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Of course a gap year “wastes” a year of your life.

However, if we get prepared for 15+ years to work – why make a choice of what to work on immediately?

How will we ever get to know the depth of the pool without stepping into it?

How will we ever know what we are good at if we don’t try what all we could be good at?

A gap year is simply the stopping at the petrol pump to give much needed fuel to the long drive of your career. 

Without it, we may be in an illusion of the car while in reality it is stagnant.

If it made you happy yesterday, don’t put the pressure on it to make you happy today as well.

We humans change.
External things don’t.

A wiser choice is to pick something different that matches your current state of happiness.

One of the happiest definitions of happiness is to know that happiness isn’t rigid.
Nothing could be a happier realization!

You should not stop watching news because someone on the Internet tells you to stop watching news.

You should stop watching news because your brain cannot focus on the good if it is being fed the bad that is happening around.

Making decisions from a point of why we want to do them makes them stick vis-a-vis doing them without awareness of reason.

Most of us have been raised to study, work hard, and get a comfortable job.

Except that most of us want to pursue something else that we love.
So we work toward it.
Waiting for that big break.
Waiting for someone to recognise us.
Or the least, to get at least one chance.

If we work hard and if we’re lucky, we somehow get that chance. 

But what happens after that chance? 

Do we work harder or do we become complacent?
Do we underpromise and overdeliver or do we commit and don’t fulfill it?
Do we become more fierce or do we lose our fire?

Shah Rukh Khan was once asked the reason behind his success, to which he replied,
“Most people work hard to get a chance. But no one works as hard as me after getting a chance.”

Working hard when you don’t even have to gives success when you don’t even ask for it.

Our parents want us to choose a risk-free path of life. 

Engineering, CA, lawyer, doctor. 

Stability was something they craved for.
Stability is something they wish for us as well.

However, we have a different take on life. 

Rightly so, because we have way more exposure, opportunities and options than they had.

And most of us want to go against our parents’ wishes and choose the path of risk and see how things unfold.

As we have these conversations with our parents, they may understand our PoV.
Or they may not. 

However, there’s one thing that we ought to communicate to them: 

Us disobeying them does not mean we are disrespecting them.

Most important things in life that need to be said are unsaid. 

To go for the career of your choice. It’s risky. 

To choose your happiness over society’s validation. It’s risky.

To leave the comfort and chart for new territories. It’s risky.

Of course it is risky.
But isn’t not taking that risk a bigger risk?

Your biggest enemy is not your competitor.
Or a newbie changing the world.
Or a viral trend you missed.

These are parts of life.

Your biggest enemy is someone who tells you that it is impossible for you to think beyond what lies in front of you. 

They make you think small because they want you to be, even if unintentionally.
You cannot move further.

It could even be your closest friends, family, or yourself.

Anyone who tells this to you is the one you should move further away from.

Society has categorised a profit-making entrepreneur as successful and the one who does not as failure.

However, that is the definition of society.
Something that is rarely correct.

True success is having the courage to build something from scratch.
True success is getting out of your own self to solve a problem.
True success is living by your own stories of success and not the ones the world has imposed on us since childhood.

There’s no such thing as failure. 

The very act of going for entrepreneurship by leaving the life of comfort is in itself the biggest success.

Happiness is our nature as kids. 

If we enjoy something, we are in a state of flow doing it.
If we don’t, we’ll cry our hearts out to make sure we don’t do it.

And then, we grow up.
Unfortunately.
And forget to make our happiness a priority. 

We pursue courses that our family wants, marry someone because we’ve been told to, and end up living a life that is totally apart from how we would be happy living it.

In the pursuit of trying to make others happy and giving up our own, we realise we aren’t happy either. 

So, choosing our happiness is the safest option to ensure not only ours, rather ,everyone else’s happiness.

How do we know if we are happy doing something?
By asking two fundamental questions:

a. What about it makes me happy?
b. Am I truly happy doing it?

It turns out the happiest thing we could do to our happiness is live with it forever.
That’s the most difficult yet the easiest thing to sign up for.

We chase goals, work hard towards them, and when we finally achieve them, we still feel incomplete. 

Why does that happen?

Because we tie our happiness to a place. 

Showing people that you can.
Proving them wrong.
Making sure you have their respect. 

It all becomes a journey where we couldn’t care less about the journey, because we have all our eyes on the destination. 

Except it makes us more drained out in the end.

I had a student come over my Instagram Live, who had been practising magic tricks for 6 years now, and baffled me with a few of his tricks on the show. 

He does not plan to make it full time, nor does he plan to monetise it. 

But just the fact of getting up each day and having something to progress to, has kept him through the troughs and valleys. 

Daily progress = daily happiness minus conditions attached.

Chasing daily progress is the ultimate antidote to the emptiness of chasing goals.