A few years ago, I was watching the FIFA Football World Cup along with a friend of mine in a restaurant.
It was Brazil against Mexico in the knockout stages of the tournament, but the game was uneventful and even a little boring to be honest.
As the game progressed, my friend and I slowly started discussing our lives. He had just completed his bachelor's in engineering recently, so I brought up the question that I usually ask most of my good friends, “so what do you really want to do”?
He told me he was interested in studying Hotel Management. But he felt that it wasn’t an option that he could pursue because his parents and his Dad, in particular, wanted him to be an engineer.
Seeing that he was genuinely interested in Hotel Management and felt strongly about it, I urged him to talk to his parents about it. I said that if you tell them what you told me, they would probably understand and be willing to support his choice.
But he felt convinced that his parents wouldn’t approve of pursuing Hotel Management, so much so that, he believed it was pointless to talk to them about it.
He knew that engineering wasn’t for him, but he didn’t want to upset his parents. So out of love and respect for them, he resigned to his fate and planned to stick with pursuing engineering related work.
He told me that there was also the fact that he had already spent four years of his life trying to earn an engineering degree and all that would be for nothing.
I responded by saying that it would be better to give Hotel Management a shot now than grow dissatisfied about his choice and make a shift 5-10 years down the line.
I met him a few months later, and by that time, he had discussed the matter with his parents.
Needless to say, his parents were understanding and supportive of his choice, and he was planning to do a Hotel Management course abroad.
A couple of weeks ago, when I wished him on his birthday, he said things were going very well for him. He was recently promoted to manager in the restaurant that he had been working in New Zealand.
It made me wonder how different things could have been if he had never made an effort to discuss with his parents about pursuing Hotel Management.
His conviction that his parents wouldn’t be supportive wasn’t based on any facts, but it was actually nothing more than an assumption.
And this can tend to be the case with most of us. Our mind tends to make plenty of fear-based assumptions, and we often confuse these assumptions with how reality will actually unfold.
But often, the only way to know the outcome of something is to try.
Now trying and giving things a shot may not work in our favour all the time, but at least, you won’t later look back with regret and wonder, what if...?
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