At 30, I finally understood why I had achieved so little

I am a complete failure.

On my way to buy coffee this morning, I suddenly realised that I am already in my thirties, yet I do not seem to have truly succeeded at anything.

Most of the time, an idea briefly flashes through my mind. Then I either lose interest after a few days, give up halfway through, or never begin at all.

Eventually, it simply disappears.

Why am I like this?

Not long ago, I came across a post on RedNote that said:

“At twenty-five, when everyone around me seems to be handing in their papers, I am still too afraid to pick up my pen as an INFJ.”

That was exactly me.

Except the person who wrote the post was twenty-five, while I had wasted seven more years and was still afraid to act.

At the heart of it, I cared too much about pride, appearances and what other people might think.

Successful people do not simply have clear and specific goals.

They also have the courage to let go of unnecessary pride.

To reach their goals, they quickly identify the skills they lack, the resources they need and the support they must find. Then they immediately go looking for them.

They are not afraid of rejection or ridicule. Like an AI without emotions, they move towards the most effective solution with complete focus.

One of my bosses is exactly this kind of person.

He is an energetic entrepreneur. Whenever I listen to him speak, I cannot help feeling inspired to push myself a little harder.

His thinking is flexible, completely different from my old stereotype of white people as rigid and straightforward. Sometimes, he is so flexible in business negotiations and social situations that I even begin to wonder whether he is being slightly unreliable.

Yet somehow, he always manages to attract the opportunities he wants and fulfil the promises he has made—or perhaps the grand claims he has confidently thrown into the world.

When his media company was first being established, it urgently needed experienced journalists.

So he brought in a former senior ABC presenter with more than thirty years of experience, someone widely recognised in the local community.

The company has never lacked local business opportunities, but when it comes to finding partnerships or investment, he never waits passively.

From plumbers to universities, government departments and peak industry bodies, whenever he wants to expand into a particular field, he directly approaches the person with the authority to make decisions.

It does not matter whether they know him or whether they have ever spoken before.

It does not matter whether they respond politely, dismiss him, or think his message has appeared out of nowhere.

If there is a potential opportunity, he reaches out without hesitation.

He does not waste energy overthinking it.

When I suggest a new content idea he may never have encountered before, he encourages me to try it, even when he does not fully understand what I am describing.

More often than not, I am the one who refuses to move forward because I am afraid the outcome will not be good enough.

I behave the same way when applying for jobs.

Before I have even updated my résumé, I have already begun imagining everything that could go wrong.

What if they reject me?

What if I stumble over my English?

What if I arrive at the interview and they realise I know nothing?

Will they wonder why someone so unqualified even dared to apply?

The most likely outcome is that I tell myself to forget it and never submit the application.

I realised that I am not incapable of doing these things.

I am simply so afraid of failure that I often refuse to try.

So I have started training myself to behave more like an AI.

Once I give myself a clear instruction, I act.

Before fear, embarrassment and shame have time to take over my mind, I begin immediately and try to build momentum through action.

I want my rational mind to take control before my emotional mind has the chance to spread its negativity.

Thinking about how easily emotions occupy my mind reminded me of another reason I often fail to act:

I enjoy succeeding in my imagination so much that I forget to do the work.

From a young age, I knew that I had an active imagination, a strong sense of creativity and a sensitivity to the world around me.

New ideas frequently appear in my mind. Quite often, reality later proves that if those ideas had been followed properly, they may indeed have worked.

I was also reasonably clever at school and became used to achieving decent results through last-minute effort.

At university, for example, I sometimes barely listened during an entire semester. Then, in the week before the final exam, I would study day and night, although in truth, much of it was closer to learning the material for the first time than revising it.

Even so, I usually scored above 80, and in some semesters, I ranked among the top three students in my class.

Over time, this gave me an inaccurate understanding of my own ability.

Whenever I thought of something I might do or a goal I might achieve, I would quickly create a rough plan in my head.

Then I would skip straight to imagining the moment of success.

I pictured the champagne before I had done any of the work.

Dopamine and endorphins rushed through my body as though the imagined success were real.

A strange confidence appeared inside me. I felt certain that as long as I tried, I would achieve exactly what I had imagined.

Then I began enjoying the illusion of what life would feel like after succeeding.

The actual work had already been forgotten.

One idea after another died inside the fantasy of its own success.

I remember discovering RedNote before many people were using it.

I thought it was an interesting platform and decided that I should create an account.

Immediately, I started planning everything in my head.

During the first year, I would visit almost every local restaurant in Canberra. I would also introduce places loved by locals but still relatively unknown within the Chinese community.

That information gap would allow me to create distinctive content.

Every photo would be beautifully arranged. Even if no one read my posts after a year, I would still have created a polished food magazine for myself.

The thought alone gave me an enormous sense of achievement.

You can probably guess what happened to the account a year later.

It still existed only in the mind I had imagined it in a year earlier.

I had done nothing.

Just like all the times I said I would lose weight, the beginning was always scheduled for tomorrow.

After enough time passes, you often discover that someone else had a similar idea, acted on it and genuinely harvested the results.

Meanwhile, you are still standing in the same place.

About a year after imagining my RedNote account, I came across a creator in Shanghai sharing how he had built his platform.

He focused entirely on exhibition venues in Shanghai. After some time, almost every search for Shanghai exhibitions brought up one of his posts.

I envied the results he had created and blamed myself for procrastinating.

Then I made the mistake of treating what someone else had gained as though it were something I had personally lost.

That only dragged me into another cycle of emotional exhaustion.

But what meaningful achievement happens overnight?

People love the pleasure of success, yet often ignore the time and effort behind it.

Almost no one achieves something extraordinary on the first attempt.

Successful creators do not post once and remain permanently at the top.

And without producing anything myself, I cannot understand how much practice is required simply to turn the crowded information inside my head into clear and coherent writing.

Finding a personal writing style, identifying the right form of content and creating words and images that people want to share all require climbing one invisible step after another.

No matter how good an idea may be, it can never become real without action.

So how do I change?

The same answer again: act immediately.

Before the lazy part of my brain has time to respond, I need to begin.

I should stop thinking about everything else.

Even completing one small part is still progress.

Nothing begins as a complete and perfect system. Everyone builds through repetition, one day after another.

This morning, while walking to buy coffee, I suddenly realised all of this and thought it might become an article.

In the past, my lazy brain would immediately have said, “This is an interesting topic. Save it in your notes and write it when you have time.”

Then the article would inevitably disappear like all the others.

Today, I forced myself to think differently.

Since the idea had appeared, I began writing down everything I could think of immediately.

Alongside taking action, another ability I have neglected for years is reflection.

As I mentioned earlier, I believe I am perceptive and quick to understand things.

But this also means that my thoughts easily scatter in different directions. I have many ideas, yet they often remain fragmented and fail to settle into anything lasting.

Since I was young, I have felt as though I possessed a small superpower:

I learn new things quickly.

When I began learning calligraphy in primary school, I first studied handwriting with a fountain pen.

During class, I often found myself watching the student behind me, who was learning the Ouyang Xun style of regular script.

Whenever the teacher explained brush strokes and structure to him, I would secretly turn around and listen.

Later, when I finally began using a traditional brush, I could already control it reasonably well. My horizontal, vertical, left-falling and right-falling strokes looked surprisingly convincing.

The teacher even said that I did not look like a beginner.

The same thing happened when I studied new concepts.

I could often understand them quickly, and after class, I was sometimes able to explain them to classmates who were still confused.

But eventually, I began to realise that the ability to learn quickly only helps with the beginning.

Anyone can begin.

Some people reach the starting point faster, while others take longer.

The real difference is created during the long journey between beginner and expert.

That journey requires constant practice, repeated mistakes and careful reflection.

Only then can someone cross all the invisible thresholds along the way.

I, however, almost always stop at the point where I feel I understand something “well enough”.

This so-called superpower has given me a brief feeling of superiority, but it has never taken me very far.

Understanding calligraphy quickly does not make me a calligrapher.

Absorbing knowledge quickly does not mean I can achieve results without effort.

Any small advantage I have at the beginning is soon matched and surpassed by people who continue practising.

The most important thing I have always been too lazy to do is review my experiences and learn from them.

Because of that, I often feel that I am wasting my own sensitivity and instinct.

If I had used the time I saved by learning quickly to practise more;

if I had reflected after every attempt and asked what could be improved;

if I had continued beyond the beginning and gone deeper into the work,

perhaps fewer things would have quietly disappeared from my life.

So now, I am trying to change.

I no longer demand perfection at the beginning. I write first.

I no longer fear whether the result will be a success or a failure, because either way, I will gain something from the experience.

As I reached the end of this article, I thought again about the RedNote post I mentioned at the beginning.

While reading the comments, I found one that made my day.

I want to give it to you as well:

“You have to believe that the moment you begin writing, you will already receive a perfect score, because you are an INFJ.”