IN PROGRESS
Notes from a life that refuses to stay in one lane
Asmar Akbar
There is a strange pressure that comes with being young and ambitious. You are expected to have a plan. A five-year plan. A career plan. A university plan. A version of yourself that already knows what it is doing. I don't have one. At least, not in the way people expect.
What I do have is a growing collection of experiences, some carefully planned, some completely unexpected, and some that I said 'yes' to before I had any idea what I was getting myself into.
I’ve worked on things that made me feel incredibly capable and things that made me question whether I knew what I was doing at all. I’ve been involved in training and development, worked on podcasts, helped people build skills, taken on leadership responsibilities, participated in hackathons, built projects, explored ideas that sounded slightly ridiculous at first, and tried to balance all of that with being a student.
And somewhere along the way, I stopped seeing these things as separate. Podcasts taught me about people. Leadership taught me about responsibility. Projects taught me how to turn an idea into something tangible. Hackathons taught me to think under pressure. Training taught me that knowing something and being able to help someone else understand it are two completely different things. School taught me discipline, sometimes willingly, sometimes very much not. And the moments when things didn't work taught me perhaps the most.
I’ve started to realise that the most valuable part of doing all these different things isn't necessarily the achievement at the end. It's what each experience leaves behind. A better question. A new perspective. A skill I didn't have before. A person I wouldn't have met otherwise. A little more confidence. Or occasionally, a very clear understanding of what I don't want to do.
That's what In Progress is about. It's not a success story. It's not a productivity blog. And it definitely isn't me pretending to have life figured out. It's a record of the process. Because I believe that being multidimensional isn't something you need to apologise for.
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Asmar Akbar is Head Girl at Shining Star International School in Abu Dhabi and Global Training and Development Lead with Globally Empowered.