I invested in myself, that’s why I succeed

I often hear my colleagues, friends, relatives as to how I’ve made significant improvements in my life – particularly my success towards my career.

All too often, I hear them say that I’m a ‘genius’ or ‘naturally gifted’ that I can do everything in my life right now and tend to be successful in all areas. In fact, they didn’t know what I’ve been through, they have no idea how much I’ve suffered or hurt in achieving this mainstream ‘success’ in my life.

As I was saying, I wasn’t able to attain it without investing too much in myself and do the hard work.

Most people see it as an innate or natural talent to succeed. When they see people succeed, most often they didn’t noticed how much time it takes just to be successful in different areas of life. They weren’t able to count how much detours, failures, mistakes, doubts it takes before they get there.

And one thing I’m surprised with is that, they thought these successful people don’t experienced failures or mistakes which is the mandatory part of our life if we wanted to succeed. But the truth is, these people often make mistakes from time to time. The ones people see mostly in our lives are the results of our tenacity or boldness to succeed.

But not everyone thinks like this. Most of the time, most people were very self-conscious in themselves that they don’t want to afford making mistakes when achieving their grandest goals. I know some of my friends who thinks that way. Just because you haven’t experienced mistakes during your life as a student doesn’t mean you won’t screw up in real-life challenges. Chances are, you will eventually if you haven’t experienced one. That’s why one of my friends got depressed when he failed to achieved his goals by failing his board exam after he graduated. And that person never get to taste failures in his early stages in his life as a student.

This is why I detest our educational system. It doesn’t teaches us to prepare in real-life situations. What we are only taught in schools is to earn a score in every quizzes, assignments, and pass examination tests. All too often we are taught to compel the challenges of real-life because of it. We became too comfortable the educational system has given us.

I on the other hand made lots of mistakes during my life as a student. I almost failed one subject, some areas of my life that consistently fails, etc. I also remember myself not having a good grades in one of my programming subjects while others passed and make a good algorithm programs effortlessly. I was very frustrated at the time. I thought I said to myself that these people were something called as ‘genius’ or ‘naturally talented’ people that’s why they succeed. I was in that same situation right now that they called me like that. But I haven’t been able to achieved it without practicing my skills day after day(even in weekends) for me to achieve this natural thinking as a developer.

So after I’ve graduated I’ve invested in myself so much by embracing failures as well as criticisms as I walked into the world of professional life. If I were to give any advices to people who wants to be successful, here are some of the points that I can give you:

• Embrace failure – Embracing failure and accept that things will not always be in your favor should be the #1 in your priority lists if you wanted to succeed. Especially, learn from it.
• Love what you do – No matter what are you doing, you must love what you do. There’s no point in working if you don’t love it. You’re simply just doing it for the sake of money. Nope. Stop it. Find something that you love to do. And earn money out of it.
• Constantly improve yourself – Being able to focus on yourself gives you the advantage of focusing to your own success rather than worrying in other human being. After all, the only control you have in this world is yourself. Everyone else have their own sense of perspective and consciousness. So don’t waste time on others. But I’m not saying that you should not spend time with them. After all, we also need to improve our personal relationships with people. Just limit it. Your world doesn’t revolve around them.
• Challenge yourself – Your greatest enemy is yourself. Give challenges to yourself. Maybe you want to learn more and your current self is not capable of doing it in the meantime. Challenge yourself to do and learn different things. For example, I want to learn cooking and in my current skillsets I can’t do it yet. So what I have to do is read articles, read books that allows me to learn in cooking different dishes by myself. Until I overcome my current self by learning it. You will be surprised how much change can you do in your life if you think that way.
• Learn from other people – Sometimes, we need a mentor, or a master if you will that can guide us to the right path. Look for them and ask them to direct you in the right path so that you save your time figuring out what to do next. These people already took the path you take. So if you wanted to have a shortcut to success, I’d say look for the people who are already successful.
• Read books – Reading books are one of the few things you can do to further supplement your thinking. You might learn something from their stories. In fact by reading books you could simply learn from their strategies.

Last note: You can’t do any of these if you don’t start investing in yourself.