I grew up hearing that if you worked hard things would work out for you. My experience in school led me to believe otherwise.
All the amount of studying in the world couldn’t get me from a B to an A. And frustratingly, all my standardized tests, IQ or whatever seemed to indicate that I should be having a much easier time with school.
Only when I started having fun learning did I manage to bring my grades to an A and more importantly not have to spend all my waling hours studying to do so.
School got much easier for me in university when I realized that I needed to take a proactive stance on what I was learning, and let curiosity rule me more than my grades.
I skipped the first two years of Japanese after 6 months of study. History suddenly became exponentially easier when I started watching documentaries and doing my own research.
And despite being behind all the time for most of my life, I realized that I could learn at an even faster pace than the curriculem, sometime 2 or 3 times faster. All it required was for me to follow my curiosity on a topic related to the curriculum and treat the textbook as context.
People said I must be smart to be 3 months ahead of current assignments and for skipping 2 years of Japanese throguh self study, but when I asked anyone if they had done what I had done, none of them had.
It’s too easy to say something is impossible for you and only possible for someone else.
I realized school, and work for that matter, keep people disempowered. It’s designed to turn you into a replaceable part, not to achieve success, not to understand the world, not to bring value.
Hard work COULD pay off. It didn’t usually. It depended on how you positioned yourself, and as my first Japanese teacher, a graduate student from from Okinawa always loved to, “even if you win the rat race, you are still a rat”.
My experience of work has been the same.
I worked hard as an employee never to see much of a raise because the system was designed to keep everything in it’s place. And like my grades compared to my true aptitude, the value I could contribute was not easily measurable in terms of profit. It didn’t mean it didn’t lead to profit, I think it led to a lot of profit for the company, but it wasn’t measurable.
I didn’t know how to get credit for what made me unique because I was functioning at a higher level than I was supposed to in the job market. I wasn’t paid to truly help people, I was paid to keep them as loyal customers, which overlapped at times but were hardly the same thing.
Perhaps if someone had taught me that “capturing value” meant gatekeeping your skills and finding ways to “market yourself”, I would have done better in that world, but I just felt like a rat.
I left and determined to become somewhat of a freelancer or business owner. I tried everything to attract paying customers, mostly trying different ways to present myself honestly. I tried lying and misleading at certain low points and found it worked much better. I didn’t like it though and so I’ve continued looking for ways to “repackage” what I do and avoid manipulating people.
People have ideas, they want to help me. But I find that they fit into two categories: those who want to cater to people’s addictions and insecurities and want me to do the things I hated a out working for someone else, and those who have no idea how difficult certain things are to succeed at and are just throwing the easiest ideas out there for you (“Why don’t you just start a youtube?” Ha!).
I’ve had great succeess on a few fronts though.
I found that I am pretty good at long term investing and so I parked the few savings I had very well. When I have capital to play with in markets, I usually find a way to turn money into more money over the course of 2-4 years. Thanks to this, I am still able to pursue things with a more idealistic attitude and even when I cash out for emergencies, it’s only a percent.
I still refuse to mislead anyone, and refuse to try and become something I am not or to cater to people’s insecurities.
When I look at my life, I see that my successes (and I’ve had a few) have never once come from hard work for hard work’s sake. Not even a little. They’ve come from being in the right place at the right time and following my excitement which led me there. Had I been living out of primarily fear, I would have ended up with much less freedom than I have, living someone else’s live instead of mine.
“Find yourself a back door”, the line comes from a cheesey Incubus song from the late 90’s.
But this is probably the best advice I’ve ever gotten, although I never thought of it as advice until now, just a line in a song that I listened to a few times.
There are cracks in the system. You can slide through the cracks to get what you want, legally and without hurting anyone.
You don’t find succeess trying to be the best worker bee, unless your idea of success is dying for the queen. Real success, at a fundamental level (or even at a spiritual level) comes from the willingness to evolve and creating a positive, non-coersive relationship with anything and everything you can…on your own terms.
The hard work that matters is whatever grind or search it takes to achieve this kind of positive feedback loop with the world around you, and only you will know what that looks like. That’s why it’s so hard. We are using the cookie cutter model that onlt works during the short time when a country is developing faster than it ever has.
The question to ask yourself is always “Am I excited about what lies beyond this?”
For me that means that as long as there is food on the table and a plan for the next 2 weeks and some kind of a back up plan, I will never prioritize money over the things I really want to do that allign with my goals. I will never cave in to fear or believe people who say something is impossible when I know in my heart that there must be a way.
Although the world looks as if soon it will not have a place for any of the things we are pursuing right now…independent small scale musician/artists, self produced yarn products and clothing, or even a family business which is becoming more and more unattainable, I see a different writing on the wall.
Authenticity is becoming harder and harder to find and soon it will become the most valuable commodity. So I am not worried. THIS is where the hard work matters.
For my parents, hard work paid off no matter what they did. That’s because they were riding on the coattails of the previous generation which was full of flexible, innovative problem solvers. Say what you want about them, they certainly had their issues, but they had a drive that my parents generation did not, pampered and sold lies in order to snuff out their life force in favor of empty security. (Nevermind that they were also canibalising on their children’s future, never questioning debt based money and endless inflationdifferent topic for a different day.)
The only hard work that really pays off now is the hard work to become the person you are meant to become, and no one can decide that except for you. Study hard to learn the things you truly want to learn. Practice hard to gain the skills you know you want. Work hard to do the work you love. And search hard for a way to make it all work for you.
If you have no idea what it is you truly want, first identify the things you’ve been taught to want and question them. Think about what kind of insecurities you have and what those insecurites are preventing you from doing.
There is so much more within our grasp that we can see right in front of us and most of it just requires tuning in to the energy of who it is we know we could become.
——-
What I’ve worked on recently:
https://youtu.be/aGPWuyhHurw?si=sq7P29_grj3g1nGQ
https://youtube.com/embed/BFlXOax-sT8?si=vOcqHFjBvBkK50Uf
Posted Using INLEO