My father divorced my mother and never teached me something useful in life. I’ve been having suicidal thoughts because my ex teachers and my ex classmates succeded in life and I didn’t. My father only supported me with food,clothes and a laptop. I’ve grown sick of him and his stupidity. How can you reach potential from a situation which is hopeless and shitty? My mother can’t support me for long and I have a paper that says I have a handicap. I’m in an engineering college but I have no materials to build things. Does that mean I have to quit college and get a job? I have learnt some things in school and highschool which are completely useless and after I graduated from both I didn’t understand nothing from life. I didn’t apply anything from school and highschool because my father wouldn’t let me. Is that how life works? By getting grades and pretend that everything is perfect?
Comparing your life to others, especially those you don’t know well, is a bad idea. You don’t know what they had to do to be successful, nor how solid and lasting their success really is.
Well, then, you still have a lot to learn. Join the club.
I’m sorry you don’t have a good father. But that needn’t be an insurmountable obstacle: lots of people with bad or absent fathers have gone on to have happy, successful lives.
And once you’re an adult, “my father wouldn’t let me” should no longer carry any weight.
I thought a few years back you decided you were done with engineering, and were looking for jobs…did you revert to trying to finish out engineering, instead of joining a ship’s crew?
Do you have access to a support line that you can call to help you in addressing these issues? Have you reached out to anyone who can help?
Success is relative. Don’t compare yourself to others and use their accomplishments as some kind of yardstick to determine your own success.
Why? Because you don’t know their situation and what it took (or didn’t) for them to get there. Someone may have started on third base, so to speak. Or they may have made sacrifices that you don’t know about. Or they may have been extraordinarily lucky. Or they may be smart, made the right decisions, worked hard, been lucky, and still only be making 50k a year, because they grew up in grinding poverty.
Personally, I’d call that last person extremely successful even if they’re not rich. They did the absolute best with the hand they were dealt.
I struggle with this sometimes. Among my high school and college peers, I have some pretty high powered people and it’s hard not to compare myself to them. But there’s no profit there- if you’re gauging your success by others’ achievements, you’re always going to fall short, because there will always be someone faster, smarter, better, more hard working, luckier, etc…
So the trick is to gauge your own success by setting meaningful goals for yourself, and then seeing how you play the cards you were dealt to achieve those goals. And recognizing that success for yourself in a way that’s meaningful to yourself.
Look at it this way- if you are injured and can’t walk, working to the point of being able to take a single step is monumental success and something you should be intensely proud of. Judging yourself as unsuccessful because you just took one step while everyone else can walk around just fine is missing the point entirely. But that’s what people do, day in and day out, when they judge themselves by others’ achievements.