How long does it take to truly know who you are?
When you define yourself what do you think about first?
What do you spend your time doing?
If you’ve ever had to spend your time doing ice breakers, then you are familiar with the question, “How would you describe yourself?” While in ice breakers, this is simple and you can explain all of the activities you are involved in, in practicality it’s more complicated.
Who you are is more than just what you do of course, you’re a collection of experiences and an entire life before the moment this question is asked. Yet what you spend your time doing now shapes the person that you will become in the future.
While this shouldn’t mean that you need to pick one thing you think will define you well for the person you want to be and hold only to that for the rest of your life, it should make you think and focus on what will build the ‘you’ you want to be.
If you can think back to when they told us to pick heroes when we were in middle school and picture that person in your mind what do you think that they were spending their time doing at your age? Do you think that they were always on the path to where they are now or do you think it was a drawn out process to get there?
While you may assume that successful people always knew where they were going, this is most often not the case. You build the success that you get from working extremely hard, but you also build that success by relating to the people that are in the world around you.
Sitting in your room and studying at all hours of the day may seem like the solution to building a successful lifestyle, but if that’s all you do, you will never build any personality outside of that room. Who you are will be trapped inside of that space forever, until you decide to go outside of your box and learn who you are in a new environment.
Similarly if you spend all of your free time partying you will become fully immersed in that environment. Not that it’s bad to have fun in college and experiment, but it’s also not a full life.
There is a whole world outside of studying and going to parties, and there is so much more to life than going to college and what school can offer you. You can build who you are in so many sanctions of the world; don’t restrict yourself to just one thing or the other. Let yourself learn to be comfortable in all environments.