At a meetup the other day, K was saying how busy he was, traveling all over the country giving lectures.
People immediately jumped in:
“Wow, are you a national-level speaker now?”
“That’s amazing, how did you manage to do that?”
On the surface it sounded like pure admiration, but underneath you could feel a mix of envy and curiosity.
Everyone’s eyes were sparkling, dying to know the “secret.”
Here’s the twist:
His lectures weren’t invited talks at all.
He was the one creating the topics, renting the venues, and organizing his own nationwide tour.
K wanted to become a national-level lecturer so badly that he searched for places he could use for free or cheap, booked them himself, promoted the sessions through the groups he was active in, and ran them in a kind of “donation-based lecture” format where he only collected enough money to cover snacks and small costs.
(Source: Freepik)
A few years have passed since then, and honestly, K really does look like a national-level speaker now.
He appears as an instructor on online training platforms, speaks on big stages alongside well-known names—people you’d immediately recognize.
No one starts out successful.
Even if you come up with a great idea, if you don’t have a team or system that supports it, the scope and impact of that idea will very quickly hit a ceiling.
I think we should stop waiting until “success is guaranteed” to begin.
Instead, set a goal knowing you might fail, and move anyway.
You only really understand something after you’ve failed at it.
Are you afraid of people looking at you and thinking,
“Why on earth is that person doing that?”
If that kind of gaze scares you, you won’t become anything.
(Source: Freepik)
Thoughts like:
“Ah, so it doesn’t work when I do it this way.”
“If I try it like that, this kind of result shows up.”
“These are the kinds of issues that pop up during execution.”
Those real, lived experiences turn into assets more valuable than anything you can buy.
Failure is what drags possibility out into the open.
They say, on average, the human brain needs to be more than 80% certain of success before it sends the “go” signal and we actually act.
Even when regular people feel fairly confident about something, most of the time they still hesitate, worry ahead of time, and end up quitting because they’re anxious about failing.
I call the kind of challenges where it’s okay to fail “silly experiments.”
Because they are silly, they’re safe. It’s okay.
Just try.
If it doesn’t work, then stop. That’s it.
And if one of those silly experiments happens to succeed?
That’s just a huge blessing.
If other people think you’re weird along the way, so what?
There’s no reason to shrink yourself in advance.
The truth is, people aren’t actually that interested in others.
So let’s stop reading too much into “what they might think.”
To run “silly experiments” that are at least somewhat aligned with success, you first have to know what you really want.
- What do you want?
- Where do you feel genuine satisfaction?
- What are you doing when you lose track of time, and feel a deep sense of fulfillment afterwards?
According to research by Professor Byung-Wan Choo on meaning in life and positive emotion, the things that give life meaning and happiness tend to fall into these four themes:
- Dedicating yourself to and achieving work or a career you truly want
- Building close relationships and helping others
- Having a personal relationship with God / practicing your faith
- Serving society, contributing to others, and nurturing the next generation
So what is your purpose in life?
And given that purpose, what can you design and plan so that your life becomes richer and more meaningful?
The core of all “planning” is this:
Find the things that give your life meaning and happiness, and actually act on them.
Failure isn’t something only adults should experience.
I think teenagers need to fail early, too.
If kids grow up with adults constantly clearing the path for them—never letting them truly fail—
their inner “muscles” don’t get strong enough to withstand real failure later in life.
Teenagers also need to think like makers:
plan things, try things, and fail at things.
The adults around them should support that process.
Failure experienced at a young age actually gives them deeper richness and resilience later in adult life.
We shouldn’t underestimate young people just because they’re young.
And we shouldn’t overprotect them just because they’re young, either.
Recent studies show that ordinary teenagers, too, can passionately pursue a meaningful life purpose.
Many discover that purpose in adolescence and start working toward it.
As they grow into early adulthood and middle age, those early purposes evolve and mature.
(Source: Freepik)
People of all ages care about success.
We read self-help books and autobiographies written by famous people, underline their phrases, and try to copy their habits.
But their success stories are often very far from where we are right now.
Can we really just copy them late and somehow end up in the same place?
We highlight their words and tell ourselves,
“Right, I failed because I wasn’t living like this person…”
It’s a bit like everyone trying to improve their English by copying the exact study method of someone who’s already a top-level English speaker—
and yet, almost no one actually reaches that level.
We throw ourselves into someone else’s method.
When the results disappoint, we blame ourselves for “not trying hard enough” and keep repeating the same cycle.
Remember this:
Their success is perfectly tailored to their life.
It is not a template for yours.
You have to find the meaning of your own life,
and design a path that looks different from others.
When you fail often,
when you run a lot of silly little experiments,
you eventually start to see a shortcut—a personal shortcut—to what success means for you.