5 Keys That Changed My Life

How I created my dream job and do what I love

Parker Klein ✌️

Published in

TwosApp

4 min readJan 28, 2025

When I was in college, I knew I wanted to start my own company.

I didn’t know how I’d do it, but I was determined.

I started by reading a lot of books and listening to podcasts.

These are the keys I discovered that helped me on my journey.

Today, I am a founder of a startup and do what I love every day.

I hope you can learn from these keys and achieve your own goals in life.

1. Develop your life philosophy

Do you have a life philosophy?

Write out exactly what you want.

For me, it is to learn about myself, take action towards what I want, and inspire people to do the same.

A clear well-defined philosophy gets to the guidelines and boundaries that keep you on track.

It’s important to do what you love, but not just falling in love, staying in love.

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

2. You don’t need to be a genius

There is nothing special about anyone.

Well, maybe there is, but thinking they are different from you, just gives you an excuse not to try.

Stop believing you have to be a genius or that other people are geniuses.

Our vanity and self-love promote the code of the genius for if we think of geniuses as something magical we are not obliged to compare ourselves and find ourselves lacking.

To call someone divine means there is no need to compete.

Geniuses all possess that seriousness of the efficient workmen which first learns to construct the parts properly before adventuring to fashion a great whole.

“Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” — Robert Collier

3. Understand it’s going to take so much work

No one can see in the work of the artist how it has become.

Every great work took long hours of practice, experimentation, learning, and crafting.

When I was getting started, I wanted to become the best programmer in the world. How would I do it? Program every day. I’ve programmed almost every day for the past 10 years.

Is also not just about working incredibly hard. That’s only part of it. There are no shortcuts to excellence, developing real expertise, figuring out really hard problems. It all takes time. Longer than most people imagine. Then you know you’ve got to apply those skills to produce goods or services that are valuable to people. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Work on something you care about and stay loyal to it.

“The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I am not afraid to die on the treadmill. I will not be outworked. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me, you might be all those things but if we get on the treadmill together there are two things: you’re getting off first or I’m going to die. It’s really that simple.” — Will Smith

4. Focus on the next step

Why fixate on the extreme limits of what we might do when most of us are at the very beginning of our journey?

The only way to reach your goal is with small steps.

Don’t stop yourself by thinking about everything you need to do, just pick the next place to start.

I would constantly set smaller goals for the day (using Twos), week, month, year, and next 5 years.

This would help me stay focused, but also give me meaningful steps along the way.

80% of success in life is showing up.

“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

5. Expect failure and learn from it

On any long journey, detours are to be expected.

Improvise, adapt, overcome.

There is so much I’ve wasted time on, things that didn’t work, but I will never complain about those things. They taught me a lot and I will have more failures in the future.

No pain, no gain.