By many measures I'm a pretty successful person. I've already written an introductory post, but I want to elaborate on my background a bit. Someone might find this perspective helpful, and some may make some changes to their life because of it. Even though financially, I'm not 'successful', as you'll see even that was due to choices that I've made to maximize success in other areas of my life. I attribute all of the following talents and skills to a firm upbringing and good parenting, but most importantly to being homeschooled.
What Success?
No, I'm not rich. Far from it. But I'm not in debt either. I read an article the other day that said that ~50% of Americans wouldn't be able to afford a $400 emergency purchase like a car repair or emergency room visit. "So I must be richer than 50% of the population then?" I surmised. But far from being rich, I'm pretty broke. So what could I possibly mean by success? Well, I'm very 'talented'. I am a musician, and I'm good enough to play gigs and get paid for it. I speak Japanese, Spanish and (used to speak) Mandarin. All self taught. I recently taught myself Spanish in less than a year. I read articles in Spanish, listen to podcasts in Spanish and converse in Spanish with no issue. I taught myself how to read and write Japanese in 1 year, and Mandarin in 6 months. Although I no longer speak Mandarin, I can still read and write it, and I plan to pick it back up soon in the future.
I'm also an accomplished programmer, having earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and made a living as an employee for a software engineering firm for 5 years. About 2 years ago I quit that job after feeling burnt out by the whole 9-5, gym, rinse and repeat cycle that my life had become. I thought to myself, "There's gotta be more to life than this, right?" I was right, there was. So I moved to a Spanish speaking country without knowing a word of Spanish, and less than a year later I was conversing and understanding the locals. I consider all of this to be 'success'. To me success isn't how much money you earn or how big your house is, because you could lose your money tomorrow and your house could taken away by fire, flood or any other such thing. Success is who you are and what you build yourself to be.
A Little About My Past
And I've built myself to be someone with many talents. How did I do that? I attribute this success to the glorious upbringing I had as child. My parents homeschooled me from K-12. I never set foot in an public/private scholastic institution unless I was taking the grade tests that all children must take. I took a 4th grade and 7th grade test, as well as the PSATs and the SATs. In every test I took I outperformed my peers by a wide margin. 95th percentile was a common phrase for me to hear. But it wasn't that I was smarter than them or better. No I consider myself to be quite average in most respects. Average height, average build, average intelligence. But what my parents taught me to do with it is where the difference lies.
Hard work is only hard if you're not having fun. Getting up in the morning to be taught by my father before he went to work, only to be taught by my mother after she came home, and before she went to sleep gave me much needed time with my parents. Time to develop in peace without the stressors of peer-pressure, fitting in or bullying. I had no knowledge of drugs, sex or alcohol until I reached my teen years. And for that alone I'm eternally grateful. I was able to develop in a cocoon of safety, away from the negative influences that so often stifle a child before they are ready to deal with them. My father taught me math and language arts. He was a stickler too. Through that struggle I learned discipline, and I learned to love learning. Information became like a drug. By the time I was 10 years old I was teaching myself Japanese. Of course, being ten I had a long way to go before I knew how to learn, but by the time I was 15 I was ready for Mandarin and I mastered the reading and writing portion of the language in 6 months.
For reference, Japanese has 2000+ characters (1945 at that time) that you have to memorize, Mandarin has at least 3000. Not just the shape and stroke order, but the meaning and the individual pronunciations that are associated with that character. Japanese characters usually have at least 2 pronunciations associated with them often 3, while Mandarin usually has 1 or 2. That took me one year to learn between the ages of 14 and 15. Before that I was learning grammar and didn't make much progress on reading and writing, due to having several false-starts. This was before the internet was a wealth of resources, before Youtube and before free guides and websites like duolingo. So what's the point of all this?
You Can Do Anything You Want To Do
If something is possible and you want to do it, you can do it. The real reason I started learning Japanese was because 1) I didn't like Spanish and its necessary to take a foreign language even in homeschool, 2) I loved Dragon Ball Z as a child. We had the International Channel on cable back when it was free, and I used to watch Dragon Ball Z in Japanese. I couldn't understand what they were saying, but it sounded really cool. One day I decided to learn Japanese so I could understand what was being said and the rest is history. Homeschooling taught me that the limits to what's possible exist only within your mind. Anything you set your mind to can be accomplished. Learning a language in under a year can be done, you just have to figure out how.