“When you change the world you see, your world changes.”
My coach used to say that to me often.
And it’s so true, isn’t it?
We’re often brought up with one set of perspectives, given one box of tools with which to navigate the world.
In Singapore, where I was born and raised, I was given the recipe for “success” at a young age.
As far back as I can remember (kindergarten?), I was told that I had to:
Study hard
Get good grades in school
Go to a good secondary school, JC (kinda like high school), University
Get awards for excellence and occupy leadership positions along the way
Get a good (re: well-paying and/or prestigious) job
Find a husband (magically, because I was not allowed to date) and get married
Buy a house, car, and additional material trappings
Have children
Work 40 (maybe 45 or 50) years
Retire and enjoy life (i.e. playing with my grandchildren)
Die happy, having lived a “successful” life
And that was the blueprint.
Follow this and happiness, contentment, all the good things in life, are guaranteed.
Or at least, that’s what I was told. That’s what I was led to believe.
Looking around at all the adults around me, I didn’t see any other options.
Every adult I knew had a stable job, was married, with kids, a house, car, and took vacations once or twice a year.
Whether they were happy or content or not was a different question we didn’t ever talk about.
But there was no alternative that I was exposed to.
My world was limited to the world I grew up in — that was my reality, there was no other.
Except when I traveled.
I’ve had the immense privilege of traveling with my family when I was younger.
My parents took us to visit places in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, India — once, we even went to Australia.
And looking back now, I realize that I must have seen something different when we left the safe haven bubble of Singapore to venture beyond its shores and its ideals — something that spoke to me, something that inspired me, something that told me that different is possible.
That different could be good, perhaps better, perhaps amazing.
I’m hypothesizing now, with the benefit of hindsight, but I believe that some elements of what I imagine happened are true.
You see, when I was about 15 or so, I realized I wanted to see the world.
Well, perhaps that desire started earlier — when I was 11, I was invited to participate in an overseas immersion program to Japan (I didn’t end up going, which is a different story altogether), and I recall it being the most excited I had ever felt in my short life.
But at 15, that desire to see what else the world had to offer had concretized into something that I desperately wanted to achieve.
Where did this desire come from? Why wasn’t I content with simply going on the annual vacations my parents took us on?
I don’t know exactly, but my haunch is that I saw/observed something when we traveled to Batu Pahat and Bangkok and Batam that piqued my curiosity.
That pushed me to start questioning that blueprint that had been handed down to me.
That drove me to wonder if “success” really lay in those things I was told I had to do — what was “success” really?
In my child’s mind, I’m guessing this is what I processed (at some level):
If success = being happy and content because of a well-paying job, nice house, car, etc., then the people who lived in seeming poverty had no business being happy or content, because as far as I could tell, they didn’t get paid very much, didn’t have a fancy house or the latest car model.
But they all seemed happy and content.
Versus my own limited experience of life in Singapore — where I didn’t see my dad except on weekends, and when I did see him, he was always in a bad mood. Where people always seemed grumpy and/or stressed. Where children committed suicide because their grades weren’t good enough.
Something wasn’t adding up.
And I guess it seemed to me that the answer lay outside of Singapore — I had to go elsewhere in the world to discover what they knew about how to live a successful life, to discover what success even meant to them.
I don’t think I formalized this thought process till much later in life, but I think that was the beginning for me.
Of realizing that my world is limited by the world I see.
If I had simply stayed in Singapore, I would never have realized that there are alternatives out there. Different options, different blueprints, different pathways — heck, even ones that haven’t been discovered yet.
And I know that staying put is comfortable. Staying in your bubble is safe(r). It’s a known quantity, and for most of us, the unknown often feels far more terrifying than a familiar evil.
I mean, that’s sometimes why people stay in abusive relationships or awful, exploitative jobs — because we know how to navigate the known evil and are unwilling to face the uncertainty of the unknown, even if it could be so much better than what we’ve ever dreamed of.
But if you take the chance to step outside this bubble and change the world you see, you could be surprised that your world is changed.
So: When you change the world you see, your world changes.
What new possibilities could you discover?
What different alternatives might you encounter?
What unexpected knowledge will you stumble upon?
And how will you and your life be changed by it?
You won’t know until you decide to take that leap.
To venture out beyond the safety and comfort of what you know and step into the great unknown.
Because hey, there’s a reason why they call it the great unknown.
It’s gonna be great.
Will you let it?
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