To Do Or Not To Do
My mother keeps telling me that I need my downtime. That I need to take breaks and do things that I really enjoy. The thing she fails to realise is that I only do things that I enjoy. Or at least I do things that allow me to do the things that I enjoy. With anything, there is always some form of sacrifice that you have to make. There will always be tedious aspects of your job or hobby that you don’t enjoy as much as everything else.
“Do what you gotta do so you can do what you wanna do.” - Denzel Washington
Where most people go wrong however is sacrificing their lives for a retirement. I actually remember getting into an argument a few years ago with a schoolmate of mine about this. I asked him what he wanted to do in life, and he said he wanted to become a politician (of all things). I was a little taken aback, I asked him; ‘Do you not want to travel and see the world and do something fun?’, he replied with; ‘I’ll do that when I retire’. Fuck me. I mean that's great and all, but not only is he setting himself up for a life filled with spineless bastards who bought their way into the political system, he is going to get a real big shock when he realises that he wasted his life due to the fact that he was sold a lie of representing ‘the people’ and doing great things.
I don’t want to wait all week for Friday. I don’t want to wait all year for Summer. I don’t want to wait all my life for retirement. There is no downtime. There is no free time. There is only YOUR time. Take advantage of that and do something you actually want. And a lot of people say they can’t afford to. But most people don’t do many things that are outside the ordinary cycle of life. So when you do something that sparks peoples interest, you can monetise the living shit out of it.
This morning when I woke up, I checked my emails and saw that €20 had been deposited into my PayPal account. Someone paid me while I slept in my warm, comfortable bed, dreaming about banging a supermodel on a yacht in the Mediterranean. It was one of the most satisfying things I have ever experienced, and it’s motivating as fuck. Whats funny about it is that I hadn’t made sales in about 2 weeks, and I was beginning to get ‘the fear’. But over the last few days, I had working hard on the store and adding new products, and trying new marking strategies. And obviously, my work is beginning to pay off. It’s incredible what you can do when you open yourself up to failure and experimentation.
Experimentation is something I feel very strongly about. Without experimentation, there is no innovation. Nothing new is a sure thing. Everything new that is created is an experiment. No one could have predicted how big the internet or social media would become. They were experiments, risks that someone took, and they paid off big time. Unfortunately, most people don’t experiment. They are dogmatic and follow the herd, never taking any risks and never progressing towards something. This somewhat ties into my last piece about competition. Two of the biggest driving forces behind innovation, competition and experimentation.
Dropping out of college was probably the biggest risk I’ve taken in my life so far. Although it hasn’t been very long since I dropped out, I’m beginning to feel like I’m going in the right direction. I can visualise what needs to be done for me to become successful over the next few months and years. That vision is constantly changing. The more opportunities that I find myself open to, the clearer that vision becomes. Again it’s funny because it’s only when I started putting myself out of my comfort zone that I was opened up to so much more. To reiterate my point (because no one ever listens the first time) Experimentation = Innovation.
Now after a speech like this, I would normally ask people; ‘What are you going to do with YOUR time?’. But I feel like a better question is; ‘What are you WILLING to do with YOUR time?’
Keep hustling.
Cormac