“I choose to have faith in love. I release my faith in fear.”
Did you get lucky?
Whenever, I get asked this – I never get offended, because for the most part people look at the headlines and forget about the hard work, discipline, sacrifice, and struggle one takes in their journey. But, I believe one of the key head starts I did have was my youth. It allowed me to overcome the ideas of fear itself.
I believe we fundamentally go through three stages of fear:
As a Child we’re Fearless
As an Adult we become more Fearing
And, as we get Elderly we become even more Fearful
As the saying goes, you can throw a kid in the water and they’ll eventually learn how to swim. But, if you throw an adult in the water, they’ll fear themselves into drowning.
During our youth, our propensity of risk and failure go hand in hand. I consider this a pivotal moment in our lives where we can define what drives us, what our inner passion is, and what we eventually want to strive to become. As a kid, I enjoyed watching CNBC and fell in love with the opportunities with the Internet. That led me to ultimately take my greatest entrepreneurial risk of dropping out of high school to start my first venture.
Today, I see kids that go to school, then college, and even after getting a degree, they still don’t know what they want to do and let society dictate their future. According to this article, over 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that require skill levels of only a high school diploma.
Life as we know, gets more complicated as we get older. Our decisions are derived from what society, our families, and responsibilities influence us to do. And as we mature into further adulthood, we worry more. Which means, we end up doing things to survive vs. enrich our lives.
So, do I consider I got lucky? Absolutely. I feel fortunate that at a young age I figured out that I loved the world of business. And, the only secret behind that that I give to others is the following:
Listen to your heart. We tend to do well at the things we love, so find something you love – or learn to love what your doing.
Check out this video for even more inspiration.