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A myth is a widely held but false belief or idea.

Let look at some of them.

The first is believing that being rich and famous should be your ultimate goal. It will make you “very happy”.

Get Real These are not goals, these are wishes and fantasies common to all mankind. As wants are limitless (the sky is the limit), it is like a dog trying to chase its own tail. You could achieve your first million goal in a year. On reaching that, you were be happy for awhile. Looking around your better-off friends or richer neighbours, you would pity yourself of not able to afford a more expensive car than what you own now, a more expensive and longer overseas holidays and so so. It ends up with you setting your next 5 or 10 millions goal for the following year. The process repeats year after year and you’re still never satisfied with your achievements till you have no more drive anymore.

The next myth is believing you need to have a good degree, a passport of financial success in life.

Get Real I understand attending a degree course is expensive, especially in the current age and time. With the rising cost of a university education, many individuals are wondering whether it makes sense to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a teriary education. Some are burden with university loan debt before even earning any salary. On top of that, industries change, the world of work evolves, and people are expected to have multiple careers (not just jobs) over their lifetime, so individuals need to continually update their skills. So, the above is a myth to believe in, not a safe bet for financial independence for life.

Get Real According to an upcoming paper in Psychological Science written by three Stanford researchers, psychologists Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton, with the help of former Stanford postdoctoral fellow Paul O’Keefe, that advice may actually make people less successful, since it unrealistically implies an easy path to success and narrows your focus too much. This close-minded view can be detrimental to the success of the individual. The researchers concluded that popular mantras like “follow your passion” make people think that pursuing a passion will be easy. Believers are then more likely to give up when they face challenges or roadblocks. Many advances in sciences and business happen when people bring different fields together, when people see novel connections between fields that maybe hadn’t been seen before. To be successful, you need to have multiple skillsets throughout your working life. These could only be achieved through lifelong learning.

Reubeno_Wise: “If it is worth doing, it worth doing well. Like what you do will go the distance, love what you do may not last that long.”

Viktor Frankl, Austrian neurologist, founder of logotherapy and Holocaust survivor, wrote the seminal psychiatry dissertation Man’s Search For Meaning and included this lucid observation in its text:

“Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run — in the long run, I say! — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.”

Final Thoughts

You can, in fact, “do what you love,” but not from day one. Instead, build yourself a foundation to stand on and allow you to fail without devastating consequences to your life. The foundation can be maintaining good mind and body, great family ties, consistent passive income streams to sustain your preferred lifestyle, and so on.

During the transition period, you could adopt “Thinking of your career and life as a series of opportunities to develop several passions”, as suggested by the Stanford researchers. You can pick yourself up, learn from the failure, and move on to try on new things and approaches.

Bon voyage to Heaven On Earth!

I’m starting a Mastermind Group, with the aim of members achieving Zest For Life through the guiding motto of “Heaven On Earth”.

If interested to join the group, please drop me a line to reubeno@zestinlife.com, stating your aim and how the Mastermind Group can help you to achieve your fulfilling life goals.

Reuben Ong

#Singapore Is Our Home