Simple Life?
Are you convinced yet that “Life is simple”? If you don’t, don’t worry because you are not alone; in fact, many people are still oblivious about it.
The big fallacy behind the idea “life is not simple” is because we are still part of the system. As with all systems, there are always some guiding principles that determine what work and what don’t. If you sway from them, you will be “punished” or you have to ask for forgiveness to rejoin the system.
A great example of a system is our educational system. Every child born in the 21st century is now expected to go through nursery school, primary school, secondary school and college (hopefully an Ivy League). During childhood, the popular belief is that you need to excel academically to be successful in life; society judges how far in life you can advance by what schools you attended or how well you performed in your examinations. Every child is implicitly measured either by a grade or what school brand he or she belongs to.
Yes, there is a positive correlation between academic performance and success. On one hand, you notice numerous well-educated people spearheading many of the Fortune 500 or Forbes Global 2000 companies. On the other hand, you can also witness many high school dropouts or so-called failures in that list too. So how are they able to make it into the list? Sheer luck? Or maybe the more appropriate question to ask is whether our current educational system that is designed during the industrial revolution is pervasive enough to be used as a metric? Fortunately, I would argue it is not.
Upon graduation of the educational system, you are now expected to work in corporations and climb up the corporate ladder. As time progresses, hopefully you can climb up the ladder and become the top chief of the company. Or at least, you can make enough good money to join the millionaire or even billionaire club. Society, as it being fickle-minded, shifts its definition of success from academic excellence to how much you make and what is your job title in the company. As long as you are not within the reach of the status quo of a management role in the corporate world, you feel that you have to “live to work” instead of “working to live”. This is where I believe our simple life definition gets muddled.
With more than 6 billion people on earth, no system exists today that can compute the different variations of human capacity to determine a person’s future. Human beings by nature of their creativity and multitude of talents, the first step to succeed is to discover thyself. From that initial step, you would gain self-confidence to use your innate talents to fight for what you are destined for.
To wrap it up, I think we should all take heed the advice from one of the greatest leaders of the 21st century, Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”