Here is a series of few lessons – life lessons – learned by my 33rd year.
How long do you think you can live? Regardless of the number you could estimate for your life, and I truly wish you a long-fulfilled life, it will definitely be negligible compared to the age of the earth and then the universe. But your impact on life is not negligible. You might have heard about the butterfly effect, how the simple flapping of the wings of a butterfly can cause a typhoon. So yes, a small change can create a big impact.
I can write a long text to motivate you and say you should never give up. But I guess you can find better motivational texts and speeches from successful people all over the internet. And I am not here for that.
For my case, I am still not close of being among those successful motivational speakers. I’d rather speak honestly as I am at a stage where I am losing my motivation in doing whatever I am currently doing but I am still trying to find the strength to keep going even if it’s at a slow pace. I am still able to achieve small improvements, still able to learn, and to overcome challenges. I am still trying to turning a situation of loss into a win (maybe – I am relying on my belief that I am not stuck in a dead horse situation). And trust me the journey is not easy. It is full of sleepless nights, stressful days (already started showing on my face through acne and aging signs), waking up in the middle of the nights barely able to breathe with a fast heartbeat, days in which I say “OK” even when I don’t agree because the effort that I would have to make if I disagree would take all my energy in vain (you can tell me that I have to try, but this is the limit where I decided that I have to stop trying because I’d rather save what remains of my energy). And the worst of all, days in which I doubted myself, days in which I questioned my competence and ability to perform, days in which I was wondering where is the limit between giving up and letting go? How can you know the difference between being a coward and quitter or quitting because the road is closed and the horse is dead?
I will share briefly a first lesson I learned with more to come in the future – I swear again for the millionth time, I am not a guru.
Here is a real-life lesson that no one had taught me in school (15 yrs) or in university (7 years). The journey of life is never a straight line. It is always a mix of irregular random ups and downs. They taught us at school to draw always straight lines, perfect circles, write between the lines but no one taught us that life is not that perfect and this is why most of us get disappointed in several occasions. We managed to draw straight lines using a ruler and perfect circles using a compass, and to write between the lines using notebook with printed ones. We managed to make everything look perfect using tools which is cheating. We cannot cheat in life all the time, and we don’t always have the proper tools for a life that can never be standardized.
Of course, I am not counting the additional daily struggles of life because life is life and well, you adapt to the mood swings of life. When it hits me with challenges and struggles, I learned to accept and hold myself together and keep moving.
I am currently at the down part of my life curve especially when comes to my job and work is a large part of my life and when I did my first career shift few years ago, I took a road in which I thought I can find a passion and create beauty out of a major that I never liked (engineering). And I did. And I managed for the past few years to get (and still getting) a life experience that I wouldn’t get if I was still sitting behind a desk even if I was moving chairs towards senior ones. This life experience did offer me a lot of knowledge. Of course, not very technical knowledge but rather a mix of everything, a mix of basic technical and emotional intelligence. The exposure to the real world is incredible in the field. I have learned that we need to have a balance between intelligence and kindness – we need to be kind in our intelligence and smart in our kindness. We shouldn’t allow abuse of kindness to the extent of naivety but also we shouldn’t be abusive in our intelligence (which could lead to bullying and aggressive behaviors) but rather be practically smart adapted to the situation and context.
We all see a successful leader and say that this person got lucky because we are working hard and still unable to be as successful. Well, no, luck and hard work have very little to say with this. I would say success comes from hard work done smartly and with a strong balance with emotions. That’s lesson 1.
Dina Hajjar 