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There are people that have gone on to do exceptional things.
Changed the world forever.

Leonardo da Vinci.
Madame Curie.
Albert Einstein.
Steve Jobs.

What’s a special trait they have?
Were they child prodigies?
Or naturally gifted?

It’s because they kept telling themselves: “I don’t know a lot, I’m still learning.”

In the quest of being a student forever, they became teachers of creating an epic life.
In their ordinary curiosity for knowledge and education, they became extraordinary.

Being extraordinary is going the extra mile by remaining an ordinary student forever.

Do you sometimes feel lonely?

You feel no one understands you, feels your emotions, or knows what you’re going through.

How to go about fixing it?

When we listen to someone who’s going through the same pain,
When we let them know they aren’t invisible,
When we assure them there’s nothing wrong with their emotions,
We take the first step in moving beyond our loneliness.

When we allow someone to walk away from their loneliness, our own walks out along with it.

In the healing and hearing of others, lies our own.

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 the other day, who has 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.

In our parents’ generation, it was a privilege to be a specialist.
To be the best and fastest in the world at one thing was the only way to survive.

With unlimited opportunities in the information age, things have reversed.

As someone who wants to climb the corporate ladder, your role is managing people instead of core work.

This needs breadth, experience and understanding of work, in addition to core skills.

Thus, becoming a generalist comes with possibilities of broader spectrum and a stronger profile.

If we are a generalist, we have a speciality of taking different paths.

We’re confused about what to do in life.

And college education certainly hasn’t helped.

Why not explore our way through life, instead of being in a hurry to settle down? 

Try out stand up comedy and share videos, and look at the reactions of people.
Create music if we love it, and see if others resonate with it
Get internships in design or coding, if that is what intrigues you.

It is better to be lost and busy in the chase of finding yourself, instead of being lost and busy in the rat race of never knowing yourself.

You have two ideas for your startup, but not sure which one.
Or perhaps two job offers.
Or two career options, and you cannot decide. 

You are looking for a solution, but to no avail.

What if we looked for questions instead, whenever we were faced with a dilemma?

Why do I want to make that decision in the first place?
What would change for me because of that decision?
What do we want from that decision?

Looking for questions instead of solutions is asking questions about the problem. 

There are some days when Instagram is down.

Sometimes Facebook is, WhatsApp is, Twitter/X as well.

I remember when that happened with Google, we all lost it.
“Dependency” was the word of the day.

We suddenly didn’t know what to do.
How to spend our time. 

All we kept doing was check the platform incessantly, showing how much we depend on it.

The next time a platform goes down, try a crazy thing: Go for a walk.
Your world is what your eyes see, not what the screen shows! 

We own the screens we own. Not the other way round.

I will spend time with my family later.
That email is important.

I will say “I love you” to my loved ones later.
That love for work is more important.

I will call my parents over the weekend.
Grind on the weekdays is more important.

I don’t have the time!

We don’t find time; we make time.
Because we will never know when we will run out of it.

One of the mistakes we make early in our lives is feeling morally obligated to help others.

If we have something that they don’t, maybe we could help.
And when we do offer our help and that still doesn’t help, we feel we must have done something wrong.
Thus starts a vicious cycle of self-blame and self-criticism.

Except that it helps no one.
And certainly makes no one happy.

When we really want to help others, we could start with listening.
Not trying to help, instead just listening.
And being positive.
While we may still not be able to give them “things”, we will still give them the right vibe.

A rather unusual way to help others is to be happy yourself.

Go to college, get your education, and chill for the rest of your life.
The biggest lie that was ever told and sold to us.

Why do we go to college?

To learn something? Not really, everything is accessible online.
To get a degree? We could do it from correspondence.
To run away from parents? Maybe that would never help.

We go to college not to learn things, rather to develop an attitude – an attitude of a student.

Once we know how to be a student, we’ve taken the best thing out of college
We go to college to learn how to become a student whenever we have to!