The FINANCIAL — The reason you are reading this newspaper is because you want to be successful. You want to achieve something, and make a dent in the universe.
You want to be special, you want to be unlike other people, and do great things with your life. You are ambitious. You want to succeed in life. However, the road to success is not easy: get ready to accept some harsh truths.
Success requires hard work. People have different measures of success, but unless success looks like relaxing at home all day, it will take hard work. Malcolm Gladwell famously wrote a book about his 10,000 hour rule, in which he posits that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to become really good at something. He mentions the Beatles, who got a lot of practice before they hit the main stage by playing extensively in dozens of German bars and clubs. Even if your success doesn’t involve technical skill, like playing a musical instrument, you will still need practice and experience. You will never be a master negotiator starting from your first deal, or a top financial analyst starting from the first financial model you put together.
People will talk about you. A downside to being successful is that people will talk about you. Especially in a country like Georgia, where gossip plays an essential social role, those who are successful will often be discussed at length, and not-so-nice things will be said about you. Your motives will be questioned, and people will start attributing your success not to your own hard work, but to the family you come from, to the friends you have, or even to luck. Your private live will also become the subject of scrutiny, and you will suddenly hear about you doing things in your private life that you never even knew you did.
Sometimes you lose. While being successful requires a lot of hard work, there is always a downside risk to this: you may lose. While a normal person with a stable job does not take a lot of risk, being successful often requires risking everything, both financially and personally. And as the word risk implies, whenever you take a risk, there is a possibility that the outcome will be bad instead of good. We all know the success story of the entrepreneur who made a killing with his second business, after his first one failed, or the story of the soccer player who managed to succeed after being fired from his first team. The morale of these stories is often that as long as you fail once or twice, you will be successful after that. However, we never hear about the people who didn’t make it. The reality is that many people who work extremely hard to become successful never become successful. For every soccer star who made it, there are thousands of kids who spent their entire childhoods in professional soccer academies, but never got to play with the big guys. Sometimes you lose
Can you take the heat? Are you ready to work hard, to be talked about, and to accept the possibility that even if you try everything you can, you might still fail? If so, go for it. “If you cannot take the heat,” as American president Harry S. Truman famously said, “get out of the kitchen.” If these three things sound like they will make you very unhappy, maybe you should consider leading a “normal” live, with more modest ambitions. There is no shame in doing so.
GEOCAPITAL MICROFINANCE ORGANIZATION
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