For the past week, I have been reading articles on the habits of successful people. This leaves me with two take-away.
First, I question how article writers qualify “successful people”. Because they are popular? They are wealthy? Most of the names mentioned were either wealthy or popular in the world scene. Only a handful names were known for their kindness and philantrophy. But to a certain extent, to be famous or wealthy, you do need to have success traits and habits we can learn from.
Second, in one of the articles about successful people, it mentioned, “They delay their gratification”. I agree. When I failed a major national exam at the age of 17, I knew I have to work harder to get back into my country’s mainstream educational path. I stopped playing video games on weekdays (and some weekends) and I even studied after school hours.
Result? I had stellar academic performance (Not good enough to be very famous though).
Now, closing to 3 years of my working life, I felt the breather to relax after work and it became a habit. Relating to people meeting their quarter-life crisis, it has not been easy for me to nail down on a career goal so I can “delay my gratification“!
My introspection: we need to know our short-term and long-term career goals so we live like “men and women on a mission“. It really works. For the past 10 years in my long-term education, I have not deviated from my goal of obtaining scholarships for my college.
It was pretty easy to achieve that goal:
- get the best grades you can,
- be active in a school interest group,
- have a global view on things. (Useful for scholarship interviews)
But as we step into our careers, it is extremely difficult to set a clear goal and a clear path. I have been trying to find out my career goals and I will be using Warren Buffet’s 5/25 elimination technique. Wish me luck!
You can read about how it works here: http://jamesclear.com/buffett-focus
Bridging ideologies with realities 