👨🏻‍🎓 A decade after high school graduation. What did I learn?

This serves as a record of my thoughts ten years after my high school graduation. Maybe I will write another one ten years later. : )

Ten years ago, at the end of June 2013, I graduated from one of the top high schools in my region (CSKPHC in Macau 🇲🇴), not as the top in class as I used to be in primary school (ego flex, I know), but as the third last in class who cheated his chemistry exams in order to graduate. Now, it is safe to say I have achieved things that seemed unimaginable to me a decade ago. So, what did I learn?

Over the past ten years, I have been through many roles, and if I am asked to name one single most important lesson I learned, it is this. Everything is about mentality. You can get what you want if you have a strong mentality. You can crush through challenges, and you will not stop or give up easily. And, in the end, title, experience, expertise, age, and other specs on paper don’t matter as much as how much you want. At 25, my students’ parents, who were thirty (or more) years older than me, gave me their credit cards and let me charge more than $6,000 for the services I sold in a single swipe. I hired people younger and older than me and did many other things that were presumably restricted by the specs on the paper mentioned above. The saying, “When there is a will, there is a way,” is true and more powerful than it has been recognized.

You may be in doubt, so let me present you with a short experiment to illustrate my point. Imagine you are at work, and person A comes to you and says, “Are you okay? You look a bit sick.”. Of course, you will thank her for the question, say you are fine, gladly ignore the thought of being sick, and continue your actions. However, imagine person B comes to you and asks you the same question. Then, person C comes and does the same. This ultimately casts an echo inside you, asking yourself whether you feel sick, like a thick layer of cloud above you that you cannot ignore. Well, then, maybe you will find out that you have a mild headache or not feeling as well as you were before all these caring people approached you.

This happens more than we think in all aspects of our lives. Before my startup idea became an actual thing in an office with customers and employees, streams of discouraging statements and questions doubting the possibilities of such a business idea ran through my brain all the time thanks to not just person A, B, and C, but probably fifty of such people repeatedly casting such clouds on me. That’s how entrepreneurial-supportive my social circle around me was back then. It improved after I joined a startup incubator, which I highly recommend, to meet like-minded entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, the point to be illustrated here is that as entrepreneurship should be a calculated risk-taking pursuit, self-doubt is the last step before you take the leap of faith. If you let self-doubt proliferate in your mentality, you will not leap far.

Ultimately, there are more facets to mentality, and I did not aim to raise any morals here in the fashion of an army before a war. Ten years of experience, from a disorganized kid who had a dream but lack of execution to a man who runs his company and comes to such enlightenment, is quite a transition. Nothing much of me has really changed but my will. That being said, I remain hopeful to have my future self falsify this lesson or find flaws because this is what life is about. ✨