The first few weeks of the year are always my favourite week of the year. It is filled with possibilities for the year ahead and expectations of myself, both personal and professional. At the turning of new year, we typically resolve to work harder, be more vigilant with our spending, eat healthier, call our relatives more often and do more yoga.
The first week of the year hadn’t even passed and I was arm-deep in chocolates in front of Netflix; something that I had promised myself to do less of this year. And then comes the guilt and the feeling of self-betrayal for not meeting my goals and missing that yoga session with my mum.
I don’t know about you, but since I was at school, I always had high expectations of myself. I have always had a very clear vision as to how I wanted to live my life; how I wanted to look; how I wanted my career to pan out, and so on. I have always meticulously planned every step towards my vision of success. I have a spreadsheet for absolutely every variation of my life and have planned every solution for every eventuality.
But as planned and strict as I have been in my day-to-day life, many of the most important successes that I have achieved have happened by complete happenstance. In England, at the tender age of 15, we had to have a very clear vision and a plan of what career we wanted to get into when we grow up. To do a specific degree you needed specific A-Levels; to do specific A-Levels you needed specific GCSEs.
So basically you have to know what you wanted to do for the rest of your life at the age of 15. You would meet ‘Careers Advisors’ who would help you decide what career path to follow based on your character and grades. I would come out of my advisory sessions more confused (and more terrified) than when I went in. I had to pick my one(!) career path right then at the age when my only concern was why I was the first boy in the entire year to have a moustache and that unibrows weren’t as common as my mum had assured me they were.
If you would had told my 15-year-old self or my 20-year-old self or, better still, my 30-year-old self, that my life and career would turn out the way it has, I would have told you to jog on. Things change. More often than not your plans turn out differently to what you had ‘planned’.
But, as you learn during your formative years, those changes challenge us, define us, shape our character and make us grow. As a business owner, your business is destined to fail every single morning you wake up. However, it is your resilience and your ability in applying your strengths to new and unplanned situations that safeguard your business and make it a success.
You learn to apply your strengths that you have curated and built over the years to anything that comes your way, so when anything unplanned that crosses your path by happenstance you are equipped to convert them into opportunity and fly. That reminds me, I have yoga class tomorrow.
Babak Golkar is the co-founder and designer of Emperor London.
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