By ROBERTO ABEDRABBO
Maybe you’ve just started college or you’re about to graduate — now what? This is the time to figure out whether you’re going to study a career that you’re passionate about, or find a job that will hopefully fulfill all your professional aspirations. However, these actions could be much harder to achieve if you don’t hold the key trait for long-term success: self-awareness.
Self-awareness goes beyond your degree of personal confidence or your ability to function as a human being in society; it is about knowing who you are, but more importantly, knowing your strengths and weaknesses. With this trait, you will know how to successfully take action based on what you are naturally good at and happy with, compared to what will provide you the most amount of money.
If we take a look at famous successful people, such as Mark Cuban or Beyoncé, we can see them as individuals who have put their lives and passions first to become the very best at what they thrive at. You might wonder how they were able to do that. The answer is simple: by determining what their strengths were and going all in on them — as well as disregarding their weaknesses completely. Do you think Beyoncé is good at political science? Yeah, probably not — so she didn’t waste her time on it.
College is the time to prepare yourself for your future career and learn as much as you can in order to have a successful future. But, more importantly, it’s also the time to determine the type of person you are, what makes you happy, and where you should allocate your time and effort the most. By doing this, you will have the opportunity to develop your strengths to a peak where you will be able to be the very best at what makes you happy.
Truth is, everybody in this world has a special talent. But the only way to determine what you’re good at and what you enjoy doing, is by knowing yourself first. The sooner you do this, the better. You could be an amazing musician, but be stuck studying economics. Similarly, you could have outstanding skills in finance, but your parents might be forcing you to study management and making you waste your full potential.
The best advice I can give you is this: Don’t let anybody define who you are. You can have an outstanding job in any area of study and make plenty of money a year. But at the end of the day, if you’re doing something that doesn’t make you happy, then you will not enjoy your life to the fullest. Take the risk, figure yourself out, and do what you love. And remember: HOW you make your money, is way more important than HOW MUCH you make.