Watch cars come off the assembly line, and you will see the same functions and capabilities in model after model. That’s what they’re designed for, that’s how they’re made. We buy them with the expectation that each will do the same thing, and the individual differences between cars are insignificant or nonexistent.
People, however, are not products off an assembly line. Even when we emerge from the same time and place, with the same training and upbringing, our differences are present from the start and will be present forever.
Before you try to live up to someone else’s expectations, or reproduce someone else’s success, ask yourself whether that is what you were really made for.
Edward Burkhardt always wanted to work on the railroad. His first job as a teenager was working on the tracks doing maintenance. Later he was a brakeman, clerk, and machinist’s helper. After finishing college, he joined the front office of the Wabash Railroad. His college classmates told him he was nuts—people don’t get engineering degrees to work for a railroad, and the industry as a whole is dying.
After twenty years in the business, Edward put together a group to buy a regional railroad. The group bought the Wisconsin Central lines and began selling stock in the railroad in 1991. Even with many other railroad companies floundering, Wisconsin Central continued to produce a profit and saw its stock grow fifteenfold over the course of the decade. Despite the old-world imagery of the railroad industry, one of the biggest investors in Wisconsin Central is Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
For Edward, success in the railroads has been a wonderful ride. “Never be afraid to pursue your dreams. What else is there to pursue?”
Of people who feel they have failed to achieve success in their lives, 64 percent point to a specific standard set by others that they were unable to live up to.
Arnold 1995