5 years back, I was completely lost in life. I was attending community college out of obligation, but I had no passion in life, my social skills were so poor my entire first year of college I talked to 0 people, and I hadn't had a girlfriend ever. My grades were middling at best, and I'd frequently see people complete assignments that took me over a week, in a few hours. Today marks a year at my dream job making 200k+ a year, working on things I love, with people that are amazing, and I have friends I regularly hang out with, and a loving girlfriend. Most of all, I feel very invigorated and feel I have a strong purpose in life. While I got lucky sometimes, I believe a lot of what I did is completely repeatable. I want to share some of the things that I did, wisdom I picked up along the way, to hopefully motivate people to achieve the same and be happier.
In my lowest part of my life 5 years back, I realized I really hated what I'd become. I never truly paid attention to what I wanted to be, and just coasted life day by day. That's when I saw a movie where the character was brimming with confidence and life. While watching the character and comparing him to myself, I couldn't help but feel intense bitter jealousy that that person wasn't me. And this feeling drove me for a good amount of the years since then.
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The first part to any journey is to have a goal, and to hold a belief that if you tried hard enough, you can become any kind of person. Be brutally honest with yourself about where you are now, so you can see clearly what things you want to improve. I truly believe I'm middling to below average intelligence, and my grades reflect that. I also truly think I started from zero skills in almost every category 5 years back. If I can do it, so can you.
The second part is to get rid of your current negative influences in your life. I used to frequent negative message boards. While you might not realize it, daily exposure to negative comments and thoughts WILL affect how you view the world. Completely get rid of any of those. Instead, try to listen to people that you aspire to be like. Listen to podcasts where people achieved great things, or biographies of people you admire. Keep in mind - do not fall for Get Rich Quick scammers. if somebody tells you that you can make $$$ quick, they are 100% lying. I also firmly believe that money shouldn't be your end goal - it's eye-catching so I included it in the title, but it was never my focus.
This was around when I started working out 3 times a week. I was always a lanky thin guy, and had no confidence in my physique. I know it's tired advice, but people repeat this point because it works. Go to the gym! Regularly exercising has many scientific benefits, and being confident looking at yourself in the mirror is a big + to your self image. I guarantee there isn't a single thing that has higher ROI in 3 hours than going to the gym 3 times a week, an hour each.
The last thing I think should be done initially, is to choose battles that aren't too hard to achieve. While it's very tempting to feel invigorated and set an insanely hard goal to turn your life around in 1 week, the reality is that setting a goal that's too high will lead to a swift defeat. Challenge yourself, but make sure your goal is in the Goldilocks zone - not too easy, not too hard, but just right. On the same vein, understand that some goals are a lot harder than others. Some goals are also disproportionately hard with less reward. If you want to be the best ballet dancer in the world, you'll be competing for the very top spot, against other extremely hard working and talented people, for a fairly low wage and short average career life. If your goal is to be a great marketer in a niche space, you'll have fairly little competition, have a comfortable salary that will keep going up, and won't be working nearly as hard as a professional ballet dancer to constantly fending off competitors. Two contrived examples that I could be wrong about, but the point is to pick a goal that isn't too difficult, and doesn't have too much competition. Make sure the effort & expected reward are worth it for you. I would not have been able to be as successful if I didn't pick a niche that didn't have much competition.
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When I started taking positive actions in my life, my day to day slowly started to change. I was less depressed, I started talking to more people once I forced myself to (since I wanted to be more sociable), and I even found myself talking to a girl online, which became my first girlfriend. I would constantly jot down notes about things I wasn't great at and what I should do to improve it. While I still had many of the faults of the me of the previous year, by intentionally focusing on changing myself, my life was slowly getting better.
One trait that I think brought me the furthest (which stems from immensely low self-esteem) is my willingness to self reflect and be critical of myself. After every interaction, I would think about what I could've done better. I would study more confident people's ways of talking, and practice talking the same in the mirror. I would spend hours on youtube looking up tips and tricks on how to talk to people. When I saw people finish assignments faster than me, I would ask them how they thought through the problem, to try to mimic their thought process. I think no matter what you're doing, self-reflecting and thinking about how to do things better & faster is how you improve. Always try to learn and improve, and (within reason) being critical of yourself is a great trait to have.
This was also around the time I would spend many hours every day strategizing & writing notes while listening to self help gurus. Much of this time was a total waste. While I think some level of advice is good, the reality is that action triumphs everything. I think the ideal split is 20% thinking, 80% action. Thinking about making friends is great, but you will learn 10x more from actually going out there and actually trying it out. After every action make sure to reflect and think about things that could've been better, but sitting in your room listening & thinking only gets you so far. After a good amount of thinking - whatever it is, take action!
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Two years in, I finally had some people I could call friends in my life, for the first time in a few years. But I was still fairly unhappy. I broke up with my first girlfriend and didn't know what i wanted to do with my life. But I was a little more confident, had some hobbies that I knew I enjoyed, and my body was noticeably more fit. I had muscles for the first time in my life. I would spend a good amount of time looking at career advice message boards and ask people for advice, which lead to me applying to internships. I applied to a ton of them, which lead to some interviews. I bombed all of them spectacularly. I was probably the worst interviewee those people interviewed in their life. My introduction was garbage, I was so nervous I would be stuttering extremely hard, and I would completely fail every single technical problem they had. I didn't pass a single first-round interview. For some interviews, I could see the person get embarrassed for me. But luckily, I interviewed for an internship ran by 4 business gradschoolers that had 0 technical questions, and only consisted of a single round. I landed my first internship.
When you start from 0, your steps are going to be fairly slow. Nobody wakes up one day and suddenly is a rockstar. But the most important thing is to keep pushing through your failures. A mistake is only a failure if you don't learn anything from it. Never make the same mistake twice, and don't be afraid to take shots.
This was also the same time I found joy in the field I was studying in. I also experimented with a ton of niches in my field, and found one that I enjoyed and also had a high salary. I focused on my craft, and spent a lot of my free time practicing to get better at it. I was still very bad - I'd say the bottom half of my class, but I would spend many hours a day studying to improve my skills. It definitely helped that I actually enjoyed what I did. While I still sucked, people didn't mind working with me in class if I had most of an assignment done. I could share ideas and contribute. Further along in life, being great at one thing leads to many opportunities. Even though I would have to spend about 2~4 times the effort as other people to achieve the same level of success, I managed to not drop out of my major, which many people did. Having a niche also meant I had much less competition, which definitely helped once I graduated. Whatever it is you like, strive to be the best at what you do.
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After college, I repeated what I had been doing. I would examine my life, notice a skill I thought I was missing, then work really hard to gain that skill. I kept repeating this over and over until I eventually got to today. And I really want to stress that all of this is a lot of work. Even today, I regularly try to spend every hour of my day improving various aspects of my life - learning new skills, optimizing processes. If you're not smart and talented, there is no shortcut to suddenly becoming a rockstar. It's a gradual process of learning, failing, and trying, over and over. But if you keep at it and your goal isn't impossibly hard, I truly believe anyone can achieve anything they put their mind to.
Here are a couple last bits of knowledge I came across throughout my journey.
Love what you do, and be passionate about it. You won't be able to spend all day working on something if you genuinely don't love it, or at least get a dull sense of enjoyment from it. I wouldn't say I'm jumping out of bed with joy every day, but I also don't mind working all day on the things I do.
Use a todolist app. I have a short memory and attention span, so I often forget things. If you think of something to do, or want to form a new habit, add it to your list. Get in the practice of looking at your list throughout the day and completing each task, one by one. It makes tasks feel like a game.
You are what you do in your free time. When reflecting back at when I was most depressed, I realized I was spending most of my day gaming & watching tv, and that it contributed almost nothing to my life. Completely cutting out gaming and TV, movies gave me a lot more time back. Spend your time throughout the day wisely
Copy from your mentors. Examine thought processes, actions of people that you want to be like, whether it be through biographies or from asking people for advice, and incorporate it into yourself. But when getting advice, keep in mind that advice is often subjective, and advice that worked for one person might not be right for you.
Set a life goal, yearly goal, monthly goal, weekly goal, daily goal. Some of these might not come instantly, and it's ok to amend them. My life goals changed many times throughout the years. But it's impossible to measure your success if you don't have a goal to measure yourself by. By setting a clear long-term goal, you can set clear near-term goals, and through those you can figure out what you should be doing on a day to day basis.
Working on a problem reduces your fear of it. I used to procrastinate greatly when I didn't want to do something. But understand that people are afraid of the unknown. By confronting something head on and working on it, you'll be less afraid of it.
Thinking slow and fast - this is an interesting one. Before every action, realize that there's an instinctual part of your brain that tells you one thing, which is the part of your brain that thinks fast. When starting out, your "fast" brain will tell you many things that aren't helpful. "Should I say hi to that person" - "No, don't do it, you're scared". "Should I start working on that assignment?" - "No, play games instead". Actively catch your brain doing this, and think through things logically (slowly). Think about your goals, what you want to achieve, then make a logical choice of what would be the better thing to do. This can be highly uncomfortable, but growing a habit of thinking through things logically, then taking actions off of it is very powerful.
Break down large problems into smaller pieces. When you have a big problem, it's hard to tell where you should even start. Break it into smaller, actionable pieces and write out the concrete steps to solving that problem. Then start working through that list. This applies for goals as well.
Do things as quickly as possible, with the least amount of effort, with the highest effectiveness, at the highest quality possible. When I was "dumb", I would often circle around for days wasting time. Always try to come up with better ways to achieve a goal. Before I start any task, I always remind myself of this, and often I can come up with creative solutions that take much less effort but lead to better results.
Work smart and hard. Same as the above point, but "if hard work is lead to success, then donkeys are the king of the jungle". Working hard is a requirement. But to be successful, you have to work smart AND hard. Don't focus on putting the hours in, but focus on how effective you're being in whatever goal you're trying to achieve. Nobody's going to give you an award for spending 10 hours on something. Suffering doesn't bring you success, being effective at something does.
Some last thoughts - some people might read the end, and think, "Wow, you work all day? That sounds stressful and not fun at all" and I think that's a fair point. And to be clear, I still take Saturday off every week to relax & do some activities that aren't directly productive towards my goals. I still spend a few hours a day on social media & watching youtube videos, I'm not a robot. Still, I think not a lot of people would enjoy the way I live. But working on things I love, having a goal in life, and working really hard every day has brought me the most fulfillment I've had ever. Knowing I'm finally good at something and working with really smart people brings me a great amount of joy. Having meaningful connections with people is beautiful, and I love my girlfriend, as does she. But life isn't all full of roses. I'm never truly fully happy, as there's always things I see lacking in myself. I'm still not the confident and charismatic guy in the movies I saw many years back. There's stress, there's disappointments, I still fail many times. But I've never felt more happy and fulfilled.
This is partly a letter for myself many years back, and I hope some people find it useful.
