Remember when you were a kid and wanted to be a fire fighting astronaut prince/princess? What happened?!?   As you grow older, your life becomes a blur. Time speeds up and moments feel like memories of emotions strung together. But there are days that stood out. Ones that I remember vividly because they influenced how I view success today. I'd like to share with you my amusing journey and key takeaways that you can leverage for your own journies.   

A 13-year-old millionaire

When I was around 13 years old, the internet was in its rebellious teenage years too. The whole thing was the wild wild west. No real security or privacy, hackers, pirates, and porn everywhere. It was a crazy fun time for nerds like me. 

• I was teaching myself HTML and building stupid websites. 
• I was emailing my school bullies, while allegedly forging my email as the president of the united states. 
• I was learning and playing; everything was great!

  And this will probably sound super stupid to you but the day that I remembered the most, was the day I remember my dad came to me and told me the worst news ever. He told me the creator of this crazy popular site, called megagames.com, was offered a million dollars and he refused it. On top of that, he was 13 years old!   That devastated me. I was thinking shit. I’m already 13 and all I could make was 12 dollars from 4 months of saved allowance. This kid is now a millionaire. I lost the race. I’m too old now. I’ll never be rich.   

The start of a classmate's success & jealousy

After that, I was still tinkering with stuff for fun, but I felt like I lost a lot of my ambition right then and there. Speed up several years into high school, I had a classmate, his name is Michael. At the time he was trying to learn how to build websites. He hit me up for some help and I brushed him off like an asshole thinking dude why are you even trying. There are a shit ton of websites out there, it’s too late for us both, you’re wasting both of our times.    Months later, he created (if not the first) one of the internet’s first photo blogging websites. He was so early to the game, it’s literally called photoblog.com. He was making crazy money off of it and I. was. in. awe.   The first thought I had was how the hell.. Why would people post pictures of themselves online. My second thought was if that’s the case, I wonder if people would do it in video format...#youtube. Then I was thinking fuck. It wasn’t too late! I still had a chance to do something special in high school, but now high school is about to end and I lost another opportunity!   

Let me mope in my rat race

Once again I feel even more stupid. I resign to my fate of being a rat in the rat race #richDadPoorDad, and just grind out my career like a regular human. At that point, I figure I'll hopefully save up enough money for me to invest before I get all old (The start of my 10 year plan millionaire plan).   Now fast-forward to 2006, where I am not in my 20s. I was grabbing dinner with my dad and he goes “wanna hear something funny? Youtube just got sold for 1.6 billion and the founder’s name is STEVE CHEN”    My eyes suddenly lit up like a deer in headlights. Between me thinking I had the same freaking idea before youtube started and the founder’s name was Steve Chen, I took the entire irony in full "stride".     It was then that I finally realized how foolish I was being, at thinking about success as time-bound with age. True story: no one gives a shit how old you are when you make it. Sure they might be a bit more impressed, but your ambition, the scale of your success, and the fact that your successful will trump everything else.   I tell you all of this because that entire progression of my thought process is not only entertaining there are some lessons to be had here that I’d like to share with you now so that you can hopefully unlock your mental blocker for thinking it’s too late, because it’s never too late.   

Key Takeaways

 

#1 - It’s a waste of time to think negatively. 

Shit hits the fan all the time and ya it’s human nature to feel like poo, but you should be aware that while you’re moping, you’re operating a fraction of your optimal efficiency. It's a nice way of saying while you’re moping, you’re wasting time.    I find the best way around this is mentally trying to rationalize the negative event or thought as a learning opportunity and force yourself to come up with one positive piece of learning. Now that you have a positive thought in your head, mark it as closed and you’ll have a much easier time moving on!   

#2 - It’s never too late to make a run for yourself

There is always going to be somebody smarter in front of you and somebody dumber behind you. Somebody richer and somebody less well off. Somebody further along than you in XYZ. Somebody who’s stuck in their situation worse than you. Therefore, thinking it’s too late, or you’re not smart enough, or you don’t have the resources or network to do what you want is a thought wasted.    The best way forward is to find role models <hero image> that is kicking ass at the things you want to kick ass in. And they don’t have to be good at everything, right? No one’s perfect. Everybody’s in their own journey and care about different combinations of things than you, so you’ll probably need multiple role models to build your own perfect image of who you want to be. Then think about where you are, objectively, and build a roadmap on how you want to bridge the gap between where you are now and where you want to be. That is how you can bring unimaginable success into a realistic and attainable roadmap. 

 

If you're interested in learning how to construct your own success roadmap, go to our article section for more.   I hope this article informed and motivated yourself. Good luck with your passions!