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The cool kid will always have opinions of you.
The boring kid within you will ache to do anything to get their validation.
It is going to be fascinating to leave who you are and be what they are.

Except, that isn’t success.
If changing yourself could bring you friends, they aren’t friends.
If being someone else could bring you closer to people, it is always a wiser choice to stay alone.Success is a relationship you have with yourself.
If you know who you are and where you are going, you are successful.

Focus is something we choose for our own selves. For the life that we have chosen. Our career. Focus makes us accountable. 

But there is another perk of that focus: The right kind of focus leads us to stop focusing on what others are doing wrong, and start looking for where they are going right. 

Owning your game does not allow you to question someone else’s. 

Most of us had a childhood of competing with others.
Get more marks than your competitor.
Higher rank.
Go to a better college than them.

These were (and unfortunately still are) the parameters that defined success for us as kids.

Except: Everyone is running their own race.
We aren’t competing against anyone, but us.

Being alone in the race is super powerful, because now we get to focus and win our way. Not someone else’s. 

When we were growing up, we were never taught self love.

More than anything else, we were sadly made to feel guilty if we didn’t make others a priority.

This conditioning led to a habit where we have forgotten how to love ourselves.

If only we realised that the best gift we could give others is to show them how to love themselves.

It will help them see themselves in the right light.
And that’s priceless!

We can love others only if we learn how to express that pious emotion to our own selves.

Of the many lies we were sold as kids (and upon growing up), this one always triumphs:

Something is better than nothing.
Selling a part of your soul is better than your soul making no money.

Except that when we are empty, we feel our truest emotions.

It is in solitude and standing for what we want, that we discover what we would never tolerate.

It is in the side-tracked lines of rat-race with the world that we discover we were not in a race with them in the first place!

And that’s not bad.
That’s liberating.

When we are busy with “something”, we never get the nothingness to be lost.
When we are tired of “nothing”, we discover who we truly are.

Someone was kind to you for a long time.
Now, all of a sudden they’ve become rude.

This leaves you questioning. 

How could they change? Why did they change? Did I do something wrong?

Somehow it has started affecting your self worth in that relationship. 

Here’s the truth: People don’t change. They just surface. Depending on their life circumstances or even the situations. 

When we accept people for where they are, we don’t do them a favour. We do one to ourselves. 

Maybe you figured a Product-Market fit that worked.
Maybe you wanted to try things on this side of the world.
Or perhaps you were just happy doing it.

Whatever it is, that reason is important. 

Your “why” is important.
Your root cause matters.

The reasons hyped by the media, the Twitteratti, competitors, don’t matter as much.

When you know why you became an entrepreneur in the first place, the only story that matters is the one between your two ears.

Out of our entire childhood of waiting for summer vacations, having crushes, that little pocket money and having nothing to worry about, what do we reminisce about the most?

That we were free.
That when we were authentic, life never brought in anything pathetic.
That when we lived in the now, we hardly wondered about the next “how”.

The best thing about childhood was that we didn’t have to do anything to be original.
The better thing is, we can still do it.
We can still go back to our roots and connect with our inner self.

We don’t start hoping we’ll get there.
We make strategies. Plans. Executing them to the T.

Then comes a huge black swan effect. At the moment we were waiting for it to get over, another one came in, sweeping away all strategies.

And when all of these do not work, then comes the hope.
Hope that we will make it through this storm, like we’ve done through all of them.
Hope that there exists a light at the end of the tunnel, wherever the end is.
Hope that till we get to the end of the tunnel, we will be the light.

All our strategies didn’t account for what we are going through. Hope is the only thing we’re left with – fortunately.

Our parents are the people we disagree with the most.
We have differing opinions on the smallest life issues to making big life decisions.
And that’s okay. And a different thing.

Right now, our parents need a different thing from us: Our presence.
When they were our age, they witnessed tremendous hard work, lack of opportunities, and struggle to make ends meet. 

Life hasn’t been easy for them. But we can make it a bit easy by being there for them – making them talk about their favourite topics (our childhood, their childhood), listening to them, or simply engaging with them.