It goes without saying that your past doesn’t define you. You don’t choose how you start your life. However, you choose the middle and the end of your life. When you are 80 years old, will you be filled with regrets or will you be filled with happiness? That will be completely up to you.
No matter how you end up in life, what matters are the choices that you make today. It doesn’t matter how bad of a hand you’re dealt what matters is how you play it. Yes, the hand does influence the outcome but you influence the outcome as well. Do you choose to let it define how you play or do you define how you play the hand?
We all started with some sort of disadvantage. I started as a minority in a city of minorities. That made me the minority of the minorities. With that came a lot of bullying and unwanted attention that brought me to trouble. When I first came to the United States I knew absolutely zero English and was handicapped to “ESL” classes.
I also wish I could tell you that that motivated me to put in more effort than anyone else to prove my worth. It didn’t, I was a very lazy kid who just wanted to play computer games all day (not an exaggeration). My eyesight is horrible because of it. However, what I understood later in life is that your past doesn’t define you.
Even though I spent too many hours playing computer games, I focused on my studies in university and graduated with a 3.82 GPA. How lucky was I that the past is not an indicator for future success? Otherwise, I would not have been so well off.
Why Your Past Doesn’t Define You
One reason why your past doesn’t define you is because you can SMASH that social share button and share to your favorite social media platform whenever you want! It’s never too late to do it and any time that you share an article, I become very appreciative. You have no idea how much I appreciate all the social media shares so far.
For those who do, I can’t thank you enough. For those who don’t, I still hope to provide as much value adding articles that I can to earn that share!
So with that said, let’s get into the reasons why your past isn’t as important as you think.
1) Your Past Doesn’t Define You Because You Control Your Future
The popular saying in the stock market is that past results is not indicative of future success. The past hundred years in the stock market has been astronomically positive. It’s been a great generator of wealth. However, there’s no guarantee that the positive results will continue. That’s how it works with your life as well.
Even if your past was good or bad, it’s not a guarantee nor a good indicator for success. There are C students who are wildly more successful than their straight A counterparts. Why is that? Success has multi dimensional requirements. It’s not enough to know the answer to a test if no one else cares.
There are other more important skillsets at play. When you graduate from college, you are starting over at a clean slate, comparatively to your peers. You are in control of your own destiny, your own choices that you make. That’s why your past doesn’t define you.
You get to choose how you decide to go out. No one else can take that away from you. What will you decide will be your future?
2) There’s Plenty of Game Left to Play
Most people give up and think that their life is over in their 20’s or 30’s. I used to think my life was over if I got a B in one of my classes. That was my paranoia at play. I was only 20 back then and thought my entire life was contingent on me getting a B in my class. That’s how ridiculous I thought.
While that motivated me to be perfect in my classes, it was not true.
When you draw your final breath is when the game of your life is finally over. You have so much life ahead of you left to live. Your past doesn’t define you, it’s how you choose to navigate going forward that matters. Never lie down and never give up on your dreams and goals. Stubbornly protect your dreams at all costs.
There are stories of people standing up in front of executives who demanded a job. That the only way they were going to leave is if they call security on her and throw her out. There is historical evidence of companies giving jobs to candidates such as these. Be tenacious.
Promise me that the only way you’re going to leave is if they throw you out of the ring.
3) It’s Just in our Head
Our worst enemy is not anyone from the outside world. It’s ourselves. No matter what things are thrown at us, there’s always a way to adjust to it. However, our minds play tricks and games against us. It’s not our friend, it’s our worst enemy we have to fight within ourselves.
We think about the worst case scenario without even ever getting there. When’s the last time that you thought your life was over? When you had a breakup that you never thought that you would get over? When you didn’t get that dream job? Whenever it was, I bet right now, it’s all in the past. You don’t even think about it anymore.
Your past doesn’t define you, it only feels like a big deal because we’re so close to it happening. However, it’s our feelings playing a cruel trick against us. It may motivate us to try even harder next time that lands us our next roles. Aside from that, it is nothing more than your feelings creating this mirage of a bad world.
My List of Past Failures
So now, it would be helpful to demonstrate exactly how your past doesn’t define you with an example from yours truly. I’ve failed over and over again in my life and I know I’ll continue to fail in monumentally bigger things down the road. So here is the list of my failures.
1) Failing to Get into Good Universities
Even though I graduated high school 4th out of 700+ kids, the vast majority of universities rejected me. I sent an application to 6 universities and got rejected by every single one except for 1. It was devastating. I was the captain of the chess team, tennis team, science olympiad team, UIL Number Sense, and was a member of the city Youth council.
The universities weren’t impressed with my background. It was rejection letter after rejection letter except for one school. I was so demoralized because all of my friends were getting into phenomenal schools like Carnegie Mellon University, California Institute of Technology, and more. Nice scholarships on top of it as well.
However, I made the most of the university that I did get into and worked to my bones. As one of the youngest in the school, I knew I was already starting at a disadvantage by starting school early. My brain wasn’t as developed as others’. However, I still came out of it ahead with a solid GPA and 3 internships under my belt.
2) Failing to Get into Investment Banking
Because I knew I was the underdog, I kicked my recruiting into overdrive. I had a deep desire to get into investment banking as a career because of the high starting salary and a large number of exit opportunities. Earning $140,000 straight out of undergrad appealed to me. However, after 100+ applications both Junior AND Senior year, I failed.
No one wanted me. Zero investment banks wanted me. Even after I spent time attending networking events, company outings, and such. Even after having many internships under my belt. And even after having near perfect GPA. It didn’t matter and none of it mattered. To make things even worse, very few companies wanted me as well.
For my Junior internships, I sent around 100+ applications between investment banks and other internships that I thought I was a good fit for. I got rejected by every single company. It was demoralizing. What was I doing wrong? I finally landed an internship that paid $16/hour. Many of my friends were getting paid $25/hr for their internships.
Plus overtime.
Even after all of those rejections, I am doing well with a salary north of $100,000. Your past doesn’t define you.
3) Gambling Addiction
Guess how much the most I ever lost at gambling in a given year? Did you guess? If you guessed $20,000, congratulations, you are correct. Whether I wanted to admit it or not, I was a bit of a gambling addict that led to me losing that obscene amount of money. That’s a downpayment on a house in certain markets.
But it was gone, just like that. Poof. Right in front of my eyes as the dealer reached out her hand to take away what used to be my money. It was during 2018. On top of my gambling losses, the trade war turned the S&P 500 negative. Even after a 50%+ savings rate for the year, I almost ended up with a LOWER net worth by end of year.
That scared me. Although a $30k bonus ($20k after tax) subsequently in March helped lower the sting, the money went towards healing my gambling losses. What helped me stop was fear. After climbing out of the hole, I have a very sizable nest egg of $400,000 to fall back on, if necessary.
Even if you were a gambling addict like me, your past doesn’t define you. You can easily keep forging ahead and move forward.
4) Day Trading Losses
When I was in college, I day traded. You can’t really blame me because well, I had no steady meaningful income come in. There was no other way to look for ways to generate income on the side. Therefore, I lost between $5,000 – $10,000 during college because I thought I was the next best day trader the world has ever seen.
The money I earned through internships and part time jobs was gone just like that. Poof. Disappeared into thin air. Or more accurately, in the pockets of someone else who smartly bet against me. Day trading is only for rich people who don’t mind losing $100,000 here and there. Where it doesn’t mean anything to them.
Do I regret it? Yes. Would I have done something differently knowing what I know now? Yes. However, I can’t change the past and all I can do is learn and move forward from the lesson. Even if you lost a lot of money doing unsound things like day trading, your past doesn’t define you. You can still keep moving forward.
5) Racism
When I came to the United States, I was in the minority of the minorities. Asian Americans accounted for 1% of the school’s entire size. Never mind that the school was majority minority in the first place. Therefore, Asian Americans had to stick with themselves to fight against the majority.
The kids called me “chink”, “chino” (I’m not Chinese), and would squint their eyes to “imitate” me. It wasn’t a one-off instance but rather a continuous occurrence. Even though I’ve been bullied with racism in the past, I don’t let it define me. I ignore them and keep moving forward. No one broke my spirit and no one can break my spirit.
Whatever horrible thing that you experienced before, your past doesn’t define you. The people who hate are the ones who doesn’t feel good about themselves. So they have to make others feel worse just so they can get on their level. As long as emotion exists, this will never go away.
Your Past Doesn’t Define You, Even if Your Voice Tells You
We all have that nagging annoying voice in our heads. The one that tells you that because of some “perceived disadvantage” that you’re never going to get there. Never ever let it make you feel broken. Its your spirit that matters in the end, your soul and your will to keep going on. Keep fighting the good fight.
Your past doesn’t define you. There are people who experienced worse things yet still came out ahead. Everything seems impossible until it isn’t. If your past does define you, that means as soon as a bad thing happened to you in the past, you should stop. That’s not how we should think.
Don’t let that annoying voice in your head get to you. It pops up in the worst of our times. It was an evolutionary advantage in the past because we needed to manage risk. These days, healthcare and modern medicine got so advanced that we can recuperate from mistakes much easier than before.
You deserve the seat at the table, you deserve to have your voice be heard in a meeting, and you deserve to be treated with respect. No matter where you came from or where you started from. Maybe you don’t have a fancy degree from an Ivy League school like from your peers.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a degree. 2+2 will always equal 4 whether others have an Ivy League degree or not. There are community college graduates who are running circles around Ivy League graduates. By a mile. If your past did define you, then your siblings and yourself would lead almost identical lives.
That’s not the case in reality. It’s your choices that make up the difference between who you are.
Your Past Doesn’t Define You, Only You Define Yourself
Your past doesn’t define you, only you define yourself. How are you going to form the biggest project of your life, which is yourself? One great thing is that your life is completely dependent on you. One scary thing is that your life is completely dependent on you.
Whether you came out a success or failure, you have no one else to blame but yourself. Proudly take credit for your successes and take responsibilities for your failures as well. If you want it badly enough, you will take steps in order to get there. Because I wanted financial independence so badly, I sacrificed as much as I could.
Even though I wanted to hang out with more friends, I sometimes declined their invitations. Even though I would have loved to travel to Europe, I’m still practicing delayed gratification and haven’t visited yet. I don’t come from a family of millionaires and no one in my family achieved massive financial success.
I learned from others in the personal finance community and from scratch. No one handed me a bunch of money to start something meaningful, I did it myself. I did have a good family upbringing where I didn’t go hungry and generally got the money I needed and wanted to pursue passions.
However, everything else, it was all done by me. That’s why your past doesn’t define you. You are creating the beautiful life of yourself from an empty blank canvas. How are you going to paint it? Are you going to be satisfied with the result or are you going to regret it? It’s your painting so you paint it however you would like to paint.
It’s completely and utterly up to you.
Awesome, David. Your sentiment reminds me of Mike Jones’ “…back then, they didn’t want me. But now I’m hot, and they’re all on me!”
All your examples and points about overcoming past experience, circumstance, and results are valid. Most impressive to me, is your acceptance of responsibility and self-awareness (“a very lazy kid who wanted play computer games all day.”) So many people will have a ‘story they tell themselves’ about being a victim, but you have avoided that trap.
One thing about your post subject strikes me. Do you, or any other readers, come upon people who can’t stop living in their own past, when things were better? They define themselves by a past when they were young, strong, attractive, and the future had a lot of promise. Myself, I come across people from my own past or sometimes new acquaintances, and they can’t wait to tell me that they were a top athlete, or dated cheerleaders, or could bench-press xxx lbs., or used to make xxx money per year. They seem to want credit for it, or have me perceive them as they feel they used to be perceived. My experience with these people is that they don’t want anything other than affirmation of that self-image, and it is a good lesson to me when I get stuck inside my own head. People in the world really don’t care that much, if at all. I like your point about the choices of satisfaction or regret, and ‘painting the empty blank canvas’ of now. Thank you for another thoughtful post, David!
Thank you JayCeezy! I absolutely will admit that I have flaws, whether it’s today, in the past, or in the future. I think it’s inevitable.
I have a feeling that I can actually come across in such a way to people… Like “I graduated the top of a very tough university” and I hope I catch myself doing it, if I do do that, and stop doing it in the future.
Those people don’t sound like good people at all, those who want to live in the past and can’t get over the fact that people moved on.
Thank YOU for another thoughtful comment!
This is such a powerful post. I love your philosophy to keep looking forward.