It is easy for anyone to be above average in any field. Dedicated sitting and concentration along with a bit of motivation will take you there. However, past this stage, things get really hard. The stage between good and the best is nerve-wracking and difficult. Here, the insights are really hard to get and come at a snail’s pace. The work too requires extreme focus to get any novelty, if there’s any. Doubts creep in and question your ability and the feeling of being stuck haunts us daily.
But that is how we can come to the peak. This is not to prove something to others but discover our own potentiality which otherwise would have remained dormant and that would alter our life into something else.
Quality
Your belief that the project that you undertook will succeed no matter what the difficulty will determine the quality and to an extent even the quantity of the work you do for it. The negative story, the strong gut feeling that it will fail despite the effort, or subconscious doubts will hamper your chances of eventual success because you won’t work to your potential unless you believe in it.
Price and benefits
Sometimes the price that you pay outweighs the benefits you get in return. The 18-hour work for extra dollars and the 3-hour internet searching for coupons and discounts for saving a few pounds belong to this category. We plan exotic trips to god-forsaken places but the long flight journeys, visa issues, and poor accommodation make the fancy beach and unique flora and fauna pointless. The promotion might be good but sadly the trading off of family and personal time might not be.
Is there nobility in suffering?
Definitely not. Being a Dostoevskyian is sick and saddening. Why should any suffering have meaning at all? And we never search for meaning while we are happy. Is it to accept the helplessness and then seek some pride in it?
Friedrich Nietzsche says that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. But suffering rarely made any men stronger. Either they get used to it or become egotistical to accept that they too are weak and can weep.
Even after the Nth time, pain cripples us but humanity and so-called self-advertised strong men find it hard to swallow it.
This has a negative consequence—No one is seeking out help and is crushing their lives simply in the name of being stoic. This is a disease and a plague for us all.
They are dumping the waste into the subconscious and growing their Jungian “shadows” and society is raising sociopaths in the name of strong Spartans.
Acknowledging this can heal the sore souls and spoiled spirits. It’s time to stop searching for meaning in martyrdom and affection in affliction.
3 Things from Rocky Balboa that changed everything.
We all know the famous Rocky speech which he gives to his son about life and how it knocks you down.
The resilience and hard mindset of Rocky are truly inspiring and life-changing indeed.
I saw the movie when I was in high school and since then the wisdom has been around in my ears. Here are a few of them
- 1)Quitting is never an option.
Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it.
You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you are hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done!—Rocky Balboa.
This is perhaps the most inspiring line I’ve ever come across. Rocky teaches about the value of persistence. It’s easy to quit if you think about it. Life knocks you down with that business failure and you go on alcohol and drugs. That’s simple and a safe way out to your La-La land.
But to continue to dream and standing up is hard because it forces you to accept the responsibility and mistakes you made which almost and always shatters your ego. Being sedated is secure and un-troubling.
No one is immune to failure and has a vaccine shot to prevent hits that life throws at you. It’s part of the process and remember the world is NASTY and very mean. People will stab you and put you down unless you take the charge.
Drink that bitter cup of responsibility and be a champion.
- 2)The Doors of change are open to all.
“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.” —Friedrich Nietzsche.
This is probably the only idea that matters in your life. It’s not Lao-Tzu-type old irrelevant philosophy but a noteworthy one. Once decided, you can be whomsoever you can be and do whatever you can.
Gandhi was an ordinary lawyer but when he was kicked out from a whites-only carriage in Pietermaritzburg, the incident changed him completely. He changed himself into an activist to stand up against racism and subjugation. That change later liberated millions of Indians from the colonization of the British empire.
Likewise, Siddhartha vexed by life’s shallowness decide to change and sat under a Bodhi tree. Well, he became the Buddha by finding enlightenment and went on to be the light of Asia.
“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” That’s what Albus Dumbledore wants you to hear to change your life.
- 3)It’s never about winning.
“The journey is the reward.”—Steve Jobs.
Winning matters but what matters more is the process and the journey. Because the journey changes you like nothing else. Take Elon Musk and Tesla. Even if he had failed, his insane work had already transformed him and place him at the peak where the 1% are.
Suppose you worked for 5 years and the writing career didn’t take off as you expected. You still have less traffic and don’t have enough money. But think about your skills. Five years surely means something. Writing skills made you a better thinker and no one can articulate words as brilliantly as you can among your peers. And you can still go freelance or work for a magazine with that skill you got there in the mind.
Never think that all was a waste in the end. You never know how the dots will be connected in the future.
Hang on!
Restrictions
Once you devised a plan, try to put as many restraints as possible in terms of time, money, place, infrastructure, people, technology, and others that you can think of. This actually improves your plan and subtracts unnecessary deviations and extra resources we added without any need.
If you have put the time restriction and are forced to complete much sooner then automatically a smart idea pops up in the mind suiting the constraint. Try to go as hard as you can and increase the pressure on the plan. In the end, you can’t help but improve the original game plan you had on the board. Restrictions move the needle!
Work
A lot many people and especially so-called successful people usually downplay the hard work they have put in or over-exaggerate the effort that went into it but no one hits the sweet spot per se. This creates either anxiety or gifts overconfidence to the listeners. It is understandable that it is subjective and cannot be captured by words. However, deliberate misguidance is dangerous and toxic which is done by the biographies written under the handheld mentoring of marketing and PR agencies.
Next time the founder of a start-up says his/her story, take it with caution. The garage origin stories are all usually lies.
Learn and Leap
What I learned after many trials and errors and mishaps is that one should not chase success right away.
Michael Watkins puts it perfectly in his context- ” There’s a lot you don’t know and in fact, there may be lots you don’t even know that you don’t know. The time before you actually start is a really crucial time when you should focus on preparing yourself.” Bias for action is good because we usually use planning as a decoy to procrastinate but jumping into the ocean without any clue about the depth is suicidal. If you think over-preparation is bad then under-preparation too is equally bad. Before you start the game, understand the rules, exceptions, variables (Big and small), information, and data that might increase the odds of winning by a few percentage points. The roadmap from the start to the end will save you.
The Mandela Way of Life is What we need.
Nelson Mandela is the first black president of South Africa. But that’s just a Wikipedia fact. What we should think about Mandela is how well he lived his life, how he could heal his hating heart, and how he faced his fears despite life’s grueling setbacks and a prison term that would crush him and throw his dreams into an impossible pit.
His “Long Walk to Freedom” teaches how to be optimistic, how we learn to hate others, how a nation should act, and how to lit the kindness flame that burns in all our hearts. His life is a valuable book that one can learn if one opens the mind a bit. Here are the seeds that I value—
- 1)Courage and Fear are twins.
One fundamental error in our thinking is that we assume being courageous means no fear and showing a spartan face. But that’s far from true. Courage is coping with fear and waging a constant battle that we never win but only make sound peace with it.
It’s an honorable pledge that we take. Yet we cannot defeat. The example is the man himself we’re talking out. When Mandela was flying on a plane. The engine failed and everyone was in panic mode. His bodyguards were running around with fear. But Mandela was reading a newspaper with courage. But here’s the thing Mandela after the emergency landing admitted that there was a fear but he merely did not show it.
This shows that being courageous is a choice that we need to make and can never defeat like a big Hercules.
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear—Mark Twain.”
- 2)Contradictions define life.
We never get
Either this or that
But
A choice hanging
In between.
We never get
Neither this nor that
But
A paradox moving
Up and down.
We never get
A personality or
An individuality
But
A docile identity
Buttered by both.
We never get
Kinky morals or
Dinky ethics
But
A badly blossomed conscience
Or deeply twirled dilemmas.
We never get
A hulky heart
or
A bony brain
But
Just a sad belly.
Ah—
Black or white?
I wish it were that simple.
—No black and white
This is a poem I wrote a while back that captures the idea well. Life is neither black nor white but grey. We need to accept the contradictions, the ifs, and buts, and tread along.
Nations accept this. For example, it cannot follow ruthless capitalism or ruthless socialism. Hence they balance out like China by following Market Socialism.
Life is an ethical dilemma with not a yes or no. But a yes-no. No wonder, Soren Kierkegaard remarked—
“I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.”
- 3)A literate tongue or pen matters a lot.
We know the famous quote of Mandela—
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
But the idea of Mandela is much more than that. Education brings out the best in you. It’s the best weapon we can use to battle against the raging hate in our hearts and purify ourselves.
That’s why he inspired many prisoners to read and as they say— He turned the cell blocks to study halls and made Robben Island a university.
And education, Mandela believed, saves democracies, protects the rights of people, and tames unethical leadership of so-called good men and women. As hatred of immigrants, blacks, and the vulnerable are on the rise and people easily fall prey to a demagogue, education is the stick to control it.
and about education and personal development, here’s what Mandela says—
“Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farm workers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.”
Pick out that book on the kindle or if you prefer the old way, then the shelf.
Future (Economics)—1
Resources, Good Governance, Human capital, and even institutional development (Why nations fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson) till now to an extent determined the success of a nation and its economic growth and development.
But in the future, I think the “Attention Capital”, that is, the attention capacity and the capabilities of its citizens will tell us the trajectory of the nation. With attention spans falling off the chart to a minimum and some claiming even to be that of a goldfish, the promise of the future is bleak. With people unable to concentrate on their tasks, productivity and prosperity can be deteriorating.
If that’s the case, governments might launch yoga and meditation schemes for the poor in the future and so-called affirmative programs. That’s a hard nut to crack, I guess.
What if the primary skill in future resumes of the employees is the ability to concentrate and sit in a lotus posture for 90 minutes?
and the companies might hire a Spiritual CEO and a guru to guide their gullible employees.
Thy Vox 