If at first you don't succeed...

Try, try, try again.

I don’t know where the quote was originated from and I’m too lazy to google it. One thing for sure is that saying has been around way longer than I am.
It teaches persistence. It teaches us not to give up on the first attempt. It’s a positive message.

But if applied incorrectly, it could mislead us into wasting our time doing something we’re simply not good at.

It’s a fact of life that the majority of us are born without any discernible talents. There’s nothing wrong with it. Not everyone is meant to be great. I believe some of us are born to enjoy the simplicity of life. The task is to recognize who we are and which category we belong to.

Let me share this story:

My husband is a photographer/cameraman. It’s his passion. I think he is really good at what he does and he likes nothing else. Sure he plays sports and computer games, goes to the movies etc, but his passion is photography. I think he is very lucky to find such passion in his life.

He works at this TV station, as an associate producer for a news program. He started out as a news cameraman and he likes his job because there’s nothing excites him more than taking pictures.

Yesterday he got a call from his supervisor. He was to be assigned as a presenter in a new program, meaning he has to be in front of the camera, hosting a show and writing the script as well. He refused because he was never trained to be a presenter in his life and has no interest to be one. In fact he was quite pissed because he was assigned on something that wasn’t his expertise and thought that it was reckless of his boss to assign him on something which he knew he would fail.

One of his colleagues, however, told him that he should try it out first and told him to look at it as a new opportunity. My hubby, being who he is, flat out refused.
Now, his colleague saw it as letting an opportunity goes away and told him that he shouldn’t really pass up on a challenge without at least having one go at it, that he shouldn’t be afraid to fail. My hubby on the other hand knew that it wasn’t his thing and didn’t want to waste his time doing something he knew he won’t be good at.
I tend to agree with my hubby.

Some people are born multi-talented and can be trained to acquire multiple skills. Some are like my hubby, very focused in one particular skill. He’d rather spend his life polishing his one skill to perfection rather than learning one whole new animal that he is not even interested in to begin with.

I think we need to draw a line between passing up a challenge and knowing who we are. Saying no to something that we know we won’t be good at is not a sign of weakness like his colleague suggested. It shows that we know exactly what we are doing. It’s not that we are afraid to fail, we just don’t want to waste time doing something which we know we are going to fail. Isn’t it better to use the time to fail in something else, in something that we know we might be able to succeed someday?

People tend to be optimistic but in the wrong way. It’s good to see things as opportunity rather than threat, but then you have to be realistic and know your limit too. And to be honest, people who are optimistic all the time tend to exhaust me.

For me it’s ok to pass up on a golden opportunity, if you don’t see it as golden.

It’s ok not to try, if you think that it’s not worth trying.

It’s ok to bail on things, if those things bring out the worst in you.

Whether an opportunity is golden or not, is for you and you only to decide.

In the modern time people generally only live until 70 years old. Some are even shorter. Make a good use of every second of it. If you have the drive to be productive, then be productive until your last breath. If being productive exhaust you and you like nothing better than lying around wasting every minute of your life, by all means do it too. Just make sure you can pay your own way because having other people to pay for your shit is not the way to go.

Remember, it’s your life, not other people’s.

Which category do I belong to? I change my mind as often as I get hungry… which is very often. So I don’t know. Sometimes I have this drive to be fiercely productive, sometimes I am a lazy bum. I don’t care. I like it. This is who I am.

So if anyone is ever desperate enough to ask me the recipe to succeed in life, I have only this advice: Be Real.