SMALL TIPS, GREAT LEAPS SERIES

Earn It, Don’t Fake It

Practice your art, instead of faking it

3 min readJul 10, 2024

For the longest time I have seen people groaning about why some of their peeps stand out, about how life’s unfair to them, about how everything goes wrong in their life, and while some of people are genuinely troubled due to outside forces, majority of them aren’t, it is within a short period of time you can see why things don't work out for them

I once had a colleague, let us call him Alex. Alex used to complain about how other people of his age were getting promotion and stealing all the attention of higherups when he was the one who deserved it, after observing him for a month I gained some clarity as to why this happened.

He didn’t have a personality, he was a “nodder”, whatever you would say to him he would nod and agree, he didn't have his perspective and was a people pleaser, well guess what, it is better to draw out boundaries and say no to things which are unnecessary instead of agreeing now and then “half assing” your way to them further, making things worse when the other person gets to know you never wanted to do it in the first place. It disappoints them and make you seem unsure about things **You** promised to do.

He faked his work ethic; he would sit in the office longer than was required in order to make himself look like the guy who goes an extra mile to finish the job, ironically, his job was never finished on time, so all this didn’t matter in the end

He didn’t work upon himself, getting a bachelor's 5 years back and never upgrading your skills just doesn't cut it, there were people around who were constantly learning and applying new knowledge in their domain, thus making them more eligible for promotion than Alex.

He would breathe heavy when going up the stairs, constantly eating sweet and sugary foods that would give him instant gratification but not the energy that requires you to be sharp between the ears when working a hectic job, he would eat foods which were high in fat and carbs rather than foods which would actually give him source of energy.

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Assessing and analyzing his situation gave me a lesson and also something to share with people I interact with

Stop complaining, start analyzing, more than often you would find a situation in which you can improve yourself, even when time is not on your side
Hard work is the solution, of course I’m not saying that we need to swim in the opposite direction of water, but rather imagine yourself breaking the rocks like a constant splash of water at beach side
Be persistent, don’t give-up if something doesn't work for the first time you try, great things are called great because of their inherent nature of being difficult, if everyone could do that then it wouldn't be great
Work on your body, whatever it may be, our bodies are designed to move and flow, not sit and rot on a chair for 8 hours a day, be mobile, flexible and ripped

Don’t be Alex, be yourself, who knows, maybe you are destined to achieve something really big, but it’s you who is holding yourself back.