For many months now, I’ve thought of many things I could venture into, but the fear of not succeeding in them has snuffed out any chances at success I could have at all.
Like I already talked about in detail in one of my last posts, it’s mostly because of the fear that even after investing a lot of time and effort into some of these things, the outcome might be not be encouraging or fulfilling.
But if there’s one thing I’ve heard almost a 100 times times lately, it’s that now, this age (early to late 20s) is the time to try out new things, venture into untested waters, and take risks(calculated of course).
Safety, security and stability are really things that are more sought out by much older people looking to settle down, and this is usually because their choices and actions affect others at that point or age. They’re now responsible for more than just themselves, but others as well - their family.
They can’t be as callous trading forex or futures with with a 1:1 risk to reward ratio anymore because every penny is more than likely already budgeted to go towards something. Neither can they decide to abruptly switch careers because they already spent decades building a career around a job that is providing stable income and security to support their families.
Doing the scary things
One thing that people don’t talk about much is how scary the uncertainty of your life is in your early 20s.
Let me paint you a picture
You probably just graduated college expecting to be hired with a sweet salary and some bonuses, only to face the biggest disappointments of your life. After years of being unemployed and trying many different things that all don’t work (or just aren’t fulfilling enough) , you start to tell yourself maybe it’s best to choose one thing to focus on. But what are you choosing exactly? What if that doesn’t work either?
My advice? Try anything you think is worth trying. You have the time for it. It might not look like it cos it seems like everyone else your age already has their shit together and figured out, but just because X or Y does, doesn’t mean everyone else does, or that you should have it figured out NOW too. We all operate on different timelines.
These are our youthful years. These are the years to take the risks, make the mistakes, but more importantly, learn from the experiences, because those will give you foresight moving forward, and form the foundation of what will become experience for you to make informed decisions based on. Playing it too safe now will open a lot of room for “what if” regrets.
So whiles our lives have not been casted in stone yet, we have a special gift of being able to afford mistakes and change. Interesting thing as I’ve learned from older people is that we don’t realize it until after a few years when we’re locked into commitments of family and responsibilities.
Forging your own path, being your own person
In certain cases, people are not scared to explore different paths because of a fear of failure, but because they see no successful person or anyone else so to speak, on the path they intend on taking. So they don’t want to be the scape goats to test the untested waters. Instead, we sit back and watch someone else try and become successful in it, and we try to use them and their journey as a blueprint for our new-found business opportunity.
Talking about this reminds of back at Uni. Everyone wanted to have past questions to refer to in preparation towards their exam, but no class wanted to be the first batch of students to be examined by a new lecturer. Which is ironic because how do you think all the past questions you normally benefit from came into being?
Bottom line is, we’re all in a rat race of doing and venturing into the same 2-3 things everyone else is going into because at least it has a proven track record of making a few successful/rich people, as opposed to the uncertainty of the latter. Which explains how you have over 20 provision shops right next to each other in your neighborhood when there’s no Barbering Salon, Mobile Money Agent, or Bakery in a 1mile radius of the neighborhood.
We forget that what works for A might not work for B, and that everyone has their own journey and their own lens to see life through.
All images in this post were shot and edited by me