• Blog
  • Archives
  • Bio
  • Awards
  • Speaking
  • Book
  • Contact

The unglamourous work you love

Published: Thursday, 28 February 2013

I love the process of getting an idea, making a plan around it, and then bringing it to the world.  It usually involves a lot of emailing, fleshing out a plan, meeting with people, learning, designing, daydreaming…

It's not very glamourous, but I just love it so much, and find it so invigorating.

And then if I've done it successfully, good things happen in the world to a lot of people.

And if I've done it unsuccessfully, then I look at what went wrong, and I try again.

It's the whole process of always trying to improve myself, learn more, and then see the impact of that on the world, that gets me excited.

And that's why people tell you to follow your passions.  Because you're going to be spending most of your time working on unglamorous things with a bunch of people who are working on their own unglamorous tasks to make a bigger project happen.  And if you don't enjoy that, well then life's not going to be very fun.

But no one sees that.  All people see is the glamour and glitz of winning awards, receiving publicity, and hobnobbing with celebrities.  But all that glamour takes up such a tiny fraction of it all.  And is just a lot of filming and camera flashes to capture a tiny fraction of time, and then distributing that far and wide.

The work you do though, and bringing that to the world - that takes ages.  And no one would want to capture it, because it's so unglamorous - just doing the same tasks over and over again.

So follow your passions and do what you love.  Because living a successful life isn't about fame or awards or external kudos.  A successful life is one where you live each day striving to make yourself better in an area you're passionate about.

About Me

Marita ChengForbes named me a world's top 50 woman in tech & 30 Under 30. I founded Robogals and Aipoly and was Young Australian of the Year 2012. Currently working on robotics company Aubot. I'm the youngest Member of the Order of Australia (AM) and I give speeches around the world.

I tweet @maritacheng and I'm on Facebook.

Subscribe

Enter your email address to receive my latest blog posts: 

 

Random Articles

  • Australian Office in Taipei

    In March this year, I was invited to the Australian Office in Taipei, Taiwan, to give a speech for International Women’s Day.   During my 10-hour...

  • Tune out everyone

    Being concerned with what people think about you makes you unable to contribute your best work to the world.

  • Delegating to not go crazy

    If you're delegating tasks and then pulling your hair out over it, then you're probably not doing it right. Anything that's insanely great requires a team...

  • Regaining focus

    During my time at Robogals, towards the end of every year, I would lose focus. Why?  All my major projects for the year would have been wound up.  My...

  • One meeting can change your life

    Go out and make those connections, meet people, have conversations. It may land you a dream job.  My friend got an engineering internship in China by...

  • A Tech Schools Update

    A building collapse warning system, a pancreatic cancer detection kit and a self-inflating shirt to stop young children drowning if they fall into a...

  • A critical analysis

    Critics are those who stand on the sidelines waiting for you to muck up so they can laugh at you, point out your mistakes gleefully and then...

  • The most important thing

    … isn’t the car you drive, whether you earn more money than your neighbour, who you know, or what you know;  it is your health.  Without your health, you...

  • Aipoly Autonomous Store

    I attended CES with members of the Aipoly team.  Aipoly were fortunate to be awarded a CES Best of Innovation Award for the second year in a row! ...

  • Success is in the doing

    Even if I know my chances of success are slim because I've been disorganised, have missed deadlines, have generally not followed my own rules for...

Enter your email address to receive my latest blog posts: 

 

Scroll to Top