Why nothing good happens to me? I've already worked my butt off!

"He has a rich dad!", "He is the boss’s friend," " He is just lucky," " He has a degree from Harvard!" What's working for him doesn't mean will work for me too!" It must involve some dirty tricks in order to achieve that!" Well, he earns more than me but so what? Money couldn't buy happiness!" Well, so the reason that you stay in the nasty job when your boss looked like a monkey when he scold you is because that got you interested?

I believe you heard this from somebody when they saw or heard someone achieve something huge. Perhaps you are one of those somebody!

There will always be people jealously judging greatness of someone else. It is so easy to work by using just the mouth compared with putting the time, effort and persistently build your path bit by bit. How I wish money could just fall from the sky when I complain about how unfair is this world to me.

You might respond that you too, are working very hard toward something, but nothing good seems to happen to you. You stay in the office while everyone left, work your butt off but you just don't understand why you are not the one that got promoted. You wrote a very meaningful article and started to blog yet nobody seems like enjoying the content or leave a comment or two.

When it comes to this point, the most-comfortable choice is to give up and rationalize that this is just not for you. So whenever you come across someone that performs well on that, you can't help but blame on everything else but yourself.

Who am I to tell you all this? I am just an ordinary person that you might have seen in Starbucks who has experience greatness by learn to train my mind. As per what I've just said, I was that somebody that blame on circumstance, parents, the world, the grass, the flowers, the dogs, the office, the boss, whatever it could be but myself.  It became my worst habit and formed my mindset into victim mode.

Years later, I found myself achieve nothing, being totally clueless about life as if a ship without knowing the direction. I just smile and give an official answer when somebody ask me that what does success looks like to me. It's crippling to think that deep question and hey, I was trying to figure out why a big chunk of my salary has gone.

Little did I know that I’m the one that allowing this to happen. Even if I know, my ego will scream out loud that this is not true. It takes me years to understand that our mind need to be trained and it takes time and effort which most likely goes against what we pursue, the shortest cut to succeed.

You might think that I'm going to share with you some secret weapon to success, or some dirty tricks to make the path way easier. Well, you will be drown in disappointment if this is the case.

Everything starts with being responsible in life. You might get furious as you don't need someone to tell you something that your parents told you when you were three. But hey, how many of us has actually practice that.

If you are responsible, why aren't you leave the job that you hate? You are in charge of being happy in every single day. If you are responsible, why aren't you put a full stop to an unloving relationship? You are in charge to find the one that suitable. If you are responsible, why leaving your dream unchased? Your life is melting and you are in charge to optimize every single day to its fullest.

When you learn to be responsible, you are as well learning to be a leader in life. Other than being responsible in taking action, it is even important to be emotionally responsible. There are certainly circumstances that give you many reasons to feel a certain way, but at the end of the day you are powerful unless you surrender that power to another person or circumstance.

You choose how you act. You might be in a frustrated circumstance but you can choose to be angry or strongly believe in yourself that you have the ability to get this done. You are not a feeling, you can choose how you feel; you are not a product or victim of the circumstance, you’re 100% in charge of how you respond to it.

There's a lot of people telling you what you should do. However, the fundamentals, in any given career, there are basic level of things and then there's the advanced stuff. We get so distracted by the advanced tips. The big leap come as a result of simply focusing on the basics. When you really start to focus on that and be good at it, should be great at it, the other stuff starts to happen.

Any rule that someone tells you, there is someone successful who is doing that. You have to give yourself an honest self-assessment about what you want to do and what you can do. Then, find out the bottom line of your company if you're an employee (for most company, it is where the money is made), while for entrepreneur, find out how can you help other people for their life to be better. Then optimize your strength, focus on just the fundamental and do it really great. And here comes the powerful question that you should have it bear in mind. How can I add value to make things better? How can I help? Through this process, those other results will start to appear.

Why Positive Influences will not work?

Alarm ring, you snooze it off and continue to sleep until the very last minute. You have no choice but to wake up, barely walk like a vampire to the bathroom. Your heart sink when all the soon to deadline tasks that you been dragging occupied your mind. You gobble up breakfast within ten minutes and rush off to work. After an eight hours work, home is where you look forward to. After dinner and a relaxing hot shower, nothing could get you away from the couch to catch up your favourite drama. It indeed the best hours in the day before you get on the bed.

Day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year. This process repeat itself.

You aware that there is such a random person named John who live without alarm. He wakes up vitality and the world is await him to join. After freshen up, he meet his friends up for breakfast for as long as he loves. Then, he might spend a ten minutes time to shoot an email to his virtual assistant who lives in India to assign tasks. Job of the day, done! He now could live the rest of his day like there is no tomorrow.

I believe I’m not the first one that tell you about this. These are some natural defensive reactions from most people.

"He has a rich dad!", " He is just lucky," " He has a degree from Harvard!" What's working for him doesn't mean will work for me too!" It must involve some dirty tricks in order to achieve that!" Well, he earns more than me but so what? Money couldn't buy happiness!"

Follow by some invisible scripts that you generate subconsciously.

" I’ll do that when I have  …….(extra money/time/resources) as now I just don’t have what it takes.”, “ I just don’t know how to get start!”, “ I tried before and this is just not for me.” You come out with dozen excuses, trying to rationalize your current situation to make yourself feel better. Faults are all blamed on circumstance, parents, the world, the grass, the flowers, the dogs, the office, the boss, whatever it could be but yourself.

This story has literally no contribution to your life. Even worse, it drags you down and belittle yourself.

In contrary, you heard someone resigned from his day job, work his butt off to start his new path, live with a tight budget that might feed him a bread in a day and ended up getting to nowhere. This is not the end yet. He might be in debt, struggling through a hard time to look for a new job.  

I believe you come across to these stories too.

“What a poor little guy that believe in dream will come true if you work hard!”,  “ Thanks god that I’m mature enough to hold myself back from being such impulsive.”, “ Well, not everyone is ‘destined’ to be an entrepreneur.” , “ If and only if this is that easy.” , “ I won’t let myself to trap in this shit for sure.”

Your mind then linked this pathway to dangerous and insecure. Whenever there is the moment that your adventure spirit is calling, it comes out and put a leash on you. You surrender and take a step back to the comfort zone. The distance between you and John’s life became farer and it takes at least twice of the effort to step out again.

This story either has no value added to your future.

We have been told to avoid negative and only stick to the positive. There will not be so many commit suicide cases if this advice is worked. Negative can’t be avoided and it comes across to you in every single day for as long as you connect with the world.

Here’s the thing. Your life will still come to plateau if the processor, your brain is outdated. The information itself, no matter it associates with negative or positive influences, will not going to add any value in your life without an updated software. Like the two cases above, an “ old brain” literally makes no differences in your life regardless of the type of informations that enter to it.

Whenever a message prompt us to take action, our mind naturally biased to the safe path, a path that it knows the outcome for, by tricking us to feel comfortable in this zone. This is what makes success so precious and rare as it takes perpetual actions of intentionally thinking in the opposite way and forms the new brain.

This is a state that urges you to live intentionally, consciously prioritize your time to take massive action that you already knew you should have done in order to reach the next level in life.

It is not about getting rid of negative feelings. It arouses anyway. It is about learning to go against the flow. Take a step back when your feelings prompt you to take a certain action as usual and ask why. Has this action makes any differences in your life? Or you do this because you just feel comfortable?

For instance, you feel envy, insignificant about yourself and being so defensive when you meet someone successful than you. As usual, you self console that in someday, you will be even successful than him but just not now as you don’t have what it takes for now. You then continue with your life and wait for the someday to come by. What if you pause for a moment, pull yourself back from follow the motion of the old thinking would bring you to, and intentionally focus on what actions step that you can take for now? Internet browsing to search for relevant topic? Ask your close friends? Whatever it could be for as long as it’s not the same old path.

4 Key solutions for dreamer to doer

“ I really want to start taking action but just that my dog is holding me back!”
This is hilarious when compare with the universe’s common lame excuses like “what if I fail?” ,  “ I don’t have time and money.”or “ I don’t really know how.”
 A few years ago, I was stuck in a rut and those were exactly my fallacies when I thought of starting a side business to break the 9-5’s curse. Looking back, I bet myself takes no action or even lose it all if a million transfers to my account at that point of time.
I stumbled upon blogs and watch video about it. My brain tried hard to absorb everything as if a dry sponge and it ended up became saturated with tons of information that I don’t really need at that moment.
And here comes the worst part. This info digging process forms a delusion of you being well productive and it makes you feel great. You will soon come to realise that you don’t even complete a minor task.
Your brain exhausted when being overloaded with garbage information. That’s the reason you felt overwhelmed and thus, led to inaction. Information itself has no value until you make use of it.
This is exactly opposite from being a student at school where they strive to achieve success by digest as much information as possible. It was just a pure battle of memory.
However, once you step into adulthood, you really have to unlearn that as nobody cares about what you know but what have you done by using what you know.
Sadly, average achievers practice thinking about changing their behavior but they don’t actually practice the changing of behavior. Key number one is to accept the fact that information itself has no value at all if you don’t apply. Action for key number one is to make it clear on what you’re searching for and give yourself a deadline for this process. Here’s the rule on setting a deadline.
Parkinson’s law explains to reduce the time allocated to complete a task to avoid time wasted as task expands to whatever amount of time allocated to it.
Treat info as if an apple pie that you should enjoy it while it is crispy and hot.
Inaction is feed by these monsters.
Let me acquaint you with them.
A series of self-devalue thoughts like “I’m not good enough for that” or “ I can’t make it happen”, or “ It’s impossible” spring in between your ears. If you continue to let them grow,  they will soon become a fact for you. It happens all within your mind, strongly affect your emotion and trying to rationalize base on your past experiences or just pure imaginations.
It could think of all the reasons why you will gonna fail and even more reasons why you should not even begin. After all, no one enjoy being looked dumb and stupid.
It is even hard for you to take action when your brain goes a step further of telling you that you have to control every single detail of every single outcome so that you do not fail. Motivation and desire were depleted at least half when you think you have to run the universe.
We already know what we should do. Here’s the nuance. Humans are born to be ambitious and no one will dedicate to themselves or their loved one to achieve only a fraction of the results. It feels so great to think that you’ll achieve something huge and have your friends amazed. A perfectionist mindset of either doing nothing or achieve exactly the flawless outcome at the first shot is doing you a disservice.
Let’s look at the venture capitalists, they’re testing 25 companies to find one that might win. Why should you think that you’re brighter than they are? Why should you think you’re going to hit it on the first? You’re beating yourself up unnecessarily for holding this delusion.
I understand that your friends will roll their eyes off if you tell them you’re gonna make an extra 100 bucks a month but hey, you will never achieve 10k dollars without the first 100 bucks.
Key number two is to prepare to make it a lot easier at the beginning and make sure you increase the intensity level gradually. Action for key number two is to make the first step a no-brainer so that you have no reason for not doing that.
For instance, you want to become a vegetarian. Instead of imagine yourself say no to meat and go green for every meal at your first trial, why not just start eating green for one meal in every 3 days? After a period when your body adapted to this new habit, change it to 2 meals in every 3 days and so on.
If you just take the leap and go green in every meal, you can still be able to make it for a few days with burning desire and motivation from reading blogs, books and watching videos. However, you’ll struggle when the motivation level subside. At that point of time, giving up is the comfort choice of all. Your brain then connects bad feelings and negative thoughts to become a vegetarian. It takes at least twice of the efforts, desires and motivations to restart the plan.


How to not give a damn?
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               It’s easy to just deal with yourself. However, it’s humans’ natural instinct to desperate for acceptance and love.
Here’s a fact that most of us tend to forget. Those who blended in, being forgotten while those who dare to stand out attract the same minded people. This could be your treasure as we all need support to beat the monsters that drag us down.
If you are observance, you will soon find out that most action taken by top performers are exactly the opposite from the average. Be very careful on who you take advice from and take advice only from those who make it to where you want to be. Bear in mind that it costs nothing to give advice but it is on your own to choose.
Rules are breakable and it changes according to different people. Break it for as long as it’s not against the law. When you get rejected (where this is not something will or will not happen, but is a requirement in success package) tell them that you’re going to do it anyway with your own method. Most of the time, you don’t really need permission from anyone but yourself to start something.
Key number three is to accept the fact that your life will only change from the moment when you become responsible on it based on the concept that rules are breakable.  Advice from the right person saves you at least a thousand miles to achieve greatness. Action for key number three is to be fully in charge of your life and maximize an approach that you’ve learned from the right person before multiple new approaches. Treat this as an experiment to find out how it’ll work the best for you.
All the roadblocks at first are exactly the magic elements that made your story extremely amazing and stand out of the crowd.
Play with your brain muscle
Years ago, I was graduated from school and had to deal with different hard choices. It was intimidated to take action when being told to choose wisely to avoid failure. After all, I was just an 18 years old teenage that hope to avoid 9-5 curse. I did have plan though but it was dead when someone from nowhere commented that it was a bad choice. I stuck for as long as five years.
In these five years, I travel and work in different countries like Macau and Singapore. Although I have some saving from it but I don’t really know what to do with it. Here is what I conclude from this experience. It’s not about how much you start off with but the state of your mind affect at least 98% of the outcome.
If you pay attention to the different emotion generated according to the different situation, you will soon find out that your mind connects you to the negative feelings like sadness and worry on the unknown path while comfort and relax on the known path.
For instance, staying at a regular job earn you a steady income so your mind makes you feel comfortable. Your mind don’t make you feel anxious on this because it knows exactly how much you can bring home and you agree to that amount. Simultaneously if we compare it to entrepreneurship, your mind instantly connect you to fear, as it doesn’t know what will gonna happen.
Here’s another version of you are what you eat called you are what you feed into your mind. For instance, if you have 100s’ positive comments and 1 negative, you will tend to dwell on the only negative and kind of ignore the positive rest. Do understand that your mind is just a tool and the outcome, your life really depends on how you make use of it.
Here’s a secret crunchy solution that I’ve found really practical. It is much easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting. Behaviour first then attitude will come along. Instead of putting on a smile only when you’re happy, put a big cheesy smiley face on first and you will feel happy. Conduct the behaviour first then your attitude will tag along.
Everything starts with being the master of emotion instead of being control by it. Here’s a simple formula. Thoughts(desire) + emotions (negative / positive) = physical equivalent that transmuted from actions.
There are certainly circumstances that give you many reasons to feel a certain way, but at the end of the day you are powerful unless you surrender that power to another person or circumstance. You choose how you act. You might be in a frustration circumstance but you can choose to be frustrated or having strong faith on yourself that you have the ability to get this done. You are not a feeling, you can choose how you feel; you are not a product or victim of the circumstance, you’re 100% in charge of how you respond to it.
Key number four is to master your emotion and understand that all impulse of thought has a tendency to turn out themselves in their physical equivalent. Your brain is just like another muscle that can be trained and you are the only person in charge to get this done.
Here’s the action step by step for you to start anything. Set a deadline and spend your free time learning. When you’re done, stop learning and start implementation. Once you notice that you hit a plateau, stop implement and set a deadline to learn again.