My undergraduate university recently posed the question to its alumni: if you could pass one message to yourself at the time of graduation, what would it be? I thought this was a decent question to reflect on so I spent some time on it and am now sharing my thoughts below.
The world is as big as you choose to make it. You can keep your world small, think your community, your town, or you can expand it to globally. By keeping your world small you can have visible impact (e.g. helping re-paint the school) or be the best at something (e.g. top football player). If you expand your world, it will be hard to see the work you do changing the world (e.g. you might influence donation programs, but there will still be suffering) and you’ll never be the best at what you do (it’s hard to beat Messi). Expanding your world comes with many benefits though, you can gain more than you lose, but it’s a trade-off that should be consciously made. In the best case scenario you can maintain both, getting benefits from both, but it’s no easy task!
If you do decide to expand your world, brace yourself, because the world is a REALLY big place: geographically, culturally, spiritually, intellectually. It’s impossible to prepare for all the different perspectives out there, so you just need to buckle up and enjoy the ride.
On that note, be comfortable with change. Change in location, change in your age, change in your body, change in your finances, change in your work, change in technology. When you’re young, changes are mostly expected (e.g. new school) and their magnitudes are small. As we grow older, the changes are more numerous, and their magnitude greater. Resisting change will usually lead to suffering, you must embrace it and glean from it everything you can.
Now if you can navigate that change and want to be successful, remember that passion is the most important trait. Passion for life, for work, for love. Passion will drive you to put in the extra work and get ahead, to get up when you’re set back, keep you aligned on a single path and stop you from wandering off it.
Finally, remember that if you keep trying to succeed, failure will come in some way or another. You need to decide if you want success or you’d rather be safe. If you choose success, be prepared to deal with the failure.