Life after school: It wasn’t meant to be like this!

Attention! If you’ve just finished school and want to live a life of pure awesomeness while steering clear of a future involving 9-5 desk jobs, then you better listen up. This is for you.
You’ve just finished high school and are on your journey toward living the life of your dreams. You can finally do all the things you’ve been dreaming about for years and years.

And your plan is pretty simple. Graduate school, check. Embark on epic adventures, check. Join the leagues of other fully fledged adults living lives of pure awesomeness, check!

Essentially, you are starting a whole new life, and you may have kind of expected it to be easy.

Never mind that you left behind a routine you’ve engaged in for at least 13 years of your life. Or that you are leaving behind the sense of safety, familiarity and security that came along with this routine. Or even that you are leaving behind an essential part of your identity and having to recreate it from scratch.

Like, how hard could this whole graduating high school, moving out into the real world and living a life of pure awesomeness thing be, huh?

Piece of cake! (Said no one ever…)

It’s been the next big adventure that you’ve wanted for SO LONG!

But, you’re not sure if you can really deliver on it. And, if you’re honest, you’re not entirely sure if you’ll ever be able to. You’ve only just finished school. It’s only been a short while since you’ve entered the world of fully-fledged adults and the thoughts of failure are lurking at every turn.

Like, what if your life plan doesn’t work out? What if you made the wrong decision and have doomed your future self to a catastrophic life of epic proportions? What if you still feel like a school kid in disguise?

When you’re staring down the abyss of the unknown, doubt and fear lurk at every single turn. And what many people don’t understand is that, this is what following your dreams looks like.

You’re probably so used to hearing people tell you to ‘follow your dreams’ or your bliss, or perhaps your passions. It’s all become a bit of a cliche.

No one tells you that if you do these things, your journey will not always be easy. Following your dreams is hard. No one has worn down that path for you to follow. At first, you have to hack down the brambles and find your footing as you stumble along on your journey via the path less travelled.

Your other option would be to follow the liner model of going well in school, to get into a good university course so that then you can succeed in a high paying career. That’s totally cool too if you like the idea of 9-5 desk jobs and being bound to your career.

For those of you who value your freedom and your passions, I want you to know it is totally fine to choose a different path. Just make sure you are prepared. When you follow your dreams and leap into the unknown, your entire world will be shaken.

You will run into obstacles and conflicts and challenges. The likelihood of messing up increases tenfold.

And for many people, the fear of failure is what prevents them from achieving the greatness they have stored within them. It stops them from even trying in the first place. So, they stop themselves, they don’t chase their dream, or learn the things they want to learn or follow the career they’ve always fantasised about.

All due to the fear that they might fail.

And even if you might find yourself doing what you’ve always wanted to do and living the life you’ve always dreamed of, you will soon find that doubt is a relentless, pesky little bugger.

But NEWSFLASH!

If you want to live a life of pure awesomeness, you’re going to have to take the leap and face the fears, doubts, worries and anxieties as they come.

Every. Single. Day.

Because that’s what you’ve signed up for. You didn’t choose easy. You chose the dream and following your dream is hard.

But you know what, you should do it anyway because if you don’t, you sign yourself up to a 100% chance of failing in living your life of pure awesomeness. If you do follow your dream, your odds of success are already increased and the more that you continue to walk along the path less travelled, the more your odds of success will continue to increase.

(This is where that exponential thing your math teacher rambled on about in 9th grade becomes really handy by the way.)

In choosing to live a life of pure awesomeness, you have a say in how you want your life to turn out.

And even if failure delivers you a whopping blow to the head, you can get up and get going because you have something worth living for. Anytime anyone has ever succeeded in something, their success has been wrapped up in a bunch of crap that didn’t work out how they expected it to.

Just as the image accompanying this post indicates.

So I guess, now’s a good time as any to let you know that it’s totally ok if you fail. This is how you learn.

It is totally ok if you want to change your direction in life. This is how you can experience a life of pure awesomeness.

And, it’s totally ok to be scared shitless because this is what will motivate you to live a life of greatness. A life you’ll look back on and think of as being a life well lived.

What makes these all ok is that you can be scared that you might make mistakes, but despite this fear, you will still take action anyway.

I’d like to leave you with a quote by Erin Hanson that describes this phase of your life beautifully, and that has inspired be in my journey with Study Hacker:

“There is freedom waiting for you, On the breezes of the sky, And you ask “What if I fall? Oh, but my darling, What if you fly?”

It is for this reason I created Study Hacker, because well, what if I fly? That thought is just so awesome that I cannot just sit back and do nothing.

And it is for this reason alone I chose to overcome the obstacles that made me want to stop writing. Had I stopped, the book which provides you with the skills you need to overcome your fears and anxieties would never have existed.

Had I stopped, that very book never would have given me the opportunity to experience the success of becoming a #1 international bestselling author within 4 days of launching on Amazon.

After having been so afraid of failure and moving past it, I can tell you the joys of flying to success are nowhere near as thrilling as I would have thought.

They are infinitely better.

You only get one shot at this life, so why not make it a damn good one?