To Shape Our Own Destiny

Right, so we have collected the courage to start. Now what? Now, is the hard part. You know, the action part. The fighting your own mind and your own assumption part. The part where we go against ourselves to reach whatever goal that we want to.

As WCKD purpose is to create some sort of framework (an unconventional, experimental framework, if you may), we need to set some structure. High chance, you and I have different goals in life. From finance, relationship preference, family, kids, and cars, down to how we want to live our lives.

So I thought, and thought, pondering for oh-so-many months and years. In the end, I ended up with this classification of improvements that you can do (in order of importance):

• Building Confidence
• Building Intelligence
• Healthy Mindset
• Achieve Happiness
• Building Wealth
• Sustainable Lifestyle
• Healthy Relationship
• Building Family

Now before you say that the order is wrong (it might be, for you), let me try to explain first from my side of view.

Building Confidence

Everything starts from here. Confidence, faith, whatever your term. Confidence means that you are confident in yourself and your capabilities to achieve your goal. Without confidence in yourself, nothing will actually happen. Having a healthy confidence in yourself is often the hardest part because you can always go overboard, or under. We often lack confidence or are dangerously overconfident in our calculations. Understanding ourselves plays a part here.

Building Intelligence

To counterpart that inner voice that says we are extremely good or extremely bad, we need to have ample knowledge about our surroundings. This is where building intelligence is important. I'm not talking about hard knowledge such as science here. I'm talking about being smart. Being understanding which inner voice would you listen to, how to assess incoming suggestions from your people, and building a framework of your own value. Building intelligence is important for us to build a growth framework.

Healthy Mindset

Confident and smart. Mmm, look at you. Once we acquire those two, we need a healthy mindset. What do I mean by healthy? It's where everything that you do promotes the growth of your overall mindset (and thus, your actions, and eventually everything else).

Achieve Happiness

Believe it or not, by having those three things before (Confidence, Intelligence, Healthy mindset), you're actually set for happiness. Yeap you read that right. Without being rich, or in a romantic relationship you can achieve happiness. Of course, it's not that easy. Happiness is a simple word and yet achieving it is extremely hard. It's like making those perfect poached eggs. Sounds simple enough but in reality you either get it or not.

Building Wealth

Now this is where it gets interesting. In essence, you are done with yourself at this point. But we all gotta contribute to society, we all have parts to play in advancing society. And when we do that, we might as well build wealth. Pay attention to the word wealth though, I'm not talking about being rich. I'm talking about being wealthy. What's the difference you asked? Keep reading chap.

Sustainable Lifestyle

The difference between being rich and being wealthy is in the sustainability. Wealthy people can live their lifestyle for a long long long time. Wealth is about having plenty of time to live your life in your means. We would have plenty of discussion on this topic, and perhaps some calculations to help us achieve a sustainable lifestyle.

Healthy Relationship

I know, I know, some of you might argue why a healthy relationship is at the end of the list. Because you need to be well off by yourself first, that's why. I'm not saying that you need to be rich first before you start a romantic relationship. I'm saying that you need to be able to take care of yourself first before entering any relationship. Caveat emptor here. There are situations where you're not fully done with yourself while inside a relationship. That's fine. This list is not an eight commandments that you need to adhere to in order.

Building Family

Not everyone is into building a family. But if you do, this one is for you. The final frontier of a relationship. The strange satisfaction of a long term relationship. We will discuss and dissect plenty of successful (and failed) long-term relationships from those who already passed it.

Do I need to remind you again, that the order is not a fixed order? In a perfect world, the order would be like that. You work on yourself, then you build some wealth, fall in love with someone at the beach, you build a family and life is happily ever after. There's a reason why Disney is so successful in selling that kind of story.

Life ain't like that chap. Life is messy. And so is the order. Choose whichever that resonates with you the most and follow it from there. Change the path however you want, as much as you like. What's important is actually not the list. It's that you keep moving despite everything. That's what matters at the end of the day.