I can't stress how important it is to genuinely figure out your own personality & consistently work on building your moral character when you're young & before you go into any career path.

It should be a given conscious effort with presence of mind & paying attention to calculate & determine who you are as a person, who you wish to be, who you wish to surround yourself with, & what you're good at & enjoy doing.

I had a unique opportunity to go to college while still in high school & one of the first classes we had to take was "life skills for college students" & we had a very attentive & inspiring counselor teaching the course.

In it, she was teaching us how to discover our personalities, strengths & weaknesses, & goal planning & execution, which I neglected to practice until I hit my 20's.

I knew exactly who I was, what I believed in, & how I wished to tackle my future at 14.

But I didn't implement that until last year (almost a decade later) & it was a lot of time spent running around only to come back to what I already understood.

Because I thought it would be easy to just go about it & a lot of adults convinced me that I didn't need that wisdom.

What I didn't see until much later was how miserable *many* adults were because they hadn't affirmed their innate natures, solidified their characters, or truly aspired *to be good at who *they* were*, instead of worrying about what the world wanted or needed them to be.

It's tragic how many adults go into education, careers, relationships, humanitarian work, & community contributions without genuinely understanding themselves, because it's easy to say you know what you want & need in life without reconciling it with who you are as a person.

But then you find out (much later in life) that it isn't who you are at all & you can't turn back the clock to go back & save all that time you spent running on a hamster wheel in order to feel like your life is on track.

My own example: I was dead set on becoming a doctor since I was like 10. By the time I was 13, I was convinced that I wanted to become the best cardiothoracic surgeon in the world. So I excelled in school. I had the devout love & pride of my family. I was an on-track kid by 17.

I even managed to excel at my religious studies, be that cool & funny guy everyone loved, & still make time for my hobbies. One of which was design. I spent hours drawing up designs I hoped to implement in my life "when I get the time."

And then my mom threw them away.

I was "steering from [my] path." It was heartbreaking, but I was still convinced that I had to become a doctor.

Because I needed to make my family proud. I wanted to be financially stable. I believed in saving lives... It was a part of who I was, the man who saved others.

And then I had to go to the hospital more because I got sick... And then I realized how much I hated hospitals. And then I started watching the doctors... I had to do that for the rest of my life? But it had to be enough, because I gave so much of my time for that mission.

But I couldn't do it. So I tried business. I was good at that, too. And then I started to learn about capitalism & how global politics works. So I decided to try engineering next. I was good at that, too. I sucked at math, but I was great with technology.

And then I started to work for engineers... & my heart just dropped. I have not met a single engineer who actually enjoys their job. They love that week the paycheck comes in & they can go on vacation. But they come back to the job & you see their shoulders sink.

I stopped to going to school. I left whatever career path I was on. I was lost. So I spent the next 4-5 years searching, trying to find out what was wrong. Why didn't I find any real meaning or joy or even just a bit of peace in anything I tried?

Years spent trying to find myself again. Trying to survive, trying to be significant at *something*... And then *last year*, early 2017, I found it.

I was severely depressed, locked up in a room most of the time, binge-watching Netflix to passively go to work & go to sleep.

And then I got curious about a documentary. Abstract: The Art of Design. It was about the lives of 8 various designers & why they loved design.

I hated the beginning of the first episode. It was weird. But then the illustrator, Christoph Niemann, spoke about something.

It was about how terrifying the creative process is for him. It's boring, staring at blank pages, until things start coming to him slowly... A million ideas... And then he has to choose just a few & make them work. And then he's afraid that he's run out of ideas.

And then he's scared of the editor in him that's so critically harsh that he has to constantly re-start the process. But he keeps going. Episode after episode, it was like that. I hated it for a minute... & then something exploded & I was awake.

I was excited to get up for the first time in a long while. I started to learn about design again. I was *curious* again. I wanted to build something again. To solve a problem for people again. And the more I got back into it, the better I understood it, organically.

So I went back & did a personality test again with 16personalities. It didn't change (I keep it private). I revisited the religious teachings of what my character should be. I started to learn about science & art & psychology & business & technology & politics & economics again.

And within one year, I was able to construct myself again & it all came together beautifully.

Everything I am as a person, who I aspired to be, & how I wished to contribute that to life, it became singular.

And I could use that in everything I hoped to achieve.

I'd been doing it for years in my own way, but subconsciously &, often, with reserve & resentment. But now it was deliberate. Now it was purposeful & directed. Now I could take who I was & make it impactful in real life.

I'm still learning...

But once you grab a hold of your own soul like that, *no one* can take that away from you, as long as you believe in it. For as long as you believe in the validity of your own genuine existence, you don't require validation from anyone else.

You're more than just alive.

You do more than just survive & live or even thrive. You become a force of nature with presence.

It took my family & friends & colleagues a long time to get on board with that about me, but they not only got over it, they came to respect & adore it.

Because you become a person that people understand & trust as someone whose integrity is never up for compromise.

So, now, not only are you living as your own person, but any people who come across you can believe in you as yourself.

It becomes a win all around.

This is why it's vital to your life that you take the time & make the effort to see yourself with sincere reflection, gather *everything* about yourself without excuses, & lay that out to understand who you are & then decide the purpose you wish to encompass *as yourself*.

Start by paying attention to yourself, write down everything (your personality traits, character traits, ambitions, obstacles, education, career possibilities, values, *everything*), don't be afraid to erase them & start over, & lay it all out.

I've gone through at least a dozen notepads doing that for the last 5/6 years. But it become easier & faster once I figured out & confirmed my personality & built a knowledge of the skills & work I believed in committing to.

The key is: be honest with yourself. So, start there.

Just remember this significant fact: this is *your* life that you're committing to.

It's not going anywhere without you, because, well, it's *your* life. Become dedicated to making it & don't run from it.