It was a freezing morning in Poland and I was on a train to Warsaw with one shot at getting into a visa program limited to 200 people.
I spent most of my twenties trying to reverse-engineer why some people actually get where they say they are going.
The gap between people who get there and people who talk about getting there kept bothering me, and I could not figure out what it was.
The only thing that actually separates them is obsession. Not talent. Not money. Not connections. Obsession.
Here is what I mean.
When I was a teenager I knew that I wanted to move out of my country. I just knew I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in a cold and dark place. That felt like enough of a reason.
I explored my options and decided that I would like to move to Australia. Back then it was not a very realistic goal and all the odds were working against me. I didn’t have money to go to study there and my country was not on the list of any available visas.
Still, I kept thinking about my goal constantly. I kept talking about it all the time. I talked about it so much that my friends grew tired of hearing it, but I persisted.
Every career decision I made in my early twenties was filtered through one question: does this get me closer to Australia?
I was not the smartest person in the room, I was not the best engineer, but I was one of the most obsessed people about my goal.
I still remember when Australia announced Work and Holiday program to Polish citizens. I believe that the first edition was limited to first 200 people.
I knew that this was my chance and I kept reading every article about this program. I even called the embassy multiple times to make sure that I will get all my papers in order.
The way it worked back then was that I needed to obtain one document from the Polish embassy in Warsaw and send it together with the rest of the documents to the embassy in Berlin.
Again, it was all on first come first serve basis.
It was a really cold day in Poland. I remember my mom telling me that I can wait one day and arrange everything the next day when the weather would get better. I felt like I couldn’t.
I caught the train in the very morning to be in Warsaw as soon as possible only to get missing document.
When I walked out of the embassy, I counted at least a dozen other people clutching the same document – and my stomach dropped.
I had already called a courier company and paid extra to have a driver waiting outside the Warsaw embassy before I even boarded the train.
I instructed (and paid extra) the courier company and expected them to deliver the document at 9:00AM and hand this document directly to the person who processed the applications.
To my surprise the courier asked me what is happening in embassy in Berlin that he is getting so many requests like this.
That was the moment when I understood that my level of obsession was shared among wider group of people.
There were more people like me.
I got the visa. I moved to Australia. But the real thing I learned was not about Australia at all.
The courier told me he was getting dozens of requests like mine that morning – obsession was not my advantage, it was the baseline.
The question is not whether you want it badly enough. The question is whether you are willing to be the person standing in the cold at 6AM while everyone else waits for better weather.