundamentals of what it means to be conscious within yourself that allows for you to create more positive interactions that spark a curiosity which shifts the interaction towards a way that will create more of these within your life to come.
After reading this, do you consider this to be applicable to you? If so, you may in fact, be a Next Generation Human.