Every now and then I give talks at universities or conferences. Often people ask me what my one motto in life is and I tell them… it’s a simple one.
It’s not what happens to you but how you react to it that matters.
That’s it. 14 of the most powerful words I live by today (and I covered it in my previous entry too). Then people ask me why and I tell them this story.
I was born with a slight disability called an eye ptosis. It’s when the eyelid muscles of one eye is too weak to hold an eye up that it droops down so much that my weak eye looks almost closed. The doctors told my parents I had to be operated on by the age of 3. If I didn’t fix it, I might lose my eyesight. So at the young tender age of 3 I underwent my first surgery.
After my surgery the doctor told my parents that my eyes will be okay… apart from one slight problem. My weak eye will still looked half close all the time. If you want to know how someone with an eye ptosis looks like, click here.
I didn’t have too much of a problem at home because my parents treated me like I was perfectly normal. Like my eyes were both equally wide opened like any other little boy growing up.
All that was soon to change. As I started going to school, it became immediately obvious to my classmates that I was different. I got called all sorts of names. From “cock-eye boy” (even though I wasn’t technically cock-eyed to well… a whole long list. I felt like some people treated me poorly because of how I looked. When they looked at me, they sometimes naturally distanced themselves from me because they didn’t know how to react around me.
It hurt me and I went through a rebellious phase. I blamed my parents for giving birth to me with such a defect, I blamed God, I blamed the people around me, I blamed everything and anyone I could put blame to. I blamed everyone but myself because I only saw myself as the victim.
I went through a turbulent number of years in primary school and it was only midway through secondary school that I decided to do something about it. At age 15, I went to see a doctor about what I would do with my drooping eye. Surgery was the obvious solution… but one doctor told me there was something I could do that might theoretically cure it. That is if I patch up my strong eye and use my weak eye for as much as I could each day. I did exactly that and after 1 year my eyes seemed to have improved. They looked a lot more normal than they ever did.
Two years later I went to see the same doctor that operated on me when I was a child. She did a number of tests on my eyes and said my eyes were perfect. That there was nothing she could do to make them anymore normal than they already were. Well there was one thing but she admitted that was more a cosmetic surgery than anything else.
When I reflect back on this one incident, it hit me. There I was at two points in my life facing the exact same challenge. One I chose to react by blaming everyone around me but myself making myself a very unhappy and negative person and distancing the people close to me. The second time (years later) I decided to blame no one but to do something about it. The day I chose to do something about it, was the day I stopped being a victim and started becoming an enabler.
That’s the simple rule I live by today. Whenever bad things happen to us, we curse our bad luck or blame the person responsible but what we forget to see is that whatever happened to us doesn’t matter as much as how we choose to react to it. When we lay the two paths we could take in reacting, we often see very very different outcomes. Just like I did many years ago.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space
