“When life gives you lemons, you make lemonades.” But life gave you nothing, right?
Growing up, looking at the world as how it is makes me think, “You know what? Fuck those people born in rich families, they’re playing LIFE at the lowest difficulty setting”. However, I grew up in a rather decent family, so mum always told me to hold the F-bomb and control my emotions. In the end, I’ll end up saying “I am grateful for everything that I have” even though I am not. I’ve been living a life of lies for so long, telling myself what I don’t really feel, I can’t remember the last time I was honest and admit that I am tired, and I don’t know what to do with my life.
Being 20, I see a lot of people of my generation start growing into life gurus, activists and hikers (yeah, mostly hikers. I don’t really know why though). Some became gym rats, some became bookworms, some became couch potatoes and some, well I don’t even know what happened to them. Regardless of what my friends — both old and new — became, I realize one similar thing in most of their lifestyles; most of them are trying to step out of the mainstream and become ‘unique’ and ‘original’. And I hardly understand why, because I’m here trying to make passive income and still focus on my studies while my friends seems to be so carefree. One day I went ‘Medium-walking’ (like blog-walking but on Medium.com? IDK) and I saw a post that hit me right in the head. It was ‘There’s more to life than being a fucking entrepreneur’ by Jon Westenberg (a good read, I highly recommend it).
“When life gives you lemon, you make lemonade”
We believe that when life gets hard, we try to get the best of it. When life push u down on your knees, you give it a friggin low-blow and stand back up. When life fucks you up you flip it off and move on.
However, if we really are going to jump higher after life drag us down, how are people — like me — who never really made a significant mistake gonna learn? Yes we can get lemonade from lemon, but we can’t get it from thin air. Or can we?
Many successful people get good when they learn a very valuable lesson from their mistakes and they often share those lessons with the public. Given the abundance of sources like YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter etc., we should really get more of these inputs. Why? Because we may learn from mistakes but life is too short to make all the mistakes in this world. Hence, we learn from others’ mistakes and get a higher learning-to-mistake ratio.
My life is not a drama or a novel. There is not much ups and downs, it’s more of a flat gradient of an adventure-vs-time graph. If one day I’m gonna big an important guy in an organization, heck my speeches are gonna be super boring. So, how am I gonna leave a mark in this world when I’m gone?
“It’s not about being nice, it’s not about being bad, it’s about having the little pieces” — Ali Imran, 2016
Sometimes we have to understand, people view different things as beautiful. Some sees terrorism as an answer, while some see it as pointless violence (and no I am not pro-terrorist). Some likes the summer and some loves the winter. Some believes in reincarnation, some in the life after death and some in death being the endpoint of everything. My point is, there’s nothing in this small world that gets the same view from everyone including success in life.
If we don’t stop sprinting to the future, at some point we will faint. If we walk to the future we may arrive too late. However, if we confidently jog at our own pace, we’ll get there when we need to get there. Not everyone is destined to be rich, having the best job or being financially free. However everyone was born to make an impact in this world. How? It’s simple. We just need to understand and accept that Mother Earth as a whole is a world too big for some of us.
We are destined to be big AND small but each of us complements each other in our own world. Believe that your world begins with you, your family and friends, and your religion/beliefs. Then you can start building your empire. The world is a sophisticated thing that needs the ‘little pieces’ from everyone to be complete. Work for it.
Being successful is simple enough. Take the leap whenever you can and expand your world to its maximum potential. NEVER overexert yourself. See the positives behind every trouble you’ve ever had. Most importantly, remember; when life gives you a lemon, you make lemonade but when life gives you nothing, you go buy yourself a lemonade from the other guy who got the lemon in the first place.
Thanks for reading. If you liked it please share and if you don’t please tell me, I am happy to read ALL of your opinions.
Love, Nabil.
