One step ahead.

            Someone once said ‘Life is 90% preparation, 10% presentation.’ It sounds like such an oversimplification at first, but when you come to think of it, it’s true. We spend nights and nights at school preparing to present an appropriate answer in the exam or the interview, we spend hours perfecting the killer power point for potential clients, and we spend years at work preparing that heavy retirement plan. Maybe the percentages may differ, but life is just a combination of various proportions of preparation and presentation.

            We spend lots of time learning and preparing. We should, after all we are born knowing nothing at all. We prepare until we are comfortable enough. There are two kinds of comfortable I know of; lazy comfortable and progressive comfortable and there is a major difference between them.  When you are done with a task and don’t feel like doing further, that’s lazy comfortable; when you are done with a task and are excited to do more, that’s as you expect, progressive comfortable. You are on the right track if you comfortable in the latter way.

            Proactive is all about asking the right kind of questions at the right time, gambling on the possibility that something good will come out of it. History makers made history because they didn’t get ‘comfortable’. Isaac Newton for instance was a student at the University of Cambridge yet not the typical University student. The university closed down for two years due to plague and Newton saw not an opportunity to chill but time to conduct experiments and fill our Physics textbooks.  Point is he took the chance and time to do something completely something.

            If there is anything I have learnt over the relatively few years of my life it’s that something is better than nothing. It’s better to feel bad than to feel nothing at all. It’s better to do something than to do nothing, because it’s the only way forward. It’s better to ask a silly question than to keep silent, better to try a weird activity than nothing. Being proactive means doing something when nothing is expected. It does tend have a rewarding effect, whether it be a conversation or a job offer.

             President Barack Obama once said, “The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.”  I find his advice quite self sufficient. Nothing in life is certain, we simply hope for the best. We can’t just sit and hope; we can’t afford to get comfortable.  Life is amazing and all, but for it to be really amazing you have to do something, prepare.