On Running Backwards

"If you are facing the right direction, all you need to do is keep walking."
- Buddhist proverb

Since starting a business, I've felt a very strong desire to be successful at a young age. One of the main reasons for this is that doing entrepreneurial things is more unique when you're young and therefore receives more praise. If I were doing the same things I'm doing now and I was 10 years older or 20 years older, people might really question if I'm doing the right thing. A successful business for a college student might be a failing business for an adult.

The problem with my desire to be really successful at a young age is that I feel rushed. With this feeling, I sometimes see myself making decisions for the short-term instead of the long-term. I love everything I'm doing to death, but at the same time, I have difficulty taking breaks from it and getting perspective. Having talked with people who are in their fifties who have had this same "rushed" feeling since they were young and haven't taken a vacation in years, I'm not sure I want to continue this "rushed" feeling anymore. I once read a statistic that said the average American spends their entire career feeling like they're 40 hours behind where they'd like be in terms of work. So maybe we all feel this "rushed" feeling. Isn't it ironic that the people who live in the best economic system in the world feel like they are so far behind always?

Now that I think about it, I can remember from a very young age wanting to become very successful at a young age and then retire. This idea seems to be embedded into our culture to the point where people sacrifice decades of their life to an end that may never come. And the reason it may never come may not be because it hasn't been acheived, but because we have spent our whole developing a mindset where we sacrifice for the future and avoid the present. A person who spends their whole life worrying about money, doesn't suddenly live in peace after it is acheived (at least most of the time). Which leads me to my next conclusion...

Be careful what you choose to spend time being good at. Every second you invest in a strength, you become more invested in it and down the road it becomes that much harder to invest yourself in new areas when it makes the most sense. In this way, our greatest strength may become our greatest weakness.

What does it mean to have a great future? My professional responsibility and leadership professor made a good point the other day. He said that people who believe that they can have a better future are willing to sacrifice their present-moment to achieve it. Peole who don't have great prospects for the future tend to live more in the present-moment.

What does it mean to be a great student? This may be a generalization, but I feel like many people who get extremely high grades become defined by their grades whether they realize it or not. Even if they don't believe in high grades anymore, it is hard to stop getting them after years of hard work staying up all night or working hard on weekends. It is hard to go to a career where grades aren't valued.

What does it mean to be successful? I sometimes feel like any success I've received thus far, makes me only want it more and faster.

I believe that many of the things one could want in this life (i.e. - happiness, peace) are available to us every moment. We simply have to "be the change we want to see", no matter how hard it might be, how (un)successful we are, how good our grades are, who we know, or how caught up we are in life's little dilemmas. When interacting with young children, I often see them cry over what I think is something silly like being picked last for a team. I invariably say, "Don't cry, it's not that important." Maybe I should be saying the same thing to myself when I get worked up over things that are small in the big scheme of things.

In the end, I think the quote at the beginning of this entry has a lot of wisdom. I need to take a deep breathe, think more about where my current path is going, face in the right direction, and have the best walk ever. If I'm going in the wrong direction, my speed doesn't matter at all!

Have a great night.