I don’t consider myself successful in the way most people think. I’m not rich, not famous, nothing of these things.
Yet I do think that I succeded in learning such many things.
Learning to sing from zero, to build up some basic muscles, to run, to jump rope, to talk, to write, to inspire even if for small moments people, to change diets and diets, breakfasts, learning new programming languages, and so on.

It’s not to brag about it, but to make a point about how was all of this possible.

You might think it’s because I’m good at learning and even though this might be part of the equation I think the reason is different.
I didn’t tell anyone about many, if not all, these things. I kept them for me until I was fairly decent about it.
Why?

Well, first and foremost because of the reactions many people have.
One day I wanted to write a letter to my bosses, to give them a different perspective. Why I letter? I like to write and I wanted to convey a message while they were relaxed, not in the daily rush.

I told about this and the first reaction was “you’re crazy, it’ll all go bad, why you dare do this?”.
Guess what? It went good.

Perceptions matter, and though they are part of the story that led to my idea about the letter they couldn’t be told while I was sharing the idea. It was impossible, but people react on what they know, and if they know only a part of the story they might jump to wrong conclusions.

The second, critical, thing is: We might want to say them only to pump up our ego.
You know when you say something like “I want to learn bungee jumping” and everyone goes like “Oh man, that’s wonderful, I always dreamed of it, bla bla bla”.
You get that nice little feeling that you’re the best, that you’re one step ahead, but will this imply that you’re going to do it? Nope. It usually leads to the opposite result because you’re already got what you wanted, a plause.

This leads us to the third and final element: Don’t do it for others. Don’t do it for your ego. Don’t do it for some temporary plause.
Do it for you, for the pleasure of learning, of practice, of being in a constant state of learn, fail, succeed, repeat. But please, don’t do it for your ego.