I feel like I have to write about my quarter-century of life journey.
Being 25, would anybody care if I said here are 10 life lessons I’ve learnt, and I want you to know that?
Being in mid twenties is alarming, it is time when you have to stand for something and no longer the fresh grad who is excited about changing the world.
Passion and life fulfillment
I developed passion for coffee when I was studying in Australia. It was a big deal because little did I know that coffee will become the compass that navigates my life later on.
Most people make career moves based on the hike in salary. I did the complete contrary.
I made 2 big career decisions in 2 years ever since leaving grad school. They were both significant but relatively easy because I was so damn sure about what I don’t want in life.
First, I quit a Big 4 accounting firm and dived into a coffee start up company. Then I quit the coffee company and started my own coffee venture.
Despite taking a pay cut from each shift (we are not even paying ourselves right now), I landed myself on a much steeper learning curve. I am accumulating knowledge faster than ever and more importantly, being happier from each transition.
Coffee drove me from a well structured organisation to a start up, to being an entrepreneur.
There are a lot of debates whether passion leads to success. Passion could be the driver but success is very much dependent on execution. However, passion is definitely an essential ingredient of life fulfillment.
Work, when it’s meaningful and fulfilling, is living.
Generosity comes from within
Once I was stunned when I saw our staff Jay tipped a waiter when we dined together. It is not in our culture to tip and he lives from pay check to pay check.
It made me think: How much do we need to own to be able to give?
My ex boss told me that business has to make money, because you have to able to care for yourself before you help others.
It is true that charity has to be run like a business to be sustainable, but I felt that something is missing from the theory.
Then I realised that generosity comes from within.
If you have more, you can help people the way Gates and Buffet distribute their wealth which has huge impact on huge population.
It doesn’t mean that you can’t give when you don’t have much.
We have a Vietnamese staff Ral who brings laughter everywhere he goes. It hit me when he told me about his story back home.
I saw sorrow in his eyes when he told me that he lost his mum at 9 and his dad has terminal stage cancer. Right before he went back to his work station, he said he wanted everyone to be happy and his face brightened up.
That to me is generosity because he chose to stay on the bright side of life and bring happiness to people despite his own sorrow.
Generosity is an act of kindness, empathy and reflection of how you perceive the world. It doesn’t necessarily have to be associated with wealth.
Gratitude
I used to pride myself for the decisions I made in life that truly reflected what I stand for. I felt that everyone has a choice and we have the power to choose ourselves, our life, and our destiny.
That was what I thought when I was so caught up in self-empowerment.
When I decided to start my own ventures, a friend told me that he wished he could start his own thing but he has a family to feed. His father passed away when he was 17 and he has to support his siblings who are still in school.
Then I saw it.
I can be bold in life because I don’t have to worry about starving my family if I fail. The worst case scenario is merely going back to being employed, which wasn’t that scary after all.
Life is unfair. Some people have so many privileges that they don’t have to fight for while some people are born in the poorest corner of the world.
And we don’t get to choose.
I love backpacking in developing countries to see how people live in scarcity and being contented. Then I look at abundance in my life and realise that I don’t need to own a lot to be happy.
I am thankful for what I have.
Life has its way of humbling you.
Andrew Zimmerman said that in a podcast with Tim Ferriss and I love this quote. How much one has to go through in life to be able to say that so casually?
In TED Global 2009, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, an author from Nigeria said:
Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.
I am blessed with so many people in life who share their stories and made me a better person.
I made bold decisions and I made mistakes. But there is nothing that I wish to do differently given a second chance because all of them make me who I am today.
A friend teased me that writing would not make me millions. I couldn’t agree more.
I started writing because I wanted to share, and I hope my thoughts and experiences could make someone somewhere feel better and less alone. It makes me happy even if one person read my stuff and like it.
So yea, this is me… for now.
