I think one of my biggest flaws is that I become content with myself very easily. Being content means you are happy with the status quo. It means that you lose motivation and drive to further yourself and become someone better, and as a result you fail to reach higher places in your life.
You see, my problem isn't that I lack the intellectual capabilities to go further, or that I can't work hard when required. My problem is that whenever things start going my way, I take my foot off the accelerator. I stop working hard, I stop trying to find ways to get to a better place, I just do enough to get by and maintain the status quo, because my mind tells me: "hey Bobby, you're doing alright, you're doing better than a lot of people. Look at so and so. Don't be so hard on yourself, just chill out and enjoy life." As a result, people who continue to push themselves begin to surpass me.
Sometimes, I don't even do enough to maintain the status quo. That's when I start to fall behind the entire pack, finally culminating in the various major failures I've had in my last 23 years.
THAT is when I finally snap out of it and my motivation returns (how convenient). I would then work hard and push myself and start climbing up the ladder again, only to get close to somewhere reputable before my brain starts telling me again: "hey Bobby...hey...", and the vicious cycle starts again.
I feel like that's what's happening to me right now. These days, I feel like I'm doing a pretty good job. My internal thought process: "I've got a steady job, I work pretty hard, sometimes 10 or 11 hrs a day, I've been getting good feedback from my manager; bottom line: I am doing alright!"
Then I think about what another Wang is doing with her life, and everything doesn't seem so rosy. We both started out in the same school. We both started out in topstream. We both did all four accelerated subjects. Yet look how our lives vastly differ now.
This is the culmination of two very different mindsets at work over 10 years; one that contents easily, and one that hungers to continuously reach higher and higher places. The difference may be small at first, but one hour of study at a time, one book at a time, one extracurricular lesson at a time, she pulls ahead. While for me, each video game, each YouTube video, each hour spent at IC0, I fall further behind. Thus small differences snowball over time and bam, 10 years later we are living very different lives. I am living the mediocre life of a white collar. She is travelling the world and on her way to becoming one of the world's future leaders.
Some people might look at us and say: "yes both of you may have appeared to have started at the same starting line, but there was always a difference in capabilities and intelligence." Sure, that may be true to a certain extent, but would the gap have been as big had I had the same mindset and worked just as hard (although I have to point out that she also made a lot of sacrifices over the years which I failed to do)?
In the famous words of the Nutri-Grain ad I recently saw on TV: "the only limits are those that we place on ourselves". I think that one sentence perfectly embodies what I've been trying to say over the last 7 paragraphs. We are our biggest obstacles on the road to success. We are our greatest inhibitors. Everything is about mindset, and to be content is to condemn yourself to a life of mediocrity. (Just to clarify, don't confuse being discontent with YOURSELF with being discontent with what you HAVE or with those around you. What I'm advocating here is having a high expectation for yourself so that you can achieve better things, NOT being greedy and never satisfied with what you have or being an asshole and having unrealistic demands for those around you. Also, don't be so hard on yourself that it'll drive you to suicide. If you kill yourself in 5 years cause you're still not as rich as Bill Gates, you're missing the point! It's all about working within our means and success is subjective anyway).
I'm not saying a mediocre life is a bad thing; after all everyone have different pursuits in life . For me personally though (or at least the part of me that doesn't content easily), I want to get somewhere. I don't just want to be one of the pack. Therefore the first thing I must do is seek and destroy the part of me that contents easily (muahahahaha KILL IT WITH FIRE!!). Obviously mindset and hard work are only part of the formula. You also have to work smarter, take calculated risks and make sacrifices. None of these things are easy, but with the right mindset I believe I can get there. In the end, it's all about what you really want and what's important to you.
To conclude this post, I shall leave you with another famous Nutri-Grain quote (ah yes the all wise and sage Nutri-Grain marketing team, you are the source of my inspiration!):
"you only get out what you put in".
BW signing out.
