Later never comes
Some things have a time, you miss it and then you never get a chance.
How many times has it happened to you that you wanted to do something and deferred it to a later time and then that time never came ? It has happened to me on uncountable occasions. Everything has a time in your life. Thinking that you will play with toy cars when you grow up is sick. Most of us delay things in our life, thinking that we will do it when we reach that comfortable happy place. But the truth is that happy place does not exists. It is now or never. But by this I do not just want to focus on the work that you would be doing. Actually work is something which you can do at any point of time. We have entrepreneurs in the world who started their company at different ages. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in his 20s. Mark Rudolph started Netflix in his 30s. Colonel Sanders started KFC at the age of 60. So, my point here is, you can actually do something about your career at every age. There are many high school failures who made it big and there are many gold medallists from Harvard who are doing nothing. So, what am I actually trying to say with this title ?
I am talking about the things which actually make us life happy and we delay them finding a free and comfortable time. This includes spending time with your friends, family, going on trips, playing, learning some new skills. Most of us spend most of the time of our day working, thinking that people in our life are forever and one day they die and we realise the time which we wanted to spend with them. we are never going to get that back. But this is just one example. I have had numerous opportunities in my life which I just let go and there are some which I am most thankful to God about that I eventually bumped on to them. As Warren Buffet says
“The losses from the opportunity you did not take are never measured, but they are the most significant ones”.(Not exactly but this is the gist).
But this does not mean that we can say yes to every opportunity that comes our way. We need to be decisive. Sometimes, our decision might be wrong. To be right, most of the times, I have just come down to one simple rule — “If you will remember it for the rest of your life, then do it”.
I remember not going out ever with my school friends. I just used to stay home and either study or sleep or watch some TV. There was nothing stopping me. I always thought, once I grow up there would be enough time to do such things. I was wrong. Yes, I can go out. Yes, I have friends. But, it will never be the same as it would have been if I would have gone then. All my friends have some great memories from those visits. I have none and I regret about it. We might have the possibility to go to the same place and do the same thing, but it will never be the same. One of the great childhood memories which I have is of blackouts. Whenever there used to be a blackout, I used to go on the roof, lie under the stars and listen songs and sometimes stories on radio. The feeling was unmatched. As I grew up, the blackouts reduced, we got inverter. The bed on which I used to lie and listen songs, broke. Everything changed.
And this is what happens with everything in our life, everything changes. The people around you will change or die, your health will deteriorate, the world will never be the same.
I always used to be a person who would just ditch everything just to stay focussed on one particular goal — trying to scale the peak. I finally reached the peak, there was applause. At the very next moment, I saw another peak, making where I am standing, look insignificant and I ditched everything again.
The peaks never end, but our life comes to end. At the end, what remains is the memories. I was blessed to have great people in my life who forced me to do certain things who did not have any personal goal involved in forcing me. I now look back and feel, if I did not do those things, I would regret that too. Whether it be a trip, which I wanted to cancel because of work which seemed important to me, or an opportunity which I wanted to leave thinking that I was not prepared for it.
In my last year of college, my friends made a plan to go to Goa, which is in itself an epic place. I did not want to go because of work and I did not like the people who were going. My best friends persuaded me so much everyday through emotional blackmails, that I finally agreed. On that trip, I met my girlfriend. The trip changed the complete course of my life ahead. I was amazed to see how one trip could change my life in so many ways I never imagined. After realising this, I started saying yes to everything that came my life, but I could not handle it because you cannot do everything. So what to do ? You don’t need to worry about that, you probably know it and you are just finding excuses to make it false.
Our life kinds of looks like this:
Every opportunity in your life leads somewhere, but it never comes back to the opportunities you lost. So, we must keep this in mind. As we go down each level, everything changes. The constant is just us and everything else changes. There are people who know their passion, but defer it just to earn money to survive at a particular time. But as they earn money, the level of standard increases and they just get stuck in the cycle of earning more money even though hating their life everyday, waiting for a day when they will break even and finally quit the job and do something which they wanted to do. I believe that day never comes and if someone really knows that this is it, they should go for it.
It is better to not be able to survive and die, rather that die everyday.
The people who actually change this world are the one either making billions or either the one making pennies. This is because they have nothing to lose. They either already got it all or either they have nothing. The people in the middle — the millionaires, or the people which we call middle class, most of you reading this article and me myself have to be in the either of the other brackets to actually make a change or adopt an attitude of “nothing to lose” to actually do something worthwhile and live a happy life or we will just keep feeding the supply of our time with the short term demands life puts in our way to finally reach at the end pondering — “Later Never Comes”.
