Ten-Minute Talk: Life Lessons

The other day, I was scrolling through social media and I came across an article from Business Insider. I didn’t open the article, but the headline suggested it was about a video game played by a 27-year-old millionaire that taught him some incredibly valuable lesson about money.

In the past, an article like this would intrigue me enough to open it. I mean, I wouldn’t mind being a millionaire by 27. And if I can do that by playing a video game, then sign me up!

This time I scoffed. What could a video game possibly teach me about money? All I’ve ever learned from video games was how to talk trash to my brother and throw away an afternoon.

Why did I ever open these articles in the first place? I thought about it for a couple minutes, then came to a conclusion. I opened these articles because of what they promise. It’s like I believed there’s this scattered “how-to” guide to becoming successful that we don’t understand. Reading this article about the 27 year old millionaire’s secret is supposed to bring us closer to being a millionaire. Despite the seeming persuasion of this implicit argument, which generates enough views that outlets like BI post articles like that about once a week, there’s something about it that doesn’t sit well. This time I thought for a lot less time. Successful people don’t all play video games! For that matter, forget all the cliches you hear about “all successful people did…” We try to connect the dots between successful (or just wealthy) people to develop a formula for wealth, letting their lives guide us where to learn the lessons we need to learn. But we’re totally missing the point!

Those lessons are around us in our everyday lives. I don’t have to play a specific video game, or work a particular job, or watch a particular movie seventeen times to learn this lesson. If that was the case, then every billionaire would have had the same upbringing. But we know for a fact that they didn’t!

It’s not about participating in activities that have the lessons you need to learn. It’s about learning the lessons from the things you’re already doing.

The people who are successful seize opportunities. The easy opportunities to see are the business opportunities: Mark Zuckerberg dropping out of college to start Facebook and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates following similar paths before him. But successful people must take opportunities to learn continuously. Think about all the times we go through the proverbial motions of life without ever questioning or analyzing our process. Driving, playing a sport, speaking, cooking. All sorts of activities that we do without thinking can provide insight into the way our minds work and how we intuitively live our lives. All we need to do is look! As people (at their own risk) heard my advice (perhaps out of pity or politeness), I’ve realized just how many lessons can be told in analogy. And that’s because the world around us can teach us those lessons.

The end of this blog post is a call to action. Feel free to ignore it. After all, I’m just in college; I’m certainly not a successful businessman myself. Nonetheless, I encourage you, next time you see an article about somebody else doing something that made them a millionaire, pick an activity you don’t think about and write down a lesson you can learn from it. The main lesson we need to learn from the experience of others is to keep our eyes peeled so we never stop learning.