Play Positive sum games:

Play positive sum games. Not status games. Not chasing recognition. But doing the work. Day in, day out. The consistency of producing value over and over for the sake of it. Not chasing what other people have in mind for me or what they think I should be doing. Live life on your terms but play it in a positive way. Add value to your interactions. Give away more than you receive. Bring on people for the ride. The more people around you are successful and doing well, the better off you’ll be.

We get so enamoured as humans, particularly ones living in North America, with chasing these ideals of what we should be in society. ‘Oh, I should be a doctor because my parents want me to and society tells me it’s a safe job that people enjoy.’ Nah. That was not my experience. My medicine experience was the grind of showing up day in and day out, but not really doing it for me. Deciding that being a doctor and working in that grind wasn’t the life I wanted.

Sure, I got through it because I had the ability to read things fast, pick up concepts quicker than most people and regurgitate information from textbooks. But I also got there because of privilege. Because of having parents who could afford to send me there. I’m not a doctor if I don’t have that. Would I have gone through the entire undergrad in science in Canada, gotten into med school and then resigned myself to career in medicine? I don’t know. Possibly. There were a lot of signs in the way I was raised telling me I could pursue something different, but it was also circumstances.

Having a year off because your program screwed up and then making a deal with your parents to trust you to take a risk. Why else did I get that venture opportunity? Because I had parents who knew about what I was getting into. Who understood that you didn’t have to stay in one career. Who knew that by leveraging the knowledge you had acquired, you could work in an entirely different field. But only if you had the passion to learn something completely new.

Thank god I did. In certain ways that’s just a function of who I am. I spoke about this with mumma because she trained us in this way since we were kids. Every day of the week we were at an activity. Swimming, basketball, music, tennis, soccer, camps, etc. Always busy doing something. Because of that, I’m used to going and moving. This last year has been a reset. A way to stop and relax. To ask yourself what is this all for?

Chasing money and opportunities for status is a zero sum game. Wanting to go to a bigger fund or move to a place to make more money is not going to make you fully happy. Sure, it’s gives you purpose and fulfilment because you’re working towards something, but the concept of being the ‘hot-shot’ at a big time firm is an illusion for you to make more money. At the end of the day, if you just be you, work on yourself, share your ideas with the world and stay in the moment, you’ll make more money than you can imagine.

Enjoy the ride. Enjoy the grind. Enjoy the learning process. Enjoy every day, because every day is a gift. You got fortunate enough to be healthy living in the western world born to parents who could afford to travel around the world and send you to university around the world. You’ve had the chance to live more life experiences than a lot of people. Your perspective on the world is unique. It’s yours. Because you’ve lived across countries and cultures and continents, pretty much on your own, you understand things a bit differently than others. You’ve been able to be in situations that most people don’t find themselves in.

You’ve been a sponge and dove head first into experiences that seem a bit crazy. Move to Amsterdam for a 6-month internship is pretty random. But you’re willing to take that risk. Again, a lot of it is circumstance. Don’t have a relationship, no obligations tying me down to my family, don’t have to be close to home to take care of my parents or be around the family. I had an opportunity to go travel the world and experience a bit of it. So use that knowledge to write about what you want. To tell the world how you see it. To share your ideas with people who didn’t get lucky to have the experiences you’ve had.

You have to maintain discipline and consistency. You have to work at this over and over again, day in, day out for years at a time. Nothing that you accomplish successfully is an overnight success. It takes time.

Look at this writing. You set this goal to create 100 pieces of content this year only after having written almost every day in a journal for over 2 years. You didn’t start writing out of the blue. You started slowly and said ‘I need to maintain this action for me’. For future me. Not for anyone else. Tbh I’m not really doing this writing thing for anyone else either.

It’s a promise I’ve made to myself. When I grow older, I want to be able to look back on my life and say I created the life I wanted. I did the work, I put in the time, I took the risks, I failed over and over again, and yet I enjoyed it. I had fun. I worked hard. I put myself in new experiences over and over again. Your view of the world is unique so talk about it. Show people how you see the world, and show your future self how you see the world. Put something down in stone, online, so that years from now you can read these blog posts and decide how much you’ve grown.

You have to start somewhere. With this writing journey, this is just at the beginning. It’s consistency over time. It’s not talking about it and thinking about it. It’s about action. It’s about doing it over and over again for a long time. It’s about compounding your skills. It’s about helping out future you. It’s about realizing that small consistent practices every day can amount to an exponential amount of knowledge relative to your previous self and the rest of the world. It’s about challenging yourself and your identity of who you are. It’s about being self-aware. It’s about failing.

You have to chase your own goals. You have to live life on your own terms, no one else. Don’t let your happiness be controlled by anyone but yourself. You are ultimately the creator of your destiny. You manifest what you want and your actions will dictate what path you decide to take. It’s not about thinking about it, procrastinating and telling people about what you’re going to be. It’s about going out and doing it, to show people what you’re capable of but mostly for yourself. To prove yourself that you can be a better, more completely person than before.

Remember, you’re only running your own race. No one else is running yours and you’re not running anyone else’s. Not your parents, not your friends, not your teachers, not your dog’s. It’s about reminding yourself that the experiences in your past have molded you, but they are not you. They are things that have happened, but have come and gone. Every day you can wake up and decide who you want to be. Sitting in the past and letting past experiences define you is never going to make you happy. You have to come back to today, to now.

Sure, they shape you but they are not you. Your thoughts are not you. They’re thoughts. You have them based on your previous experiences and knowledge, but they’re just thoughts. They’re not you. A lot of people love attaching their identities to thoughts and opinions, but that’s a lie they tell themselves. They are more complicated than that. They are their actions. How they act every day is ultimately who they are.

So change your actions. If you have a problem, do something about it. Come up with a solution, test it and see if it works. If it doesn’t, then go back to the drawing board, reflect on what happened and make another action. Iterate like this over and over again until you find what you’re looking for. If you keep doing that and are extremely persistent, your actions will open up a future that you couldn’t even comprehend. But your persistence has to be almost obsessive. You have to make a pact with yourself that you can’t lie to yourself.

Every day we tell ourselves narratives of who we are in person, but we’re more than that. We’re hiding behind a lot of internal struggle/strife. We hide things and take specific actions in order to control our narrative, but often times we’re not acting based entirely on what we believe in. We’re letting the noise of society to cloud our decisions and judgement. In order to be something different, you have to think different. You can’t follow the rest of the world and groupthink if you want to be different. You have to do things differently and believe that you have the ability to do whatever you want.

Your belief in yourself has to be greater than anyone else’s belief in you. If I’m being honest, no one really cares about you, besides your close family and friends. Even your friends, everyone is so caught up in their own lives how much are they really thinking about what you’re doing? Not at all. People are selfish. They’re so worried about themselves. But that idea is also so freeing because you’re not beholden to anyone. You’re only beholden to yourself.

So live your truth. Own your story. Make a lasting impact on society. Go out and help people doing it the way you want. You don’t owe anyone an explanation for being you. Listen to people’s feedback and let the right ones guide you, but chart your own path. Play positive sum game with positive people and you’ll live a happily fulfilled life.