Last week, in the middle of a conversation, my husband Sam turned to me and said, “If anyone overheard us talking right now, they’d think we were delusional.”
It wouldn’t be the first time either he or I would be accused of that.
I grew up in India in a frugal and conservative middle-class household. We bought our first car—a second-hand Maruti 800—when I was fourteen years old. I’d only ever sat in a car twice before then. I shared a bedroom with my grandmother until I was twenty-one. I wasn’t allowed to talk to boys, let alone date them, and when my parents found out that I, at age twenty-four, had been dating a guy for about four years, they assumed that I would marry him. (I didn’t.)
The path that was set out for me was clear: I was going to be a top student and get a decent education, then I was going to get married, and then I’d do whatever the heck my parents-in-law deemed right for me.
Except, I never could get on board with that.
Instead, I vehemently refused to learn how to cook, because in India, a woman who can’t cook is basically useless as a marriage prospect. That problem solved, I started dating, not just outside of my religion, but outside of my nationality. I shunned religion entirely. And I started giving voice to my dreams—of travel, of writing, of wanting more, even if I couldn’t define what that “more” was yet.
They told me I was delusional. That I’d end up bitter and unhappy as I sat on a pile of my shattered dreams.
Sometimes I believed them—like when I shut down an online business I started in 2001 and made profitable within the year—but mostly I just did my own thing.
I became a freelancer in India in 2001 when no one knew what the word “freelance” even meant. This, after turning down, at age twenty, the offer to become an editor of a national magazine within the year if I stuck around. I traveled around India at first, further afield later. I met amazing people who were doing incredible things and my delusions only multiplied.
If you’d told the 13-year-old me that by the time I’d turned thirty, I would have written for over 200 publications, including The New York Times and TIME, traveled to a dozen countries, and found the love of my life, a beautiful and gifted man (who cooks no less), even I would have called you delusional. But here I am, living that life, and while it’s by no means perfect, it is indeed, nothing like the life anyone could have predicted for someone like me.
And if my delusions from when I was fifteen years old can come true when I’m thirty-three, why can’t my delusions of today come true when I’m fifty?
Why can’t yours?
As Bill Gates once said, “We overestimate what we can accomplish in two years, but we underestimate what we can accomplish in 10.”
He was talking about polio eradication, but the principle applies to everything in life. Including your writing career. And mine.
Two months ago, I got offered a $92,000 a year job working from home. It was pure and simple content marketing, the work was fun and challenging with potential for learning about business, and my employers told me that as long as I got my work done, I was free to continue working on The International Freelancer, any books I was writing, even my freelancing. It was win-win-win. I accepted.
About a month ago, I thanked them for the opportunity and quit.
Delusion had struck again.
The job wasn’t the right fit for me, but I realized quickly that no job was ever going to feel like the right fit for me, no matter how flexible it was or how well it paid. Like with the magazine editor job that I walked away from when I was twenty, I believed that I was capable of more. That even if it took two years or five or ten, I could multiply those numbers a lot quicker working for myself and building my own business than I could working for someone else and building theirs.
I was talking to Sam about my (pretty ambitious) income projections for the next five years that evening. Hence his comment about our collective delusion.
If I told most people about our dreams, and especially our belief in ourselves, they’d roll their eyes and remind us that we’re still massively behind where people of our age should be. That we’re still in debt. My father, on the other hand, simply says, “Of course. You two are destined for greatness. Why do you constantly doubt this?”
My father knows quite a bit about delusions and bringing them to fruition. Growing up in the slums of East Delhi, studying at night under a lamp post because electricity hasn’t yet come to your neighborhood, and believing, despite all odds, that you will succeed is not easy, but he did it. His is the biggest, bravest, most amazing success story I know.
And what he taught me is that there are three steps to any goal:
1. Delusion
2. Learning
3. Taking action
I can’t help you with the delusion. I can tell you stories and provide inspiration and hopefully, like my parents did with me, guide you towards a place where you learn to accept your delusions as a part of your future reality, no matter what anyone else says.
I can’t help you with the action either. In the end, you are the only one who can choose whether to put something into practice or not. No one can do it for you. It’s up to you.
But that bit in the middle? The learning? That’s where you’re in luck. Because not only can I help you, but so can hundreds of other people all waiting for you to take that first step. They’re all out there, counting on you to pick up their books, register for their courses, and join their communities so they can share what they’ve learned and steer you towards success.
You might think it was luck or chance that I got offered that $92,000 a year content marketing job but it wasn’t. It was preparation. I was perfectly prepared for the opportunity when it arose because every single day for the last year, I have spent two hours learning about online business or content marketing or technology that will aid in those two things.
I haven’t watched television in over a year now. Instead, every night, when my son is in bed and my husband is off working a night shift, I study. I’ve joined membership sites, I’ve taken online courses, I’ve listened to podcasts, and I’ve read almost a hundred books so far this year, mostly non-fiction. As a result, I’ve massively increased my productivity, expanded my knowledge about the industry, and learned how to do things I previously didn’t know even existed.
It’s this learning that enabled me to not just land that job, but to walk away from it with confidence knowing that I can make more on my own by doing content marketing as a freelancer and with my own business. Maybe not this year, maybe not even next, but five years from now, I know I’ll be better off—financially and otherwise—having invested in my own potential and growth over someone else’s.
Believe in yourself. Trust that you can do whatever it is that you choose to do with your life.
Learn everything you can so that when opportunities present themselves, you’re perfectly positioned to take advantage of them.
And most importantly, put that learning into action.
It’s not easy, but it is simple.
If I could do it, so can you.