Life Portals: Moments and Mentors Part I
by Jesse Sung Founder & Mentor at ZEYDRA.com
“Time is valuable, so is good company” — zeydra.com
Part I.
When you look back at all your past decisions, every single person in your life has played some variable role in the mapping of those choices. The pivotal ones send us through the equivalent of what are life portals, as they are life changing.
When you decide to move to a new city, accept a new job offer or get involved in a new relationship, these choices stem from the interactions you have with the people in your life. We are all living, breathing individual payloads of energy and information. The constant exchange through interactions makes us sort of mentor and mentees to each other in varying degrees.
People are instances of influence, ranging from the subtle to the very persuasive. It becomes really interesting when you start plotting faces behind those forces. Ideally you learn to filter good from bad and compound good connections towards your overall well being.
Life is a mystical journey with no given manual on how to live it. But if you’re striving for human-defined “success” of upwards social mobility, then the objectives are not so mysterious nor subjective. It comes down to productivity. The how, where and with whom are you exchanging your time and energy with? and are they net positives?
Portal Provenance Plot
It’s nearly impossible to track all the right and wrong decisions throughout your life. But you can start with highlighting past and present people and the events surrounding them.
A catalytic exercise I highly recommend is taking pen to paper and scribing down those names and events that you believe added tracks to the course of opening your life “portals”. Typically you’ll end up having two groups of names, some under thank yous and others under f*ck yous, hopefully having a lot less of the latter.
Digging into memory banks isn’t always easy especially if you have had traumatic events in the past. But those are just as salient and I encourage to avoid denial and factor them in when scoping out the entire history of events. All of these time capsules culminate to the dose of your present day reality.
The following is what I call my personal Portal Provenance Plot, a timeline (starting with junior college years) of people-to-events in my life that has led to each portal while pursuing progress and prosperity.
Shape
• Circles = Individuals
• Ovals = Life events; change of city, starting a venture
• Diamond = Portal moments (Key decision; high net positive output)
Border
• Density = Magnitude of positive effect
Color
• White = Assisted-introductions
• Blue = Positive influence
• Red = Negative influence
• Purple = Both positive/negative
*Theoretically the less Red, Purple the better (higher chance of net positive)
Background Bar (Shaded)
Height of bar = Personal financial wealth
• Red = Forms of depression
• Blue= Euphoria
• None = Stability
Without undermining any of the past, present friends, relationships or family which I may have left out, these are just the attributions that are most obvious in my chain of life portals.
Looking at the plot, I have been fortunate to experience an almost linear progression in my overall prosperity. However as the diagram suggests, these achievements didn’t come without the staircase of uncertainty, setbacks and periods of depression.
Such a plot allows me to also clearly reflect on the negative people, events and decisions of the past. There are always important lessons from these experiences, but we want to ensure there are far fewer of them in comparison to the good.
Regardless of being a droplet of matter in the Universe’s infinite science fair, I believe faith and serendipity are not mutually exclusive of choice and free will. Most people would prefer entertaining and fun companionships over educational or productive ones, not knowing the longer term consequences of such. But it is possible to have the best of both if you know what to look for.
As the old saying goes, people are a product of their environments, so choose wisely.
