Have you ever wondered how did you get here?
You’re sitting there by yourself minding your own business. Thoughts wandering between that cat video your friend sent you to the groceries you need to buy for dinner. You’re exhausted. In your mind, a captivating thought has just delicately come to surface when it’s suddenly blown to oblivion by your phone’s notification bleep. Beneath your walking feet are the train station tiles and, before you know it, your shoes are hitting that flat concrete path to your doorstep. You’ve reached your destination but silently wonder what happened to all the in-between? Unaware, you’ve been set on auto-pilot. Floating through your life tamed at a cruise-control speed — not fast enough to be exhilarating or slow enough to be dull.
It’s comfortably suffocating and happily unsatisfying.
But suddenly, a ‘simple something’ innocuously creeps into your life. Like water to fish, it’s so blindingly obvious and familiar that on a usual day you would walk right on by. But not on this day. On this day it strikes you, grabs hold, and hits deep. Slowly but surely, this ‘simple something’ casts new light on your old deep-rooted dogma. Your world is reimagined. Turned upside down, inside out, and never the same. The moments that preceded barely matter anymore and your thoughts on yourself have changed.
A new perspective has hatched.
How I took the leap to be a Social Entrepreneur.
On an average day browsing the internet, I stumbled across a photo of a famous living legend: Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. The thing about this photo I found online is that it was not of Kawakubo as she’s known today, the notorious and unmistakable designer, it was taken of her over 40 years ago — back in her youth when she didn’t have a name for herself. I promptly downloaded and renamed the file from gibberish to ‘Young Rei Kawakubo’.
Then it struck me.
Why did I add ‘Young’ in the name, and not just write it as ‘Rei Kawakubo’? I looked at the photo again, much more deeply this time, and wondered to myself…at the very moment that this photo was taken, did she know who she would become in the future? Her eyes, her hair, her hands…at that very moment did she know of the empire she would build or the people she would empower? The obvious answer is no, she didn’t know — but my mind couldn’t stop racing. A thought wouldn’t leave and haunted me unwaveringly throughout the day. And that thought was:
Everything that I’m doing today will be remembered as the young version of myself.
That is, somebody in the future is going to look at a photo taken of me on this very day, add ‘young’ before my name, and wonder ‘what was he doing?’ Will the answer be: I was working while counting the days till the weekend to blow my savings on cheap thrills to mask my life’s dissatisfaction? Will the answer be: I was waiting for the right moment that never seemed to come to chase after the things that mattered to me? Or, will the answer be: I was out of money, I was confused, but I was out there building my ambitions?
Photos are snapshots of time, freezing moments forever. The moments you put on your boots for world exploration and the moments you can’t climb out from under the sheets. We blaze through thousands of them every day never wondering if any of those snapshots are really worth remembering. And sadly, we make many of our moment decisions based on what comes easiest to us rather than what we’d like to remember as our days gone past. The truth is, every photo taken of me is freezing evidence of my life at that point in time. Freezing my decisions to be lazy, to not do what I said I would, and to drift in mediocrity with no plans to change. When the moment passes and the shutter lens close, it’s become a part of history.
I’ve been (un)fortunate in that since I was young I’ve always had a strange inkling that I would die before 40. Any random pain in my body I would attribute to some hidden cancer — morbid, I know. I didn’t think much of it, but in retrospect the effects of an ‘early death mentality’ have been profound on me. Skipping past all the ‘what is the purpose of life’ and ‘pursuit of happiness’ talk, it has made me laser-focused; I choose only to do what I deem as meaningful and cast aside all the rest.
In my teens, this meant unceasingly questioning why schools are run the way they are. In my twenties, it meant choosing my own life rather than inheriting one given to me.
And today, this ‘early death mentality’ has influenced me to realise that there’s no point to anything if I’m alone. No achievement conquered or money earned is worth anything if there’s nobody alongside me to share it with. For me, this has quietly evolved to the belief of trying to make other people happy. By focusing on others, I’ve found the effort spent makes me considerably happier than trying to make myself happy. Ironic, yet fascinating. By design the human condition is wired for us to be happier when we’re helping others rather than ourselves. The problem it seems, is it took me too long to truly adopt this understanding.
Although there are catalysts, it’s the seemingly random building blocks building up to the change that are the real unseen heroes. My venture to become a social entrepreneur wasn’t walking outside, seeing pollution, and then signing on the dotted line; it was an accumulation of decisions that led me here. And each of those decisions were based on a simple concept:
How would I like to be remembered today?
Things perish, moments fade, and strangers glide on by — if you let them. Looking at the most recent photo ourselves, how many of us can convincingly say: ‘that exact moment in time (and all its encapsulation of who I am) is exactly how I want to be remembered’? I made a simple change in how I make my daily decisions; instead of doing what is natural and easy, I choose to do what is most memorable. This has, over time, greatly altered my landscape. It has led me to a place where I can genuinely say that I am happy. Every single day.
So the question is, what do you want to be remembered for today?
