How having a crush in high school led me to personal development?
By: Omar Hamdy
Tags: Books, First Post, Reading, Writing, Personal Development

The Story

8 years ago, my crush in high school enjoyed reading books, mainly fictional novels. I was never a person who would read a “book”, I was more of “watch the movie” or “skim article” type of a content consumer. I never had the commitment to sit down, read a chapter, or consistently return to a book to finish it. However, having a crush inspired me buy a book and read it only to have “reading books” as a “common interest”. (p.s. Oh boy, the amount of roasting I will get from this.. sigh.. #sad_teen_archives)

I knew I needed to pick up a book that was extremely engaging, otherwise I wouldn’t finish it and hence won’t have the “reading books” badge on me. After couple of hours researching online, I settled on “The Maze Runner” by James Dashner. It was a great young adult dystopian science fiction novel that I couldn’t put down until I finished it. I was consumed emotionally by it, even when I wasn’t reading it, I was always thinking about it. I would think about the characters, how they would feel being in the situations they were in, how would I feel or react if I find myself in such situations. Even after finishing the novel, I was mentally drained by it for almost a month!

Later on, I read 2 more very engaging and almost equally entertaining but different novels, one of which was “Divergent” by Veronica Roth and the other was “The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green, before I decided to stop reading fictional genre. Other than the obvious reason that my attempt to attract my crush has been miserably futile, I didn’t like the after-feeling that lingered after finishing those novels. It almost felt like a hangover (even though I don’t really know what a hangover feels like) from being in fictional land too long, and it took me time to recalibrate my feelings that were all over the place. Maybe that’s what makes them great, but I didn’t enjoy that.

The Transformation

Though I stopped reading fictional novels, I grew to appreciate the value of reading for my own personal growth. I started exploring different genres, and found myself gravitating towards self-help genre. I read “The Compound Effect”, “Switch”, “The 5 essential people skills”, “The Subtle Art of not giving a F*ck” and most recently “Algorithms to live by”. A common theme across non-cliché, credible, research-backed, self-help books is the idea that there is no hack to success or solving problems. You basically must put in the work, you have to be disciplined about it to allow the consistency to yield positive results. It all starts will doing some hardcore soul searching as to what you want to do/be in life then set small achievable goals to get you there over time. You would think you know that, but it is not until you actually read it, that it becomes so clear to you. Using that general-theme awareness, I stepped outside my comfort zone over the past 5–7 years, tried new cool things, took on new challenges where I succeeded in some and failed in others and learned a lot along the way.

Lesson Learned

One of my mentors once taught me that whenever reflecting on/documenting a lesson learned, I should use “I” instead of “you/third person”. For example, “I learned that I need to be more empathetic towards others” instead of “I learned that you need to be more empathetic towards others”). It acts as a positive reinforcement to your… sorry.. my… own learnings and makes it that much more personal and impactful. So here it goes;

I may decide to change my behavior and even my character purely driven by meeting someone new or taking on a new role, but I need to always ask myself the following questions when that happens and better yet, before it happens;

1- What elements am I changing in myself?

2- Am I changing for the better or for the worse?

3- If that person stops being in my circle/I stop being in a particular role, will I still want/not want to do the thing I picked up? Why?

4- What other possibilities were now introduced because of that encounter? How can I explore them?

Lastly

This is my first ever blog post, I have no benchmark whatsoever to judge how good it is, so if you are a writer and have some feedback, I would appreciate that. Who knows, I may end up becoming a blogger/writer one day, and write about “how a writer helped me become a writer”.