It goes with simple observation of what your parents and grandparents have repeatedly said growing up, each generation is different from the last. Our generation has been labeled as the one most capable of having a revolutionary impact on the world while at the same time being labeled as the ones who tend to be the laziest.

So, what is it? Are we self-entitled when it comes to earning success? Do we suffer from a lack of inspiration?

From my personal experience, times in which missed opportunities have occurred and failures have arisen, which can all be traced to an ugly and self-destructing habit I still find myself struggling with from time to time: hijacking your own personal advancement.

We are the greatest robbers to our success. It all starts with the appraisal of how satisfied we are with our lives. When the question comes up of what more we can do in terms of getting ahead and being who we want to be, and having what we want to have, most individuals will claim that they’re happy and ultimately satisfied at any given point in their lives. This is still the case even upon personal reflection in which we fantasize about having that larger, stronger shell that no one can break through.

And why is this? When one expresses the feeling of being content, they know that there is not as much of a demand to actually change. There are no challenges to break the habits that need to be changed, or acquiring the ones that take significant effort to employ for that matter.

We hijack ourselves from happiness by saying that we’re happy. We pull the emergency brake on any upcoming opportunity that detracts from the usual rhythms of our daily ritual.

This especially applies to students reading this. As adolescents, we are told to study hard, make it into college, and then study hard again so that we can work even harder in a cubicle.

As a result, we learn to not acknowledge any yearning to be successful in a more creative and innovative way that bears considerably more weight compared to the conventional ways of going about in pursuing the next phase of our life.

Finally, for the few individuals relevant to this piece that this next relic may apply to, we as humans like to punish ourselves. We often think that we do not deserve any particular piece of success. We let past letdowns swallow the best of us along with the realization of our own individual specialness. The slippery slope of the “emergency brake” mentality mentioned earlier also plays a role considering a repeatedly sedentary existence inevitably leads all of us to feel unaccomplished to the point that any offered initiative is turned down because it is human nature to believe that someone is better deserving of that once in a lifetime job interview, internship, or grad program.

With all things considered, (the rate of diseases, warfare, and bad genes, etc.) the chances of anybody being born at the time they were born are 1 in 400,000,000,000. Yes, that's one in four-hundred trillion. Thanks for the various ted talk videos, such a fact is scientifically proven and such a fact should influence you, my friend to end the never-ending cycle of self-destruction and hijack when it comes to success.