Just sharing a story from my life

Recently, I got a call from a company where I interned in the summer during my high school days. I went to high school in a residential town (with a few high streets) and interned in a small accounting firm serving small and medium enterprises. The boss is not well; he was crossing a big road, but because he had bad legs, he couldn't finish the crossing before the traffic light changed, he slipped in the middle of crossing and a generous driver drove him to a nearby hospital. He needed an operation to walk properly and is still in recovery.

He used to be one of tough guys who was born in a small town (where most lived poor) and worked his ass off to get an accounting qualification and moved to a nice residential neighborhood and opened his practice. He was working as a receptionist at a local clinic until he qualified as an accountant. He ate badly (couldn't spell "sushi") and wore horrible clothes. He graduated from a university we don't know (I didn't at least) with an economics degree. He opened his practice late (late 30s), kept his head down, worked hard to get clients, charged less than everyone. Because he had quite a life, he liked to tell stories.

When I interned, he used to let me pick up a few more hours than he should (I was on a hourly wage) and took me to a lot of places. He used to caution me about the populist sentiment, nothing to do with politics. What he meant by populist was "being in the majority."

He said "the majority are not always wrong, but sometimes they get things horribly wrong," he used to say. "Life is hard and you need to have some discipline to get by. Otherwise, you would end up living poor, looking over your shoulders and worried about your old age."

"Good things in life take discipline. They are not given to you. If you are in the majority, you sometimes lose sight of what are really important and go with the flow. Especially this is difficult when you are young. You will get it some day, but you have to work hard, harder than you think you can, to get what you want in life."

I didn't get what he was saying at that time. When I was at high school and university, I stood by "everyone's right," "right for everyone," "healthcare for everyone," all the left wing values just like any average Joe and Mary on the American campus blindly do everyday. What my old boss was saying really started to sink in when our lives started to diverge after graduation, after getting into the real world.

When you are a student, by definition, you don't have anything, so you don't lose anything (you don't gain anything either though). And it's easy to advocate the "equality for all" positions. When you are a student, you don't think about retirement or when the next cheque comes in (or when next bills arrive). You can be as dumb as you would like. A good way of describing these majority of students (including your truly at that time) are "idealistic," a bad way they are "unsurprisingly cliché and stupid."

Once you go out in the real world, you realize that some work harder than others, some have bigger ambitions, everyone is not the same at all, they are distinctly different. Everyone carries with them their life philosophy. Some are happy to live on the state handout, some are content earning $75k a year, some are plainly horrible people who say one thing and do another and call that a survival.

I now have a little saving, not a vast amount enough to retire, but little. It took me a while to have that. I have a career that also took me a while to build and also has given me opportunities to work with people from all over the world. I also have friends, close friends who I can call. I also have an advanced degree which I had to earn while working full-time. I once lived so far from the city that the commute took me 95 mins (exactly) one way and 190 mins a day round trip because I couldn't afford living in the city.

Yes, I think the man was right. Life is hard, not as easy as you might think when you are campaigning on campus.