Arjun Khemani

You’ll find two kinds of clichéd “motivational” advice given by “successful people” out there.

One side says you have all the time in the world. Your life is just getting started. Be patient and trust the process.

And the other says you’re running out of time. You need to have a very strong sense of urgency. You need to win today, let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!

Both of these so-called successful people advice is completely contradictory. So which one do we want to be listening to to “succeed”?

I really think that both the pieces of advice is really good but very bad at the same time. Because it really depends on the person listening to the advice. I generally tend to like the “Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go! We’re running out of time” mentality, and I’m able to accept and perform on that mind-set usually well because I’m young and I certainly have a lot of energy and passion driving me to do what I want to do. But this kind of a thinking probably won’t work for someone in the 40’s who’s just been through some very harsh times or something like that and the energy levels of that individual are probably much lower and that person on hearing to the “Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!” urgency advice is led to think depressingly, “It’s too late for me now. It’s all over, I’m too old to do something new.” But that isn’t true. We’re living in an era where advanced healthcare makes it easy for us to live a long, healthy life. You can still work for another 20+ years. For you, you need to hear that you have time.

So, both the advice is good… and bad. Probably a mid-point or a complete good mixture of the two pieces of advice is a good one but we, as humans, usually don’t tend to have that un-infiltrated balance. But I still think that it depends on the person and the dreams and goals of the individual.

So ask yourself, which kind of person am I? Do I want to have a sense of urgency and do things fast or be patient and let the work of the process unfold itself?
And one more small and very important thing, don’t “deafly” listen to successful people’s advice. Take inspiration but apply that inspiration according to your own values. Always.