There is always something wrong in life. It's never perfect.
Sometimes, there are financial problems. Sometimes, there are health problems.
And then, there are problems that are outside of your control. Like the global pandemic. The economy. The politics. The climate.
Even people around you. They create unintended problems.
And when you cannot carry the weight of these problems, you stop caring. You think screw it all.
You tell yourself that you'll get back on track once things become better.
You plan ahead about things. You will start eating healthy foods, once you have more time. You will start saving and investing once you start earning more money.
Basically, you are always planning to take action once everything is perfect.
But the truth is, things are never perfect. In fact, they are never even normal. There is always some trouble.
When I look back at history, I see people survived multiple plagues, wars, food crisis. Problems that they had no solution or not much control over.
If you compare the resources available to you today, you can theoretically solve almost all of your problems. The internet has made it possible.
You can find opportunities to make money, learn almost any skill, understand your health and mental well being. You can connect with people who are facing similar problems. Learn what works for them and try to apply it in your life.
Taking a few steps like reading books, taking courses and connecting with the right people is all it takes. In short, you have access to solutions.
Still, we struggle a lot. And the reason we struggle to improve is because we don't understand what we truly want, or how we can improve. We are not confident enough to try.
The reason we struggle to improve, the reason we cannot solve our problems is because we don't know what leads to progress and achievement. We don't define our success. We let other people define it.
We see people making tens of thousands of dollars a month. We see people with incredible smartness, physique and happiness.
And then we think it's not possible for us.
It's because you only see impressive results. But almost never see the process that leads to those results.
Doing anything of worth requires deliberate, incremental and consistent work.
In the beginning, your efforts may not look like they can amount to much. But they accumulate and compound with time.
You only need one gain per day
One small win per day. That's all it takes to make the difference in the long term.
Small things will add up and compound over time.
Progress is not achieved by luck or accident, but by working on yourself daily. — Epictetus
Everyday, what you read, what you learn, what you practice, and how you act, creates your life. The better things you add daily, the better your life becomes.
A good life is incremental progress made day by day.
As Darren Hardy in his book "The Compound Effect" said,
"The compound effect is always working. Either you make it work for you or it will have negative effects."
Small but smart choices adds up.
The formula is: smart choices + consistency + time = huge achievements.
Each day, we have to make a choice.
To work or not to.
To be happy or not to.
To let our circumstances define our happiness, our efforts and our goals, or not to.
We all are where we are now because of the choices we made at the early stage of our lives.
It's never too late to make any changes in your life.
Define your Success
Everyone has a different definition for success. For some people, it's getting out of their country, moving to a developed nation and earning proper wages.
For some people, success is owning a house and a retirement fund.
And for some people, success is marrying a beautiful person, having kids.
To achieve success in your life, you have to define your meaning of success first. Otherwise, you might feel like a failure according to other's definition of success.
If you go by people's definition of success, they might say you are unsuccessful unless you are a millionaire(if you live around normal people), or a billionaire(if you live around multi millionaires).
One thing that works for me is asking myself every six months "How do I define success and what steps should I take to achieve it?"
This process is for the goals I want to achieve in the next year.
A few things that I focus on:
- Making More Money: What are the new opportunities I can find to make more money?
- Learning New Skills: What new skills I can learn to improve my life?
- Feedback: Where am I in terms of my last year goals?