The Day I Started Smiling

By the time this new year arrived, I was already deep in reflection about who I am and what I’m missing in my life.

I was born 30 years ago with a cleft, which basically means most of my nose, mouth, respiratory and other significant parts, which determine how we all look, breath or speak, were messed up from the ground up. I spent my life struggling with why, how, what — why me? what do I do? how can I make it go away?

I was struggling at school, in sports, with people. I was struggling, but unlike other folks, I wasn’t struggling to be the best, I was struggling for a simpler goal — I was struggling to be normal like everyone else.

I spent something like the first 27 years of my life trying to be just like everyone around me — my whole life, until I started my own business. This was a major turning point for me; it made me see myself different, and feel differently about other’s perceptions of me. In a way, I guess it was the first time I had to re-think about a lot of what I knew about myself. It made me go out of my comfort zone; it made look for solutions, rather than reasons.

For the first time, I didn’t want to be like everyone else; I just wanted to be the best. Founding my own company brought out the ambitious, goal-chaser, deal-maker version of myself. I wanted to understand how to better articulate myself and what I stand for, and more importantly, to stand out from the crowd, but this time — for a positive reason.

About a week ago I went through, what is (in my eyes) the last stop in this thirty-year journey. It was a four-hour surgery that summed up the last 30 years and hopefully the next 90. Afterwards, I realized that these first 30 years taught me a few things about how to improve the way I live my life.

Better vs. Different

This is one of my most asked questions. Which is best: to be different or better?

When I was young, the fact that I looked and talked a bit differently bothered me so much that I was dying to make it better. I spent most of my elementary and middle school years in surgeries and other kind of treatment. I even met with a speech therapist a few times a week so I could sound like all other kids. Become better was my main goal in life back then.

When I was seventeen, I had another surgery. For the first time, I was uncertain about what would be the better end result, to make my cleft look better or to have as minimal change as possible?

I actually felt that having a whole different look than what I was used to would actually make me feel worse. I guess it was my first entrance to the place everybody likes to call, the “comfort zone”.

When I came out of surgery this time, I definitely looked different. I spent the next ten days in my house without connecting with the outside world. I didn’t go out, didn’t reach out, didn’t care. I was handling the fact that now I’m different than who I was a day ago. It took me seventeen years to feel comfortable with what i’m seeing, and now — I need to do all this work again. “It’s not better if it makes you feel so different all over again.” that’s what I always told myself.

And again, I was wrong.

Only after my latest surgery a few weeks ago did I realize how stupid I had been. Why did I think that I would find balance by turning my world upside down? I had to ask myself a simple question: What is better, to look different from yourself, or to look different from others? I thought it would be simple; I thought that the more different I looked after surgery the better, because then I’d look less different from everyone else.

It may have taken me thirty years to realize, but different is very subjective. It is how I see myself as opposed to others perception of me. But this is sometimes wrong. We should all look at ourselves, at our goals and decisions in life, as if we’re the only one making it. That way, we will find the perfect correlation between these two word — better & different.

Mirror

For my whole life, I’ve always felt like everyone was looking at me. When I was young, other children often were; they would point and stare when they realized I didn’t look like them. Once I grew up, though, I started to question this — I realized that maybe it wasn’t true, that people weren’t looking at me.

To get a better idea of what other people see when they look at me, I spend a lot of time looking in the mirror. We all have perceptions of how others see us, and we all have perceptions of ourselves, but these are often inaccurate. Without constantly questioning your self-perception, you cannot grow, you cannot move forward. It’s true about the product we’re building, about the people we’re in a relationship with, and about the way we live our lives.

Trust

I’ve had over ten surgeries since the day I was born, some under general anesthesia and some (by my own request) under local anesthesia while I was wide awake. I’ve reflected a lot about the reasons that led me to ask to be awake; I mean, isn’t it strange that I would rather be wide awake, hear and feel (in blurry) what the doctors are doing when I could just sleep through it?

I believe it is a matter of trust. My doctors are all hand-picked by me, after meeting with the best of the best, everyone my country has to offer. Still, for some reason, I didn’t feel that I can fully trust them. I was certain that I had 100% confidence in my doctors, but still, I asked them to keep me awake with a degree of control.

This has taught me something about life, relationships, and business. Trust is an endless process. It’s a journey, not a fact. It builds itself step-by-step. You can feel like you trust someone 100%, but maybe it’s 99%, and the difference between 99% and 100% is significant.

I now know, that building trust usually takes time, efforts and endless back and forts. But when it hit the 100% mark, it’s usually the first mark of a future success.

Smiling

Someone once told me that smiling helps everything.

Apparently, it can help you in many ways, whether in business or in life. Smiling helps you be more kind to others, it helps them be more kind to you. Smiling makes the world better.

But I can’t smile. I know how to laugh, but I don’t know how to smile.

I sometimes think about whether not being able to smile means that I can’t externalize my happiness. I’m in a middle of reading Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people, where he points out the importance of showing the world how positive you are by giving compliments, positive feedback, and smiles.

A few months back, when my doctors told me that they had an idea for me, I told them one thing: “I don’t care what you’re doing, you don’t even need to sketch it for me like you usually do, just make me a better smiler.” The fact that I didn’t know what they were going to do to me calmed me; I didn’t think about how different I’d look, or whether it is going to be better or not. I just wanted to be able to smile.

I wanted to be able to smile to be a better version of myself, so I could give myself the feedback I need when something good happens, and allow myself to wordlessly share my positive thoughts.

I wanted to be able to smile to be a better person, so I can constantly tell others around me how much I appreciate them and how much better I am because of them.

I wanted to be able to smile to be a better entrepreneur, so I could show the world what we’re building with the confidence backed with a smile.

But actually, I wanted to be able to smile because although I always looked different, there was only one thing missing that made me so different than others:

The lack of ability to show them, that I’m in fact the luckiest person alive.

Photo Credit: Nana B Agyei at Flickr Creative Commons