Building Tower of Our Life


Seoul Tower, Charm of South Korea

Seoul Tower, Charm of South Korea

Having a sightseeing in a new tourism city by enjoying the beauty of its famous ‘tower’ is just amazing. Wandering around Paris then visiting its world-wide well-known Eiffel Tower, wondering Burj Khalifa of Dubai as the tallest building in the whole world, or even enjoying small ‘tower’ like Tugu Jogja (Jogja Monument). Each of them has its unique charm that keeps attracting people to visit them and bring back good memories afterward.

Just like those cities, our life also consist of many towers, yet they are intangible ones. We are on the top of out tower when we feel we’ve succeeded in our study, won a competition that we’ve been struggling really hard, holding strategic leadership position in our organization, etc. A time when others congratulate us, admire our hard work that bring us to that particular level.

Even though our ‘tower’ of success will be in different ‘height’, just like real towers in the real world, our tower is unique and have special meaning to some certain number of people. The height is somehow not really important, but the way to build it and what it is required to establish such tower is much more significant. Quite similar to the fact that not every country could construct Burj Khalifa, not everybody can be the best football player like Messi or the magnificent Warrior like Salahudin Al-Ayubi (Saladin); however, most cities in every country has their own ‘tower’ that fascinates visitors. That is us, we do not have to be as famous as Barack Obama or as smart as Albert Einstein, we still have our right to build our own tower, that dignifies our being makes our surrounding be happy with us.

The Finished Work is What People See

People normally do not come to visit the tower in the making, they mostly only come to the well-finished and famous ones. It is a fact. Since they only see the ending, many of them do not really wonder about the process required to establish such marvel. Our ‘tower of success’ is also similar, people will congratulate us only when we reach the top of our achievement, and only a few who really know how hard we’ve been working to struggle reaching the top.

Building Process is Always Hard

During the process of establishing our ‘tower of success,’ there will be much more hardships than good stuffs. At the beginning, other people will not really care if we’re building some great tower. Many will assume that we’re just normal house or some might mistakenly consider us building wrong properties in the wrong place.  Therefore, during this process, if we get mocked by some passer-byes we need to admit the high probability of such occurrence and not let it ruin our motivation to continue stacking bricks for our great master-piece.  Let say, when we start moving to new country trying to establish great achievement up there, the occurrence of many people assuming us as a normal useless fool guy, underestimating our skills, or even looking down at our future, is just normal. We need to understand their state of being senior in that country, but (the important part), do not let them devastate our dream of establishing our ‘success tower.’

On the middle of the process, we might lose our confident, be disoriented from our goal, or even be jealous of other people’s success in creating their tower. It’s a normal phase, but we cannot too long be in that position. We are trying to build our own tower, we don’t have to create a resemblance of of other’s tower.  When we’re down loosing hope, let’s think back about our tower that we built last time, the hard steps during the process, etc. We’ve passed this step last time(s) so there’s a very high possibility that we will pass it again. Let’s read our motivating books, watching inspiring videos/clip/movies, or even by simply thinking about our family and our effort to make them proud of us.

Once we reach around 75% of our tower, somehow there could be a feeling of settled down, feeling of early-satisfaction that blows wind of ‘stop moving’ to our head. There could a thought, “Ah.. this is good enough, stopping here and finishing it till the end would not be much different.” DON’T LISTEN TO IT. Keep moving up, continue our putting bricks-after-bricks to construct our tower. As I posted before, good is the enemy of great. If we want to reach great things, then we should not be easily satisfied with good accomplishments.

Some Weird Ending Might Be Good

I guess almost everybody well aware about Pisa Tower in Italy. It was originally designed to be a ‘normal’ straight tower, then due to some unplanned environment, it’s tilted a few degree. Some might say that such thing is a failure. However, it turns out that what they expected are totally wrong. Rather than seeing it as weakness, people consider it as the Pisa’s unique charm, and therefore vast number of people visit it.

Our ‘tower of success’ could be the same. We were planning something that we thought would be best for us, but then the result is somehow not really well (at least in our opinion). If it’s proceeded with hard works and perseverance, we don’t need to be worried to much about it. Let’s believe it’s the best thing for us, for this very moment. Let’s think positively. There should be reason for such occurrence. Everything happens to us for reason, and in most cases we are not smart and patient enough to see the final result which takes long period of time to show up, and often provides us with unpleasant results on the way to get there.

Good Ending, Great Process

In the previous part I said that people only look at the result of our ‘tower of success.’ That is true for attracting people to admire our tower at first few glance. After that, they might ask some sensitive questions related to our way to success. That’s when the real things going on: they’re checking our process of achieving the goal. Great result with be much more admired if it’s achieved by great process; while great result might turn into trash if it’s come out dishonor process. The sad fact is that great process that produce relatively ‘bad result’ normally do not attract much attention. Therefore, in building our ‘tree of success’ we need to make sure that we are using the right method.

Reaching High, Stay Low

Most importantly, once we finished everything, the time when we’re on the top of our success, if we do not behave carefully we could fall really painfully. Even though we’ve reached the top, the feeling of ‘humble’ is ultimately still required. We might feel happy and praise our self for such accomplishment, but doing it excessively will cause other malicious results. If we’re too proud and look down to other people after our we reach our achievement, people might disrespect us and no longer consider our success as good things.

If we stay low, not only do others will still get along quite well with us, there is also possibility that more successful man is present on that gathering and testing you. If we stay humble to him, it might bring opportunity to our side so we can learn from him, so that we can build even ‘higher tower of success’ in our life.

Category : PERSONAL Development
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