Why Challenges are important for Young People
Why is struggle good? Is our life made better through hardship? These are some reasons why challenges are important
3y
The first time I ever lost money in the stock market was when I was 19. I had been trading for a year and had made money every month. But then one month the market went down and I had to borrow more money to keep buying stocks. And then it kept going down and down. And one day my broker called me and said, "You have to put in $40,000 today or we will have to close your account."I didn't have that much money so I sold some of my stocks at a huge loss. It took me years to get back even.That was a painful experience but it taught me many things: A) don't trade unless you know what you are doing (I knew nothing), B) never borrow money to invest (which is like borrowing pain from the future to enjoy pleasure now), C) don't hold onto losing stocks hoping they will come back (because they won't).It also taught me how scared I am of failure. How hard it is for me to admit that something is not working out for me. That I can't do everything or be everything or make everyone happy.That's why challenges are good: because they teach us who we really are when we are under pressure, when we feel shame, when we have lost something important to us, when we feel scared. Because those are the times when our real self comes out and says, "Who am I?"
When I started writing books in 2004 after having written only articles for magazines for 10 years, it was very hard at first because no publisher wanted my book idea ("How To Be The Luckiest Person Alive").But then Tim Ferriss read an article of mine on his podcast and he said he would publish my book if he ever published another book again (he eventually did publish four of them).But getting a publisher was not easy. It took 5 years of writing every day before anyone would even consider publishing anything by me.In those five years there were many days where all I wrote were rewrites of the same chapters over and over again trying to make them as good as possible but knowing that no publisher would ever buy them because they were just practice work for later work later on in my career which would be better than these early attempts at writing books.During those five years there were many days where it felt like all this work was pointless since no one seemed interested in buying anything by me at all so why bother?But those challenges made me realize two things: A) What kind of writer I wanted to be B) What kind of stories i wanted ot tellAnd those challenges turned into opportunities later on because once publishers started buying books by me, they kept buying them because they knew that I loved writing stories that told people how much fun life can be if you approach it with curiosity instead of fear-based thinking
Sometimes challenges seem like failures but often they turn into successes later on if you study why something worked or didn't work out this way:In 2008-2009 during the financial crisis ,I lost about half my savings due to bad investments . But then immediately afterwards ,my business doubled overnight as suddenly companies needed help with social media marketing since their budgets had been slashed during the financial crisis .So instead of doubling down on investments which might take months before any returns ,I doubled down on hiring people . And within six months ,we went from 3 employees up to 30 employees ,mostly from all the new business coming in from companies needing help with social media marketing .This experience taught me that sometimes there's no middle step between success and failure . Sometimes success turns into failure instantly so don't
Comments (0)
No comments.