22,000 is the number of days I left with my life.

BirdieChao
Aug 13, 2017
4 min read

This is Birdie's 21st personal article

At the age of 19, I always thought that I’m early in starting whatever I’m trying to do. Being this blog or trying to have a startup, and that mindset of “I think I started early” has been dragging me down recently. I have been complacent about what I’m doing and start being lazier and lazier because I think, with my pace, I will have an edge over people of my age in the real world.

Till yesterday, I watched a video talking about fresh graduates going into the society. The video reminds me how much time I have left with my life and I shouldn’t use the little time I have in doing meaningless things. Instead, I should keep up my work like last time and keep designing and shaping my life.

The video is in Chinese but I highly recommend you to watch it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRhaxHTlAtw

- The Bird that got addicted to Mobile Legends recently

It wasn’t shown in the video, but in the article I read together with the video, the author asked this question. “When your life is less than 22k, would you still do what you do today?”

My obvious answer is of course “HELL OH NO!”. To be honest, recently I have been totally out of form in personal development. I went into total Lepak mode. I didn’t read books, didn’t constantly look for new things to learn and lastly, I didn’t even keep up with my gym routine.

I know I could have come up with excuses like I injured my leg, I’m stressed with school projects and maybe even, I just gone through a break up. But inside myself, I know that this is all excuses because I still have the time to have fun with youtube everyday. I choose to listen to music and stare into blank space instead of listening to a podcast which I used to. Every empty time slot that I have and can turn it into a productive session, I’ve made it into a rotting session.

Lucky that I came across this video that gave me a tight slap to my face when I watch it. I don’t know how long would I be in this state if I didn’t come across this video.

Is it all you got for your life?

Humans are a creature of habits, this is both a good news and a bad news because this perfectly depicts what the video has share. We can design our own life with the types of habits that we form.

It isn’t hard to prove that statement is true. Successful people always have a set of good habits that they practice and that set of good habits are seemed as impossible to those that failed to do it. Let’s just take waking up early as an example. Most of the most successful people in the world all have their unique morning ritual. They are able to wake up extremely early and get a lot of things done before the world even wakes up. But for the most of us, if we have nothing on, we wake up after 6 hours after they do.

You see the difference?

So, imagine for yourself, how would your next 10 years be like if you carry your current set of habits throughout the next 10 years. Would you be an average Joe or Elon Musk?

Alright, sorry, Elon Musk is too much off the grid, but the point is this. No matter who you are now, you can always change your set of habits to re-design yourself for your future.

If you want to know what kind of habits that are good to start with. HIT THE LIKE BUTTON! And I will share a mini-post about 10 good habits that we, as students can start right now.

Fear of taking risk and failure

Any type of changes can not only bring new opportunities but also comes together with unknown risk in it. Therefore, to the majority of the people, any type of changes is a type of gambling. So, while facing the chances of failures, we often think that we couldn’t afford it.

Whenever we face a situation where we are forced to make choices. We will always intuitively imagine the worst case possible and demoralise ourselves before anything even happens. And you wouldn’t choose to believe that your abilities are able to overcome all the possible risk that you imagined.

Then while you are hesitating to take action, the number of days you left with your life is slowly decreasing. And often when you realize that you need to take action, it is too late.

Also, when we are afraid to take the risk of making mistakes and fail at certain things, you also forgo the opportunities that you can grow yourself and the chances to be successful. If you like everybody else that are kiasu, scared their work can’t pay off and carry responsibilities that are too heavy, then I’m afraid that your life wouldn’t have a breakthrough that can redefine who you are.

So why not just say “F*** it” sometimes and try to go for it. You never know what can come out of that.

If you want to start taking action and make mistakes for your better future, why not read my post “find yourself, then connect the dots” after finishing this article. So we can take a calculated risk and minimize our chance of failure.

That's all for this post, but before I end, I would like to ask you this question.

"Before the 22k hit you, how are you going to make yourself prepared for the 22k?"

If you like this article and find it helpful, make sure you hit that like button (It will make me write a special post just for the 10 habits as well!). Of course, feel free to share this post with anyone that you think they need to read this and start taking action to their own life. Of course, any action that you take after the reading is highly appreciated! Especially the subscribing to my blog! This will really motivate me on continue writing and improving. So thank you guys for reading and hope you guys learn something here! With this, I'll see you guys next week!

It's your choice

To live in your dreams or to be living your dreams

-BirdieChao