Find Your Crowd

The second greatest discovery you can make in life, next to discovering who you really are, is finding where you belong. I prefer to call it finding your crowd. When you've figured out your personality, motivations and aspirations, you will have a much easier life and a happy one if you plant yourself in the right environment. If you surround yourself with people who will water you and motivate you to live the life you dream of. Finding my crowd has been of immense help to me, especially in making me optimistic and consistent.

image: hongkiat.com

Back in 2008, when I wanted to write CCNA certification exam I immersed myself in an online community of people wanting to pass the CCNA exam. I planted myself in a surrounding that made passing the CCNA exam a normal thing. I learned just as much from the online community as I did from the study guide I used. They gave me the motivation to read hard, as everyone read hard and it was just the normal thing to do. They gave me the motivation to schedule an exam date long before I was done studying, again, because most people did it that way and they were able to overcome their fear of failure as it meant no turning back. They even made scoring a very high mark fairly easy to do, as I kept seeing feedback of people who scored 1000/1000 and above 950/1000. In the end, and without thinking I was doing anything unusual, I read and practiced for 8 hours a day and within three weeks I wrote my CCNA exam and passed with a high score of 962/1000. That's how powerful being in the midst of the right people can be. It even encouraged me to write Oracle's OCA 10g certification exam and pass with a perfect score. And inspired others around me to do CCNA. Two of them now have CCNP.

In 2004, I was a very good Christian. I'm still a Christian and like to consider myself still a good one but I am not a quarter as good as I was then. I surrounded myself with so many christian literature. I read all the ones I could buy and borrow. And even read the ones written over 50 years ago; 500 page brown paper books written on holiness. Then I came across stories of people reading the bible cover to cover in a year or less. I decided to do so too. I would read many pages of the bible daily. I once read the entire book of Job at a sitting, and still read other passages that day. In eight months I had read the bible cover to cover and felt like I could have done it in less time. The next cover to cover reading took me over two years. I didn't have the communal push I got while I did the first one.

Today, I don't feel like I am doing anything beyond average by writing daily. I can give you a long list of people who write daily. I surrounded myself with people who write daily and made me feel like it's a very normal and easy thing to do. The truth is I feel like I am not doing enough. My role model is George Bernard Shaw and he wrote over 250,000 articles. That's the equivalent of writing 3 articles a day for more than 200 years. So I have never woken up and felt like I was doing anything extra-ordinary by writing daily.

In your journey to achieving your personal goals the easiest way to go about it is to find a crowd heading the way you want to go. No one runs a marathon alone. This year, find your crowd. And make taking big steps toward your goals look normal.