Why I have stopped comparing my life to others!!
Hello guys,
As I promised, I am going to make it a point to write my blog more often than I used to. At this moment I realized that working on my resume wasn't very inspiring. But, I enjoy writing always have always will. I mean I do need to do more work on my resume as per my career coach but I realized last night that I do not enjoy doing it. Nobody does, my love is being creative and writing and thinking up outlandish ideas in my head and putting them down. Am I getting to that point where corporate life is not as enjoyable to me anymore? Am I craving to do my own thing? Is writing my calling? Or am I living in a fantasy world and should not quit my day job? I do not know.
Before I get into my topic of discussion, let me finish with this. For a while now especially since I got laid off, I have been asking God to reveal to me my talent. I mean we all have talents but I've always wondered what mine was. I want to make sure that for as long as I am blessed to be on this earth I live in my purpose. I know I am good at a few things but what do I really enjoy to do? I honestly have been struggling with it. But then yesterday as I was watching TD Jakes, his guest Lisa Sugar said if you get compliments from various people about something or people come to you to ask your advice on something continuously then that is your talent. Yesterday its so weird, I was talking to my mom and she said she went over to my aunt's house a few days prior and my cousin and my aunt had mentioned they enjoy reading my blog. I am quite good at it. Also every time I write the blog I have a few people telling me I am good at it and they really enjoy reading it. I then decided to look back at my life and I remember as a young girl as young as 9, I enjoyed writing poems and stories. Where my dad used to work they had a magazine and they would publish my poems. In Secondary school, I would spend hours writing stories instead of studying. I will get so engrossed in my writing that I didn't see the need to study or do any homework. The love died or should I say was buried when I came to high school in Canada and my English teacher told me I couldn't write to save my life. Talk about dream crusher and from that time onwards, I became insecure in my writing. Thankfully fast forward to 2015, I took a course in digital marketing and we used to write blogs on a weekly basis. When the course was over, my professor said you are really talented in writing I encourage you to keep writing a blog and alas! the birth of my blog. Last night my girl said to me, you are really good at it, why don't you join a creative writing workshop or group so you can enhance yourself further. So I did, so through that, I hope I will improve my writing substantially and God willing you will be seeing me on the shelves in bookstores or on kindle. Until then I need to find a 9-5 to sustain me.
Anyways back to our regular scheduled program :). As you, all know I am 34 years old. I am not ashamed of my age. I am actually very proud and blessed to be 34 years old. Not many people live to see their 34th birthday. I am not that person who when you ask how old are you will I cower away and say "you should not ask my age". I actually like to shock people when I tell them my age because thanks to good genes and melanin, I do not look my age. Black ain't cracking in my face. Whenever I meet anyone and they say oh you are so young and I say well I am 34 they are shocked, gobsmacked and amazed. Wow, I would pin you as a 20 something-year-old. So yes I am quick to say my age. Anyways, as I said in yesterday's blog I have said that at 34 I may not have achieved many things that people my age would have achieved. I don't think I did anything wrong that I may seem behind in life, but I felt better when on Saturday I was talking to an older gentleman and he said "oh my friend don't stress you still have many years to get to your peak. You are still young in the career game". But, then career-wise when you have friends or family members who are becoming VPs and Senior executives in the corporate world and CEOs and they are the same age as you, it is almost depressing to say when will I ever get there? I am so behind in life. But then again as I said everyone runs a different race.
With the birth of social media and the more apps that are made it is so hard not to go online and see people you know, posting pictures of their picture perfect lives. I mean to go on Instagram right now and you will see so many pictures of people getting married, having babies, buying a home, posing with their new cars. Go on LinkedIn and you will see people you know changing their job titles to the Senior manager of this, VP of this, CEO of that. You read their job description it will almost make you want to close your LinkedIn page because you feel so left behind. Oooh and wait, let Forbes post their article on Millionaires and billionaires in their 20s and 30s and you are like damn. I can't even afford to stay a hundredaire or thousandaire and people are in their millions before their 30th birthday. Where did I go wrong? Am I lazy, am I not that ambitious? What kills me is when you see quotes like "I'll sleep when I'm dead" or "grinding to make that paper" and I saw one recently that said "I'm working hard so my daughter doesn't have to sell protein powder on Instagram" I mean you see all these things and It will make you want to burn your bed and stay up all night hustling and grinding. But the question is doing what? I mean I just realized last night that my talent is writing so if at 34 I just discovered it. Does it mean I wasn't ambitious before? Does it mean I am lazy? I think the hell not. Also, I do not know about some of you, but if I don't get my full 7-8 hours of sleep, I am not productive. So if I am going to sleep when I'm dead then that means I will be dying soon because what is the point of grinding when I'm cranky and useless. Does it mean I am not hungry enough because I sleep less? Last time I checked we need at least 7-8 hours of sleep to be productive, so if I'm working and grinding and not getting that, then when I make it to millionaire or billionaire I will be using all my money to pay doctors to keep me alive because I have deprived myself, sleep, rest, healthy eating habits. My heart is soo worn out because of stress , then my daughter who I am breaking my back for won't be able to enjoy the money I have stored up for her because she will be using it to look after my ailments. At the end of the day, don't get me wrong if I have to sacrifice a few hours of sleep in order to get stuff done- then yes I will do it not even an if but or why. But on a daily basis, I can't see myself doing that. I remember when I was writing my thesis, towards the last 6 weeks to meeting the deadline, I was sacrificing my sleep. I would wake up at 6 am, get ready go to the library- spend the whole day there come home about 6pm. Have dinner and go back to my room work till 4 am, sleep for 2 hours and start all over again. I swear, it was hard, it was horrible. It was lonely. I hated every minute of it. I felt like I was a prisoner. By the time I was done and handed in my thesis, I was so exhausted I slept for 3 days. Yes, in the end, it was worth it. I got my MBA and it was a small sacrifice I had to make but it was worth it. But, what I learned is this, I had 6 months to complete my thesis, if I had managed my time more and procrastinated less, I wouldn't have had to kill myself to complete a thesis. I couldn't even celebrate the completion of my thesis the way I had planned to because I was so tired.
Wait, hold on before you jump on my back, I am not saying making the sacrifice is not a good thing. I am just saying that sometimes making sacrifices short term is necessary but then in the long run if you are breaking your back in order to live the good life, then you miss out on things that are important. Your family, your friends, important events. By the time you make it to the top you have neglected all those around you that there is no one there to enjoy it with. Recently, I was having a conversation with someone close to me and she was telling me how some people are so focused on staying on top and being relevant that quality time isn't spent with close family and friends. I mentioned that sometimes we are so focused on staying relevant that we forget that there are people around us who need our attention, who need to create memories with us. Unfortunately, you end up not knowing your family or your friends that, God forbid when you pass, your family might grieve you, but not because they miss you but because they didn't get to know you because you were too busy working to know those around you. Or worse, they might not grieve you at all or for long because you were not around them for them to feel the loss of your presence.
So, yeah I may have diverted a bit but my whole point of my blog is this, We live in a society where there is a timeline to achieve certain things. By 22 you should have graduated university, at 24 you should be married, by 27 you should have had a child, by 30 you should be a senior level person at your company, by 40 you should have had your first child in college, by 50 you should be a grandparent, by 65 you should be retired . We go as far as that if we meet a man for us women and at a certain age he hasn't achieved career success we disqualify him. Oh no, he cannot do. We have a saying back in Ghana that we want a man who has "cooked right now"(literal translation) But what it means that we want someone who has reached his peak instead of someone who is trying to make his way. Thinking like that puts unnecessary pressure on men or on women and then you either force yourself to do things you shouldn't do or end up in situations you shouldn't be in. We are always looking at other people's grass and comparing it to our own. In that case, we end up wanting to covet our neighbour's grass only to get there and we either one realize that its fake grass or they spent time working on their grass, tending to it to keep it green. Whereas if we spent time working on our grass, tending to it, feeding with fertilizer, watering it daily, pulling out the weeds, eventually the grass will turn green.
I remember I wanted so many things in 2016, and some things I achieved, some things came my way started off great but then came to a halt because things happened and put things into the slow lane, some things didn't happen at all. I know that there were people who started off the year, with marriage and are ending the year separated. There are people who started the year with great careers and ended up redundant. There are many people who we compared our lives to and we thought they had everything we wanted and are not in the same place as they were. My dad always says this that you these Generation Y people, you guys are trying to compete with us baby boomers. You don't realize that some of us reached the peak of our success later in life but through hard work and perseverance. When you guys don't get what you want you give up and walk away and blame the whole world for your problems. You have everything handed to you that you like to take the easy way out of life. We live in a society or in a world that we are told to have a bigger car, a bigger house, covet your neighbours' property. We are so focused on living the big life. Competing and living like the Joneses and at any cost. What we don't realize that, all these things we are chasing after is material. If you don't have a job that pays you enough, you quit, if you don't have a relationship that is like a 90s R&B song then it's not the right relationship. If your man doesn't call you for two days, drop his ass and find someone who does. We are told that bigger is better, more is better, but we are not told that hard work, living in your purpose, not trying to compete with others and not try and run someone's race will bring us peace of mind. We are killing ourselves trying to maintain a life we can't afford to have because having Christian Louboutins makes me relevant. As I write this I just saw that Alan Thicke died at 69 years old. It puts it into perspective for me that, my tomorrow is not promised. Every day that I am on this earth is a gift. If I am too focused trying to live other people's lives and competing with other people then I will be missing out on my purpose. I will one day if I am fortunate to be on my death bed and looking back at my life and regretting not doing all I had to do to have the sort of life I should have had. I will be wishing I could start all over and do it again but it will be too late. I would wish, I had not tried to spend my life chasing after money that I will be leaving behind anyway, instead of traveling and learning new cultures, spending time with friends and family. Impacting strangers in a way that will leave them feeling loved and most importantly be happy. When God blesses me with marriage, I want to make sure it will be a marriage that God ordained and intended marriage to be and to last a lifetime. Not rushing into something that will end in a year because I was looking at everyone around me getting married so I settled for just anyone instead of the man God prepared for me. If I am going to have a great career then it is doing something that I am passionate about not just anything that I will end up switching jobs and chasing after more money, but I am missing out on work-life balance. I want to make sure that wherever I am heading in life, it will be MY JOURNEY. at GOD's PACE and TIME. Wherever I am, I am happy. Even when I make mistakes I can brush myself off and keep going. I am not going to look at my age, and use is a determining factor as to where my life should be.
So guys, as I am saying, stay in your lane. Focus on your journey. You don't know what people have done to get to where they are. Or what they didn't do. Your age or station in life shouldn't determine your destination. At the end of the day, some of the wealthiest or most successful people in life did not make it till later in life. Steve Harvey is one person who struggled for years and these past few years not even more than 10 years his career has skyrocketed. He is hosting everything and he is everywhere. When he was homeless and living in his car he could have given up, gone and find himself a corporate job and spent his life miserable. But he didn't give up. Eventually, he got his big break and now we can't get enough of Steve Harvey. He didn't look at other people's lives and try to live it, he lived his own. Then you have Kim Kardashian who had a sex tape and now is one of the most famous females in the world. But there are many people who had sex tapes and it did not bring them the fame and success they were seeking after. I mean I'm not saying having a sex tape is a good thing to propel you into fame but I'm just saying sometimes if you keep chasing after other people's paths of success it might not necessarily work out for you. God is a great God and He makes everyone's journey unique. So if you try and follow's someone's path it might frustrate you. Just like if you compare your relationship to someone else's relationship to yours, you will keep ending every relationship when it doesn't meet up to societies standards. Instead of accepting that your relationship is unique and that you put in the work, you make God the foundation and you stay strong your relationship will become exactly the best relationship for you. Not to say ,to stay in a bad relationship but stop looking at other people's situation and comparing to yours because people only show you what they want you to see but not the truth behind their journey.
I shall end here because I have carried on for too long, but hope I made some sense and made you realize your journey is unique. Enjoy it and in the end, it will be everything it will need to be.
Lots of love
A.P.W
xoxo
As I promised, I am going to make it a point to write my blog more often than I used to. At this moment I realized that working on my resume wasn't very inspiring. But, I enjoy writing always have always will. I mean I do need to do more work on my resume as per my career coach but I realized last night that I do not enjoy doing it. Nobody does, my love is being creative and writing and thinking up outlandish ideas in my head and putting them down. Am I getting to that point where corporate life is not as enjoyable to me anymore? Am I craving to do my own thing? Is writing my calling? Or am I living in a fantasy world and should not quit my day job? I do not know.
Before I get into my topic of discussion, let me finish with this. For a while now especially since I got laid off, I have been asking God to reveal to me my talent. I mean we all have talents but I've always wondered what mine was. I want to make sure that for as long as I am blessed to be on this earth I live in my purpose. I know I am good at a few things but what do I really enjoy to do? I honestly have been struggling with it. But then yesterday as I was watching TD Jakes, his guest Lisa Sugar said if you get compliments from various people about something or people come to you to ask your advice on something continuously then that is your talent. Yesterday its so weird, I was talking to my mom and she said she went over to my aunt's house a few days prior and my cousin and my aunt had mentioned they enjoy reading my blog. I am quite good at it. Also every time I write the blog I have a few people telling me I am good at it and they really enjoy reading it. I then decided to look back at my life and I remember as a young girl as young as 9, I enjoyed writing poems and stories. Where my dad used to work they had a magazine and they would publish my poems. In Secondary school, I would spend hours writing stories instead of studying. I will get so engrossed in my writing that I didn't see the need to study or do any homework. The love died or should I say was buried when I came to high school in Canada and my English teacher told me I couldn't write to save my life. Talk about dream crusher and from that time onwards, I became insecure in my writing. Thankfully fast forward to 2015, I took a course in digital marketing and we used to write blogs on a weekly basis. When the course was over, my professor said you are really talented in writing I encourage you to keep writing a blog and alas! the birth of my blog. Last night my girl said to me, you are really good at it, why don't you join a creative writing workshop or group so you can enhance yourself further. So I did, so through that, I hope I will improve my writing substantially and God willing you will be seeing me on the shelves in bookstores or on kindle. Until then I need to find a 9-5 to sustain me.
Anyways back to our regular scheduled program :). As you, all know I am 34 years old. I am not ashamed of my age. I am actually very proud and blessed to be 34 years old. Not many people live to see their 34th birthday. I am not that person who when you ask how old are you will I cower away and say "you should not ask my age". I actually like to shock people when I tell them my age because thanks to good genes and melanin, I do not look my age. Black ain't cracking in my face. Whenever I meet anyone and they say oh you are so young and I say well I am 34 they are shocked, gobsmacked and amazed. Wow, I would pin you as a 20 something-year-old. So yes I am quick to say my age. Anyways, as I said in yesterday's blog I have said that at 34 I may not have achieved many things that people my age would have achieved. I don't think I did anything wrong that I may seem behind in life, but I felt better when on Saturday I was talking to an older gentleman and he said "oh my friend don't stress you still have many years to get to your peak. You are still young in the career game". But, then career-wise when you have friends or family members who are becoming VPs and Senior executives in the corporate world and CEOs and they are the same age as you, it is almost depressing to say when will I ever get there? I am so behind in life. But then again as I said everyone runs a different race.
With the birth of social media and the more apps that are made it is so hard not to go online and see people you know, posting pictures of their picture perfect lives. I mean to go on Instagram right now and you will see so many pictures of people getting married, having babies, buying a home, posing with their new cars. Go on LinkedIn and you will see people you know changing their job titles to the Senior manager of this, VP of this, CEO of that. You read their job description it will almost make you want to close your LinkedIn page because you feel so left behind. Oooh and wait, let Forbes post their article on Millionaires and billionaires in their 20s and 30s and you are like damn. I can't even afford to stay a hundredaire or thousandaire and people are in their millions before their 30th birthday. Where did I go wrong? Am I lazy, am I not that ambitious? What kills me is when you see quotes like "I'll sleep when I'm dead" or "grinding to make that paper" and I saw one recently that said "I'm working hard so my daughter doesn't have to sell protein powder on Instagram" I mean you see all these things and It will make you want to burn your bed and stay up all night hustling and grinding. But the question is doing what? I mean I just realized last night that my talent is writing so if at 34 I just discovered it. Does it mean I wasn't ambitious before? Does it mean I am lazy? I think the hell not. Also, I do not know about some of you, but if I don't get my full 7-8 hours of sleep, I am not productive. So if I am going to sleep when I'm dead then that means I will be dying soon because what is the point of grinding when I'm cranky and useless. Does it mean I am not hungry enough because I sleep less? Last time I checked we need at least 7-8 hours of sleep to be productive, so if I'm working and grinding and not getting that, then when I make it to millionaire or billionaire I will be using all my money to pay doctors to keep me alive because I have deprived myself, sleep, rest, healthy eating habits. My heart is soo worn out because of stress , then my daughter who I am breaking my back for won't be able to enjoy the money I have stored up for her because she will be using it to look after my ailments. At the end of the day, don't get me wrong if I have to sacrifice a few hours of sleep in order to get stuff done- then yes I will do it not even an if but or why. But on a daily basis, I can't see myself doing that. I remember when I was writing my thesis, towards the last 6 weeks to meeting the deadline, I was sacrificing my sleep. I would wake up at 6 am, get ready go to the library- spend the whole day there come home about 6pm. Have dinner and go back to my room work till 4 am, sleep for 2 hours and start all over again. I swear, it was hard, it was horrible. It was lonely. I hated every minute of it. I felt like I was a prisoner. By the time I was done and handed in my thesis, I was so exhausted I slept for 3 days. Yes, in the end, it was worth it. I got my MBA and it was a small sacrifice I had to make but it was worth it. But, what I learned is this, I had 6 months to complete my thesis, if I had managed my time more and procrastinated less, I wouldn't have had to kill myself to complete a thesis. I couldn't even celebrate the completion of my thesis the way I had planned to because I was so tired.
Wait, hold on before you jump on my back, I am not saying making the sacrifice is not a good thing. I am just saying that sometimes making sacrifices short term is necessary but then in the long run if you are breaking your back in order to live the good life, then you miss out on things that are important. Your family, your friends, important events. By the time you make it to the top you have neglected all those around you that there is no one there to enjoy it with. Recently, I was having a conversation with someone close to me and she was telling me how some people are so focused on staying on top and being relevant that quality time isn't spent with close family and friends. I mentioned that sometimes we are so focused on staying relevant that we forget that there are people around us who need our attention, who need to create memories with us. Unfortunately, you end up not knowing your family or your friends that, God forbid when you pass, your family might grieve you, but not because they miss you but because they didn't get to know you because you were too busy working to know those around you. Or worse, they might not grieve you at all or for long because you were not around them for them to feel the loss of your presence.
So, yeah I may have diverted a bit but my whole point of my blog is this, We live in a society where there is a timeline to achieve certain things. By 22 you should have graduated university, at 24 you should be married, by 27 you should have had a child, by 30 you should be a senior level person at your company, by 40 you should have had your first child in college, by 50 you should be a grandparent, by 65 you should be retired . We go as far as that if we meet a man for us women and at a certain age he hasn't achieved career success we disqualify him. Oh no, he cannot do. We have a saying back in Ghana that we want a man who has "cooked right now"(literal translation) But what it means that we want someone who has reached his peak instead of someone who is trying to make his way. Thinking like that puts unnecessary pressure on men or on women and then you either force yourself to do things you shouldn't do or end up in situations you shouldn't be in. We are always looking at other people's grass and comparing it to our own. In that case, we end up wanting to covet our neighbour's grass only to get there and we either one realize that its fake grass or they spent time working on their grass, tending to it to keep it green. Whereas if we spent time working on our grass, tending to it, feeding with fertilizer, watering it daily, pulling out the weeds, eventually the grass will turn green.
I remember I wanted so many things in 2016, and some things I achieved, some things came my way started off great but then came to a halt because things happened and put things into the slow lane, some things didn't happen at all. I know that there were people who started off the year, with marriage and are ending the year separated. There are people who started the year with great careers and ended up redundant. There are many people who we compared our lives to and we thought they had everything we wanted and are not in the same place as they were. My dad always says this that you these Generation Y people, you guys are trying to compete with us baby boomers. You don't realize that some of us reached the peak of our success later in life but through hard work and perseverance. When you guys don't get what you want you give up and walk away and blame the whole world for your problems. You have everything handed to you that you like to take the easy way out of life. We live in a society or in a world that we are told to have a bigger car, a bigger house, covet your neighbours' property. We are so focused on living the big life. Competing and living like the Joneses and at any cost. What we don't realize that, all these things we are chasing after is material. If you don't have a job that pays you enough, you quit, if you don't have a relationship that is like a 90s R&B song then it's not the right relationship. If your man doesn't call you for two days, drop his ass and find someone who does. We are told that bigger is better, more is better, but we are not told that hard work, living in your purpose, not trying to compete with others and not try and run someone's race will bring us peace of mind. We are killing ourselves trying to maintain a life we can't afford to have because having Christian Louboutins makes me relevant. As I write this I just saw that Alan Thicke died at 69 years old. It puts it into perspective for me that, my tomorrow is not promised. Every day that I am on this earth is a gift. If I am too focused trying to live other people's lives and competing with other people then I will be missing out on my purpose. I will one day if I am fortunate to be on my death bed and looking back at my life and regretting not doing all I had to do to have the sort of life I should have had. I will be wishing I could start all over and do it again but it will be too late. I would wish, I had not tried to spend my life chasing after money that I will be leaving behind anyway, instead of traveling and learning new cultures, spending time with friends and family. Impacting strangers in a way that will leave them feeling loved and most importantly be happy. When God blesses me with marriage, I want to make sure it will be a marriage that God ordained and intended marriage to be and to last a lifetime. Not rushing into something that will end in a year because I was looking at everyone around me getting married so I settled for just anyone instead of the man God prepared for me. If I am going to have a great career then it is doing something that I am passionate about not just anything that I will end up switching jobs and chasing after more money, but I am missing out on work-life balance. I want to make sure that wherever I am heading in life, it will be MY JOURNEY. at GOD's PACE and TIME. Wherever I am, I am happy. Even when I make mistakes I can brush myself off and keep going. I am not going to look at my age, and use is a determining factor as to where my life should be.
So guys, as I am saying, stay in your lane. Focus on your journey. You don't know what people have done to get to where they are. Or what they didn't do. Your age or station in life shouldn't determine your destination. At the end of the day, some of the wealthiest or most successful people in life did not make it till later in life. Steve Harvey is one person who struggled for years and these past few years not even more than 10 years his career has skyrocketed. He is hosting everything and he is everywhere. When he was homeless and living in his car he could have given up, gone and find himself a corporate job and spent his life miserable. But he didn't give up. Eventually, he got his big break and now we can't get enough of Steve Harvey. He didn't look at other people's lives and try to live it, he lived his own. Then you have Kim Kardashian who had a sex tape and now is one of the most famous females in the world. But there are many people who had sex tapes and it did not bring them the fame and success they were seeking after. I mean I'm not saying having a sex tape is a good thing to propel you into fame but I'm just saying sometimes if you keep chasing after other people's paths of success it might not necessarily work out for you. God is a great God and He makes everyone's journey unique. So if you try and follow's someone's path it might frustrate you. Just like if you compare your relationship to someone else's relationship to yours, you will keep ending every relationship when it doesn't meet up to societies standards. Instead of accepting that your relationship is unique and that you put in the work, you make God the foundation and you stay strong your relationship will become exactly the best relationship for you. Not to say ,to stay in a bad relationship but stop looking at other people's situation and comparing to yours because people only show you what they want you to see but not the truth behind their journey.
I shall end here because I have carried on for too long, but hope I made some sense and made you realize your journey is unique. Enjoy it and in the end, it will be everything it will need to be.
Lots of love
A.P.W
xoxo
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