Foundations of Real Confidence
Demolition and Construction
The taller the building, the deeper the foundation.
As a kid I heard this once from my father, now a 45-year veteran and entrepreneur in the construction and engineering field. I remember visiting his construction site and noticing large rectangular shaped ditches in the ground where a building structure would be built. I used to wonder what was so complicated about digging ditches? To my novice eye a hole in the ground was a hole in the ground.
The foundations of a building have to have tremendous respect for nature — winds above and earth movement below the foundations can rip any man-made structure apart if it is not engineered properly.
Another lesson etched in my brain forever.
30 years later, I still tap into these lessons in my own way, fusing them with my personal journey and lessons harvested from experiences of others. When someone asks me how I coped with all the ups and downs in my life, the embarrassing slips, the unexpected gut kicks, the violent knock-outs, the life-draining marathons and ultra-marathons mixed in with successes big and small, being exposed to life’s real blessings in the most abundant of ways, I attribute being able to make it through with sanity and a smile because I kept strengthening my foundations all along. I learnt and applied the life lesson that similar to a building’s foundation, life’s foundations have to be treated with intelligence and mindfulness keeping in account the impact from inner-self and external factors.
Specifically, I continually invested in my confidence, the foundation to all my progress despite bumps in the road. I am not a 21-year old billionaire who bought Bitcoin at $0.01, I am a 41- year old regular person who endured severe lack of direction in his late teens, faced the dark side of introversion, depression, business failures, marriage failure, legal battles, raising a child as a single father, health issues, rebuilding life and business from scratch, and lived to tell about it, thanks in large part to self-belief, so 1) I don’t go down without a fight-to-remember and 2) others may benefit. Though I am writing this article from my perspective, I have also never met a self-made person who didn’t posses a high degree of self-belief.
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