Seven Essential Attitudes in Life for Young People
By Dr Goh Seh Kai
9 Oct 2021
After working for more than thirty-five years, I wish to share my views on the seven attitudes — self-awareness, optimism, patience, silence, respect, resilience and curiosity, which have enabled me to become more viable and happier in my life. I hope they could be helpful tips for young people in their life journey.
Self-Awareness: Human beings typically believe what they could accomplish previously will determine what they can perform in the future. However, people must also understand that they might not always realize their aspirations in a different context, such as wrong timing, environmental changes, inappropriate personal attributes, etc.
It would be risky to proceed with your plans without realizing your limitations. For example, due to technological developments, your previous qualities, such as experience, skills, knowledge, might not be helpful to your current jobs.
As a result, you might find yourselves inefficient or ineffective in your work, and unless you can continually strengthen your abilities, you might not survive long in our position. Therefore, it would be best to work in a post within your capability to be more viable.
Likewise, knowing your physical strength boundary is crucial to minimizing your safety and health risks. For example, I injured my right leg while playing badminton with my young colleagues a few years ago. Although I was an excellent player when I was young, I did not realize I had exceeded my limit because of my age and lacked regular exercise for a long time. The tragedy took me half a year to recover from limping.
The experience has reminded me that our past strengths will not warrant our current performance unless we improve ourselves. Also, if you could constantly assess your limitations before proceeding with your plans or taking any actions, you would prevent yourself from falling into the risk traps and living a better life.
Optimism: Most people are too concerned about their decision-making, although they might have finalized their decisions through massive data collection and tedious analyses to avoid potential risks, reduce costs and enhance benefits.
Although it is logical to ensure your endeavour will succeed through proper planning, you shall not be too pessimistic and worried about the outcome once you have finalized your carefully thought decisions. The reason is you cannot control the results that are affected by many external factors. And no matter how specific your plan, there would always be possibilities that the outcome might not turn out to what you have expected. Moreover, you would experience pressure and stress that might affect your mental health in the long run.
Likewise, being pessimistic would harmfully impact your self-assurance that might undermine your performance and affect your expected outcome. However, being optimistic will encourage you to continue to put in your best effort despite any setbacks and enable you to succeed one day. As a result of an optimistic mindset, it is a matter of time to realize your ambition and that all your prior fears are deemed unnecessary.
Hence, it would be best if you could always hope for the best result of your decision-making. Then, although the outcome might not turn out to be what you have wanted and disappointed you, you would gain something, such as more and better potential opportunities waiting for you to seize in the future.
Patience: People always want to realize their dream swiftly — fast promotion, quickly becoming rich, etc. Despite their best efforts, the outcome might not appear to be what they expect.
At that juncture, being impatient would not change the consequence but would negatively affect people’s inspiration to continue to strive harder to achieve their goals.
Moreover, it is worthless to be impatient since it would frustrate you and might encourage you to give up. And, frequent irritation would also be harmful to your mental health and self-confidence in the long run.
Sometimes, being patient would advantage you even though you might not accomplish what you wished then. The reason is it might not be the right time for you to fulfil your vision due to incompetency — you might be at risk if you could otherwise achieve what you eagerly wanted.
Due to failing to achieve your goals, you might feel exasperated. However, instead of feeling impatient, you should understand your deficiencies for failing to attain your aims and find ways to eliminate them.
Likewise, it is equally essential to constantly assess your strengths and weaknesses to seize opportunities that will match your strengths and avoid the risks, which will enable you to accomplish your objectives.
However, if you possess the required qualities but do not have the chance to demonstrate your abilities, you shall be patient to wait for other opportunities.
By continually uplifting your capabilities, monitoring the changes, being patient and not losing hope, you will realize your aspiration eventually.
Silence: It would be best to avoid telling your colleagues and friends about your secret because you do not know whether they might manipulate it to harm you. On many occasions, people used to vent their hidden facts to others regardless of their trusted colleagues, friends, etc.
In general, everyone has hidden facts shameful for disclosing, such as family problems, bad habits, weaknesses, etc. And many people cannot keep their mouths shut but gossip around. Hence, if you leak your undisclosed information to your colleagues and remind them to keep it confidential, you might not be sure if they would spread them around or exaggerate or distort your stories before distributing them to others.
In life, there are always cunning people and like stabbing others in the back for their benefit. Because of the rumour, it might hurt you one day. For example, these people might spread the story to someone who can significantly impact you, such as your superiors or boss, etc.
As a result of their knowledge, they might have a negative impression of you, which might affect your interpersonal relationships, career advancement, etc.
Therefore, it would be best to keep your secret regardless of whether you know the person since it is difficult, though not impossible, to find someone whom you can trust and who can keep your secret.
Respect: Do not be rude to people in any form of interaction, such as during verbal, non-verbal and written communication, because it might leave them an unforgettably negative impression.
People always want you to respect them regardless of their status, especially someone who has a lower position or lesser power than you, such as your subordinates. The reason is if you could constantly respect others, regardless of whether they will treat you the same in return, it will benefit you in the long run.
As a result of your respectful behaviour, they would gradually be impressed by your politeness, friendliness and sincerity, which will enhance their trust in you, and you might be surprised to gain others’ support if you need it one day.
For example, I have always been able to secure another job quickly through my former colleagues’ recommendations due to my consistently respectful behaviour towards them during work. My ex-colleagues understood that I was not the kind of person who always talked bad about others or looked down on them.
Therefore, consistently showing respect to others in life will benefit you, although it might seem that you are weak without dignity.
Resilience: As life is uncertain, you must be able to bounce back, although you might fail many times. Since you need to continue to live daily life, you must continually cope with challenges that hinder your progress by staying resilient when experiencing setbacks.
To survive the crunch, you should not let the hindrances knock you down regardless of the number of times you encounter. By enduring each impediment, you would learn to become strong again to cope with more difficulties next time.
Bluntly, jobless, business failures, relationship issues, etc., are not unusual to everyone in their life. But should you give up totally or strategize how to revitalize yourself to tide over the difficulties will determine your fate.
In any disadvantageous situation, the challenge is changing it to the condition that will benefit you. For example, when you could not secure a new job for a long time during an economic downturn, or your businesses did not perform well and were on the brink of closing down. If you do not give up but continue finding ways to revitalize yourself, such as changing strategies, uplifting your capabilities, etc., you might survive eventually.
Curiosity: People must acknowledge that their skills and knowledge are seldom sufficient to be efficient and effective in their work.
Due to rapid technological development, there is a lot of helpful knowledge and advanced skills that you can acquire to uplift your business’s performance or improve your qualities sought after by employers.
In today’s competitive market, you ought to avoid complacent and stagnant in your expertise as others are constantly progressing to overtake you. To avoid being dispensable, you have to stay competitive by leveraging the latest knowledge and advanced skills.
The rationale is your expertise will become obsolete very soon due to innovation and technological breakthroughs. Therefore, it would be detrimental to you in the long run if you could not keep abreast of technological development to advance your competitiveness through lifelong learning.
Likewise, it is essential to be curious and keen to continue monitoring the trends and know or learn something paramount to reinvigorate your capabilities and be helpful to your future career pathway.
To summarize, the seven attitudes — self-awareness, optimism, patience, silence, respect, resilience and curiosity — have helped me to become more viable and happier in my life. Hence, I hope they will be helpful tips for young people to live more viably and happily in their life journey.
Thank you for reading, and your comments are welcome and appreciated!
