The competition is always with yourself. You are your biggest foe. Hence the wars we should wage should be against ourselves. Junk food, distractions, lazying around, dopamine addictions, plan B’s, etc, unite to play with your mind and intentions. This is the fight that matters to us and not the social status games.
Flow
To enter the flow state, an idea should completely infect your mind. And that idea should be something that you strongly desire and yearn for. The half-hearted wishes do not let you fall into immersion and experience the joy that effortless action brings. At that moment, one truly understands what the right action is.
Verschlimmbesserung
It’s a german word and in English, it is loosely translated to bad improvement.
It is the process of spoiling something by overdoing it. The artist does it by giving a few extra unnecessary strokes to the painting. The musician does it by adding more notes, the chef by mixing needless spices, and so on.
The eagerness to perfect something and the will to go above and beyond sometimes is detrimental.
At times, the good is the thing to settle for and not hunt for the best one.
Slow
Go slow. Reduce the pace.
The only thing you are rushing towards is death. Nothing will change that.
The speedy showers, hasty dressing up, and the gulping down of coffee to save microseconds won’t matter in the end. Take a chill pill.
Problems
The problems that you encounter more or less define where you are in life. If the delay of Amazon delivery is your biggest problem to worry then it shows our priorities and the state of our living. Bigger problems put you in a different plane which in turn puts us in a different direction and path. Petty problems, petty life. It’s that simple.
Thoughts
The more we live in our heads, the more reality gets twisted and frightens us. Practicing presence and mindfulness helps us witness a less scary and terrifying world. We feel much lighter if we can leave the mind world for a bit. Treat your mind like a gym where you need to go to do some work and after that leave it and lock the damn door.
Mind chatter and your pampering of it trap you and create problems that never existed in the first place.
Time
One, time corrupts memory. When recalled, we often exaggerate or understate what exactly happened. This was seen clearly when 9/11 survivors told the things that never happened to the media, that’s why so many rumors and gossip have cropped up. Second, we are poor long-term decision-makers. The brain has a ‘Now bias’, that is only to think of short-term consequences and effects and nudge us to do things that give fruits at this moment. The serious long-term effects are thrown away and never shown to us in the fullest sense, hence we often procrastinate or ignore important tasks and do silly things that usually won’t matter down the line.
Commitments
At any cost, we should not break the commitments we made to ourselves. Decided to write an essay, run 5 miles, clean up the mess in the room, read a book, or whatever that might be, once you have made an agreement with yourself, make sure to honor it without breaking it. It is critical to your confidence and overall self-esteem. Think twice before the decision if you may, but once agreed upon, there shouldn’t be going back.
Love/Power
Oftentimes, power is masqueraded as love. Whether it is a parent imposing their wish on a child or a partner influencing the choice of spouse, we can observe a subtle soft power-based imposition rather than a sweet love. Because love calls for unconditional freedom which is usually robbed away when a free choice is violated by people who claim to shower affection.
Difficult at the top
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.
Thy Vox 