• 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

  • Aipolyglot

    My cofounder in Aipoly is Italian, so we went to Italy to promote, due to popular demand, Aipoly’s availability in 7 languages - English, French,...

  • Future is fuzzy

    I used to get anxious about the future.  Whether I could get a good job, where I would live, if I would have enough money to survive. But then I...

  • YouthActionNet Global Fellowship Day 4: Meeting an alumni's project

    We had the chance to visit one of the previous YAN Fellow's projects in Mexico. I chose to visit "Deport-es para Compartir" (or "Sports to Share")...

  • The Year of a Young Australian of the Year

    In 2008, I founded Robogals as a response to there being hardly any other women in my engineering classes. Our organisation is run by university...

  • Stop the world, I want to get off!

    Uni, business, studies, networking- like clockwork, life never seems to stop moving.  Rushing through breakfast to get to lectures on time, quick...

  • Scrap paper

    I write all my blog posts on scrap paper. I printed so many speeches last year that I have all these A4 scrap sheets of paper that just have...

  • I've done what I've done

    When I became Young Australian of the Year a year ago, I wanted to give as many speeches as I physically could, I wanted to contribute to the...

  • Nexus Impact Accelerator Fellow

    I spent the last few days of February in Washington DC attending the Nexus Global Summit as a Nexus Impact Accelerator Fellow. NEXUS is a global...

  • Where are you not looking?

    You’ve brainstormed and tried all the keywords that you could think of in Google, you’ve asked Jeeves, you’ve spoken to your lecturers and you’ve...

  • Woman in STEM

    For National Science Week, I spoke at the Super STEM Careers event about my career in STEM.

Enter your email address to receive my latest blog posts: 

 

Scroll to Top