“Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.”
Modern people view the world through a looking glass, a Facebook looking glass, an Instagram looking glass, or a media looking glass, and when we look through, we only see carefully picked moments in the lives of others. Those moments have the sole purpose of making their lives seem more interesting and awesome. I won’t post a photo of myself sitting sweaty and tired in front of my computer or dead tired and lazy in front of the television, even though that is probably how I spend most of my time, but I will post a photo of myself climbing a mountain or paddling a kayak, even though I only do those things once in a while. It is easy to become envious of other people when you only see the most exciting parts of their lives.
The business and startup world has an even more extreme version of this looking glass as we’ve started idolizing the extremes of those businesses with “overnight” success stories left and right. We look at these founders thinking, “If only that would have been me…” We forget that we are looking through a twisted looking glass that focuses on the good and forgets the bad and crazy. In many cases, the founders have had to sacrifice so much to be where they are now, and there is no certainty about their happiness. And really, happiness should be the only measure of success in our lives. The problem with happiness is that we can’t share it online, we can’t put it into an Instagram photo, we can’t tweet it, and the media can’t write about it. There is no way of proving to others that you are happy, so the only way to enjoy happiness is by embracing it ourselves and not caring whether others know about it or not.
Embrace happiness and don’t try to copy other people’s success, create your own.
Finally, to conclude this blog post, I thought I would share a photo of myself sitting sweaty and tired in front of my computer.
Frumkvöðull í meira en 20 ár. Stofnandi 7 fyrirtækja og Frumkvöðlar-samfélagsins. Skrifar um ferðalagið — gott og illt.
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