“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
- Mark Twain
It’s amazing how many people I see that are afraid to set sail, afraid to learn about themselves and find and pursue their passions. I don’t blame them. It is easy and comfortable to be at the ’safe harbor’. It is failure, and the risks of being different that makes people reluctant to explore. The seas can be calm, or they can be tumultuous torrents and you don’t know until you sail. To explore, is not easy. It requires you to walk in unknown territory, but it’s worth it.
The most interesting people, the people you read about in Business weekly or the people who give talks at TED, are people who have made more mistakes in their lives than most regular people. As a young adult, I am trying to make as many mistakes as I can, actively learning about as much as I can and satisfying my intellectual curiosity even though I may not be good at everything I learn about. Even dropping a coffee on your lap is a mistake that will teach you to hold your coffee with a firmer grip and in turn, make you a more successful person in a way. A great way to learn is through experiences so I want to make my mistakes now, so when I will be older, I will have built up the experience I need to really succeed. I am finally getting to a point where my experiences. I am starting to feel that the mistakes and the knowledge I have accumulated is really started to define me as person.
These learning experiences that are a result of exploring are closely tied into the concept of luck. I don’t like using clichés, I find they lose their meanings but one I really like; you make your own luck. But the cliché fails to qualify the meaning of how you make it, its through experiences. Luck is a function of the amount you learn and experience, not a complete random phenomenon.
So learn, explore and reach your potential. The riskiest thing to be is to be conservative.
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
- Niels Bohr
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