• 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

  • Special Visitors

    During our summer working out of the Engineers Australia Victoria office, we had some special visitors. Minister Merlino, the Deputy Premier and...

  • Channel 7 - House of Wellness TV

    Channel 7’s The House of Wellness TV got in touch to find out what I’m up to. We talked robots, Aipoly and more robots.

  • Be a fool

    When you learn something for the first time, everything is new to you. So you explore, you try different things, you fall down, you fail, you fail, and...

  • How successful are you?

    “I go to Imperial College”, “I’m applying to MIT”, “I play bowls for my county”, or “I’m a pro-series gamer” means nothing to the person who doesn’t know...

  • The Bubble

    I used to think the bubble was a bad thing.  The huge number of people who called themselves an entrepreneur.  The over-inflation of entrepreneurs in...

  • 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...

  • Phoenix, Arizona

    I love exploring new cities! So I was super thrilled to visit Phoenix in Arizona, and speak at ASQ’s Lean and Six Sigma Conference as their opening...

  • Sandra Sully AGENDA coffee book

    Through speaking on stage together at Vogue magazine’s Vogue Codes event together in Sydney in 2018, Sandra Sully invited me to take part in her...

  • Remo Office Visit

    Remo Giuffré, Founder and Director of TEDxSydney and Founder of General Thinking, and his lovely daughter Lola (an engineering student at the...

  • Cool enough

    I find that many people my age are quite lost.  They don't know what to do with their lives, they don't know what their dream job is, they don't know...

Enter your email address to receive my latest blog posts: 

 

Scroll to Top