When you Tried Everything... and Became Nothing

Focus or Lose

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I never knew. And I was always jealous of those young children who answered without hesitation: “I want to open a restaurant” or “I want to be a firefighter” or whatever they wanted to be.

I would have hoped that things would have worked out 30 years later… but it’s still the same. It’s as if nothing really excites me. I don’t know, and that led me to try thousands of things. Jobs that might surprise you. Selling fireworks. Selling socks. Selling lingerie… Selling personalized mugs… Selling sandwiches… Selling poker accessories… Selling old video games… Becoming a chess teacher… Being a semi-pro video game player… Having a semi-pro video game team… And I’m forgetting lots of other things.

At one point, things were going well. I was making a good living. But man is never satisfied. And I had the urge to become something else. It’s hard to do something every day that doesn’t excite you. We search for meaning that we can’t find. So I embarked on new paths without really being sure what I wanted to be. And after a few years, I destroyed almost everything.

I didn’t become the other things I wanted to be. More failures. All while destroying my core work. Today, I find myself rebuilding that core work, just so I can continue to live.

In a few years, I’ll be 40. Which is well into the halfway point of my life. Sad to reach that age without really knowing what I’m dying to do on this earth. That’s how it is, and that’s okay.

I have always told you to follow your dreams. And that will never change. But if you do, don’t make the mistakes I made. Many times.

I have a PhD in failure, failed attempts, and self-sabotage. If only I could prevent a few others from graduating in the same subject as me.

Every time I took a leap of faith into a new career, I failed. And the reason seems pretty obvious to me today. In fact, there are not one, but two reasons.

• A lack of personal investment

These new things you want to do, you’ll have to put your heart and soul into them if you want them to succeed. And maybe I no longer have the strength or the desire. Or maybe I don’t want to succeed enough. But without unwavering dedication to your dream, it’s doomed to fail.

With more discipline and organization, I could have made my dreams come true. But I lacked energy. And common sense. The mind scattered across too many things.

• I haven’t burned my bridges

I’ve always kept backup plans open. I’ve never stopped working on other projects alongside my own. But time and energy cannot be divided infinitely. It took me almost 37 and a half years to understand that you can’t make something succeed by dividing your attention between too many things.

I don’t know what you want to be. I just know that whatever it is, if you want to turn it into your income or your main career, you’re going to have to focus and give it your all.

It’s foolish to try to become many things at once. That’s the best way to become nothing.

This also applies to our goals. At the beginning, we set ourselves thousands of goals to achieve. Then we are surprised when we don’t accomplish any of them. We should set ourselves just one or two big goals and no more. So that we can really devote our energy, time, and attention to them.

Remove the superfluous, keep the essential, and succeed.

Or don’t sort through it all. Try to do everything at once. I hope you succeed anyway. But for me, it didn’t work. I exhausted myself. I lost almost everything professionally. And I find myself once again building from scratch at an age when normally, we should already be well on our way.

I love you because I love humans, even though they are often unbearable. So, I’m just trying to give you some good advice so that you don’t make the same mistakes that cost me so many years of my life.

Good luck in everything you wish to do. We only have one life. I suppose it has to count.