How Can Someone Be like Leonard Kim, without All the Life Experience?

We acquire knowledge much faster than we acquire wisdom.

Reading my content won’t make you any more or any less like me. Maybe you can learn some lessons from my mistakes, however it won’t change the content of your character nor add value to your own personal experiences.

Keep asking questions. Having a curious nature, that’s a great start. In life, we need to keep an open mind. To stay curious to what the world has in store for us.

I would highly suggest to be yourself. Just be open to understanding what goes on around you. Try to reflect upon it all and learn the lessons that come with it. Then back yourself with a philosophy of consistent and never-ending improvement.

Buddhists call this conquest a journey to reach Nirvana. Taoists practice something similar each day. The Japanese call it Kaizen. Whatever you want to call it is completely up to you, however the whole goal is to become aware of more today than you were the day before. For each day that we don’t grow, that is when we start dying.

Personally, through the last decade, I mostly listened to self-help books from authors ranging from John Maxwell to Jim Rohn. I did what I could to carry over and implement their philosophies into my life. At times, I forgot what I was doing and completely messed everything up. Other times, things worked in my favor.

To be completely real, my life didn’t start to fall upon the right path until about a little over a year ago, starting in June 2013. Before that, I always tried to control my environment. I tried to make the lives of others revolve around what I wanted. As I’m sure that you can predict, or even visualize, when I tried to take control of everything, nothing worked. Everything fell apart.

Contrary to the advice of another person who said to fake it until you make it, I would have to say that you need to be completely true to yourself. When I tried to fake it until I made it in life, I lost out on more opportunities than I was granted. Instead, I was left with nothing.

The same happened for my friends as well, who wouldn’t even dare to speak of their journeys, unless they were drunk and at a private booth at a bar to cry away their sorrows.

Actually, my life started to change a little prior to June 2013. However, that is when I took action upon what I planned to change.

In December of 2012, my best friend came over to my birthday party. She came bearing gifts. A gift that would be one of the indicating factors that would change my life. That gift was a book. A book by the author Don Miguel Ruiz. It was called The Four Agreements. Since my best friend gave it to me, I immediately read it the next day. Then I started to lay out blueprints to the foundation in my life.

While I was laying out the foundation, I still had some failures here and there, but the most heartbreaking instance of all was to find out that my best friend had vanished.

She was nowhere to be found.

I assumed she had taken it upon herself to live to the four agreements. To become all that she could become. Yet, here I was doing nothing in my life but consistently failing.

So, I made a decision. Two decisions actually. I decided to follow the four agreements. Then I decided to to stop taking life seriously. The funny thing is, when I stopped taking life seriously, life took me seriously.

Then I made a third decision. To have an attitude of gratitude.

At first, it seemed tacky, lame even, to think of what I was grateful for each day. Then as time progressed, I noticed that this small change in behavior affected my whole life. I was much happier. Then weird things happened. I started to attract friends and people who wanted to share the message I was communicating. Even people who wanted to invest in me, be mentored by me, or even sign me on as a consultant to their business, even though I haven’t accomplished much in my life. As unreal as it sounds, I miraculously was even able to attract a girlfriend. Then I ended up where I am today.

However, the journey to get here wasn’t a smooth ride. I’m just human. I’m not perfect, much like how the rest of the world isn’t perfect. I fell back, faltered, scared off people and even went into depression at certain times after I made all these changes. But I made sure I did one thing after I fell. I made sure to pick myself back up and continue moving forward.

So if I were you, what I would do is to pick up that book, live in the present and start to live with an attitude of gratitude. Those few changes in your lifestyle will have a dramatic impact on your whole entire life.

Oh and don’t be scared to share stories in your personal life. Some events may seem lame, or even embarrassing, however others are going through the exact same thing you are. Start sharing how you overcame those odds, whether it be a test, getting into a specific school, or even a promotion at work, to get you to where you are today.

Originally posted on Quora.

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