The First Time Someone Is Proud of You
When the appreciation comes from the right person, you will know.
Finding inspiration is easy
“Proud” word gives us goosebumps every time. When we say this to ourselves, we get it. When someone else says to us, we get it. But the memory is most influential when a close person says it.
Everyone has a brother or dad kind of friend in their life that we trust blindly for support, and we get back the expected love every single time. But when it starts with the closest people you know, i.e., your family, the support becomes concrete with time. I have talked a lot about my dad and how he is inspiring me every single day.
Tough love and circadian rhythm follower are his defining characteristics. I can’t stop talking about him because there is so much to a person we don’t know before we start talking to them. Everyone has their way of looking at the world based on their experience. Listen, and you will learn a lot from it.
Whenever I feel down, I recall all the achievements I have accomplished so far and all the people who live to see me happy. And he is one of them. Getting a job and living life on your terms takes time. The sooner we embrace this truth, the more conscious steps we take in advance. Learning with experience is the most genuine way of trusting this belief. Yes, that includes failures, too!
Career choices are subjective.
The competition in prestigious colleges is so fierce that if you feel down without sharing your misery with anyone, depression will take you down and give rise to terrible life choices. I have seen some people (even my close friends) go down that road, and I learned from them early on.
For a college student who has enjoyed all the known luxuries while being there, a time comes when we become proactive about career preference. Especially if you start late, you need some initial support to keep going because everyone around you looks like they are seizing the day. You also have to kill the guilt and become active.
The first doorway to industry trends is an internship to gain practical exposure. And like every other successful student, my journey was also full of turbulences. I compromised my health for it, cut-off social interactions for it, traded sleep hours for it and even tricked my brain into building a fake pressure to perform at peak level.
Give time for the milestone. It will shift for you.
After six months of struggle, when I finally secured an off-campus internship, the moment was millennial because of all the hard work that went into it. And as I have mentioned in previous blogs too, my dad doesn’t give a damn to words.
During those six months, I had nothing fruitful to show him in my career choice. There were multiple reasons he doubted my decisions. Like why am I choosing computer science field if my program is Engineering Physics? I can become a researcher and contribute to the area of Physics.
Friends mocked me on taking a paid online course. They were like, “What value this paid course will provide you that a free course cannot?”. I did not reply to them because they had a traditional mindset that we can achieve anything without spending any resource if we are thrifty enough. But that is not the correct definition — thrifty means using your resources judiciously for things that matter.
After securing the internship, the first thing I did was call my dad and give him a sigh of relief that my career has taken-off with a growth mindset. Then he gave me goosebumps by saying this: “I am proud of you”.
I can flash that whenever I need to get back up. How strong is it? I don’t care, but the memory is always fresh in my mind, and I will remember that there is a person who is living to see me successful and change the system that is in desperate need of an overhaul.
This blog belongs to a series of posts I am publishing in this 100-days streak. Today is day 26. Navigate to the end of the article 22 for the references from day 23 onwards. If you would like to read the ones before day 22, here is the first one that started it all.
~ Sanjeev
