what I was like in high school (you’ll never guess)

My mom’s favorite childhood photo of me (which I hate) perfectly sums up who I was until high school: Frizzy uneven bob cut to my chin... Chubby cheeks from a summer of overeating at my grandparents’... Wal-mart navy polo about three sizes too big... Awkward half-smile covering my braces... And most mortifying of all, a humongous mountain of a pimple on my forehead. If I had to choose one word to describe who I was, it’d be: “Average.” And that, it turned out, was the best thing that could have happened to me. Because it taught me that who you are, right now, doesn’t have to define you. In fact, it’s the other way around: YOU get to define who you are. That’s how I became the Luisa I decided to define in high school... I decided to become “smart.”Take it from the girl who used to be so bad at math she had to draw out three hundred and fifty seven tick marks to calculate “123 + 234 = ?”... The skills you are, or aren’t, born with are just a starting point. I decided to get fit. In high school, my now-husband’s friends, who’d known me since middle school, were flabbergasted: “You like Luisa?! She used to be fat.” Nowadays when people tell me on social media that “it must be helpful to be born attractive,” I just chuckle. Of course they have no idea what I used to look like. (Learning to wear clothes that aren’t three sizes too big helped too, BTW.) I decided to develop confidence. I made some big strides in high school. Especially with overcoming massive awkwardness so that I could do class presentations, interview for college, and basically, hold a normal conversation. All things I couldn’t do naturally. So I learned. If what I just shared surprised you, I get it. Fourteen-year-old Luisa wouldn’t recognize now-Luisa either. And that’s good, because the Luisa I was on the path to grow into at fourteen would never have become a successful entrepreneur. Which is why I changed what I needed to change, to become the person I wanted to be. The first step was deciding to view who I was then as my starting point, not my destiny. Ultimately, this is a decision that’s available to each of us, at any point in time. So how did I make that decision? I started by shutting out the voices around me saying things like... “Luisa’s just not that smart.” “We just aren’t that kind of people.” (“That kind” being “rich” or “successful.”) “The women in our family just don’t have great figures.” Next, I asked myself...“What if?” What if I were smart? What if I was the rich or successful kind of person? What if I had a great figure? And that leads me to the question I want to leave you with today: What if you were a successful entrepreneur? How would you act, think, do, and be? How would you look back on where you are now and how did you get to become that successful entrepreneur version of yourself? I’ll share my answer tomorrow, when I open the doors for my most personal course. The one where I documented every step of how I became “Successful Entrepreneur Luisa.” Luisa Zhou [Facebook]( [YouTube]( [Instagram]( [Unsubscribe]( Zhou Ventures, Inc. P.O. Box 2545 New York, New York 10163-2545 United States