Is It Too Late To Achieve Something Worthwhile?

 — This is a guest post written by Andy Ooi — 

Many in their late twenties or thirties wonder: “Is it too late to achieve something worthwhile?”

The answer is obvious: Yes, it is too late.

By the time they were born, it was already too late. They did nothing during the nine months in their mother’s womb. By the time they went to school, it was even later than too late. They had a great childhood by fooling around.

I know that sounds sarcastic, but people don’t realize that they actually have 2 choices:

First, they can decide that it is too late. Then they can spend the rest of their lives being too late.

Second, they can decide to just do it. Then ignore the “fact” that it is too late.

You see, life is too short to worry about timing. Here are 3 things people can do to “just do it” right now:

1)   Stop Finding The “Passion”

Many people want to “find their passion” first before doing anything worthwhile. That is just a brilliant excuse to procrastinate.

“Finding passions” is like searching for unicorns. Nobody will ever find one.

Actually, people don’t need to “find” their passions. They should just do one thing that makes them happy.

For example, I wake up at 5am to pump out at least 500 words every day, because writing makes me happy. Maybe I will become a famous writer one day. Maybe I won’t.

But for now, writing is my passion.

2)   Build Habits, Stop Relying On Motivation

With the right habits, motivation can be thrown out of the window. For example, people don’t motivate themselves to brush their teeth. The habit is internalized over the years.

In other words, people need to build habits around what they want to achieve. And history is full of similar examples: Pablo Picasso created over 50,000 paintings his entire life by painting every day.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart became the King of Pop of the late 1700’s, not because he was a genius. Maybe he was a genius, but he studied and composed music every single day.

3)   Expect Failures. Learn From Them.

Most people never fail, because they never tried.

Entrepreneurs need to research, plan and execute. Many are patient enough to spend years researching and planning. There is only one problem. They never execute.

I was the opposite: I hated to plan and research. I failed so many times in my business adventures but I never stopped learning. Here are some of my notable “failures”:

i) I created a course to teach people to play CityVille better – a Facebook based game that had 100,000,000 players. I figured out that my product – a video course would drive the other ebook products out of business.

I was wrong – nobody wanted a video course. I went out of business. Game over.

ii) Then I learned to create “niche” websites. I targeted the credit card market and became very good at it. I was outranking a credit card company in Google search results, and that made them nervous.

Then I receive angry lawyer letters threatening to take down my website. Apparently I infringed the company’s trade mark in my website name.

Realizing my mistake, I got scared and let them take over the website. Game over.

iii) I sold cheap jewelry imported from China. I marketed them on a local forum by running a “give away” contest that went viral.

I send out half of my stock for free. My customers were overjoyed.

After that small win, I wish I could tell you my jewelry sold like hot cakes. But I made a grand total of zero sales.

Game over, again.

Successful People Don’t Care About Being Too Late

Here are some late bloomers who were obviously too late, but they didn’t care:

i) Ray Kroc was too late when he became the president of the McDonald’s Corporation. He was 53. He was an ambulance driver and a paper cup salesman.

ii) Fauja Singh, nicknamed “Turbanned Tornado” ran his first marathon at the incredibly late age of 89. He decided to retire at 102 years old.

iii) J. K. Rowling was 30 when she started to write the Harry Potter series. Being too late, divorced, clinically depressed and jobless, she didn’t care and just put ink onto paper.

Today, she is worth a billion dollars and she is still writing incredible stories.

So, Is It Too Late?

The answer is hardly surprising: It doesn’t matter.

What matters though, is whether people take massive actions to achieve whatever they want.

Then the Ray Kroc’s, Fauja Singh’s, J.K. Rowling’s, Picasso’s and Mozart’s will make bigger and bigger waves in the world.

 


About the Author

Andy Ooi believes in the power of having the right habits to achieve success. He writes about personal development at TheBadassMind.com.


 

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