In our path to find the best version of ourselves, it is really common to bump into one of the strongest and worst mistakes of our lives: Entitlement!
This is something that pretty much every person in the world has experienced at least one time in their lives but it is getting more obvious and easy to spot now with the new generations: the millennials.
What is entitlement?
By definition, entitlement is the fact of having a right to something. Beyond any definition, the sense of entitlement is the feeling of deserving something from someone or from something only for the simple fact of existing or belonging to certain groups in a social, financial, ethnical or even geographical way.
Our parents are quite responsible for that when they used to tell us that we were special and that we were meant to do great things and that we deserve much better without really justify why.
It happens all the time, especially on people who decided to follow the traditional work path; they work really hard from 9 to 5 during 5 days a week and sometimes with extra hours to make someone else rich and at some point, they feel like they deserve something for that. Well, folks! It was your decision to work on making the dreams of others come true instead of working on your own dreams; it was your decision to become a paid slave instead of using the same time and energy on creating your own empire. And despite if you have worked in the same position for 10 years, if you have a Ph.D. or if you are the best friend of Donald Trump; the only absolute truth is that no one owes you a dime.
You Get What You Deserve
In this life, if you don’t fight for what you want, you get what you deserve.
We all have 24 hours a day and if you decide to use half of them to work in a shitty job for someone else and the other half to watch TV and party, then you will get what you deserve: the celebration of a Friday coming every week, a paycheck that will never look enough for you, a deep sense of “I deserve something better” and a jubilation that will make you laugh when you get it at your 60s.
When I graduated from Industrial and Systems Engineering, I wanted everyone to call me Engineer. Later when I made an MBA I was wondering if people actually call you master. When I created my first online business I printed business cards with the title CEO on them behind my name.
It’s crazy how we link our identity to nonsense things. In the end, no one cares… I am not the first nor the last engineer; definitely not the first nor the last guy with a master and even when creating a business is something that not everyone is doing I am not the CEO of Facebook or Amazon. Not yet at least!
Now, everywhere I go and everything I do I put my self only with my name: E. Christian Trejo
This is who I am. I’m not a degree, I’m not a position, I’m Erick Christian Trejo the only one and the original and my value is based on what I provide to the world.
No one owes me a dime because I am capable to get what I want by working and investing my time and energy on it. And the same is with you and with everyone else.
You can get all that you want if you help enough people to get what they want and getting paid for that help. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your company or your boss or your family or your partner or that the universe owes you something only because you have spent time and energy doing something for them.
In the best scenario, you will get a big thank you, maybe a hug, that’s it. But if you expect your dreams to become fulfilled because someone owes you something you better wait seated.
You Are Not Special, Not YET
New generations are facing this problem in a big magnitude now because when they graduate and apply for a job, they realize that no one is giving them a special treatment or a special salary or a higher position. They all have to start from scratch as everyone else does; except that everyone else wasn’t told by their parents that they were special without reason.
Of course, your parents love you and you are special for them but you are not special for the rest of the world; you have to work on your own goals to achieve that right. Or you can work for someone else and help them to be “special” in this world.
In order to help you Unleashing your Best-Self, I suggest you learn the art of detaching yourself from any sort of entitlement or expectations that involve others to give you back what you gave them once.
Experience Is Overrated, Learn Something New
Understand that you are the only one responsible for your own reality. Every thought, every belief, every word coming out of your mouth, every action being taken along your life has defined and will define your reality and your life experience.
That life experience is only true for you because you decided a long time ago to think, live and act in the way you have been doing it. And because of that, you have been attracting more and more similar situations that reinforce the idea that your experience is an absolute truth; with that reinforcement, you make your beliefs stronger. You are living in a vicious cycle. But it’s not because life is in the way you think it is; it is because you believe life is in one way, that you experience it in the same way as a reality.
If you would decide to change your thoughts, your beliefs and your actions; you would start having a different experience that has nothing to do with the previous one.
We choose when things get worse or get better; we decide when things change if we really want them to change. People use to say: “I must see to believe”; when in fact, the right way is “I must believe to see, to have and to experience”.
Define who you are and what you get; not by a fake sense of entitlement, but because of what you believe and create in this world.
