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.
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.
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.
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.
Don’t break the chain
Once you have built momentum, don’t break it. Save it at all costs. Avoid the empty-zero days where you do nothing. If the task that you are supposed to do is damn hard, then at least do 10% of it. The 100 push-ups are hard but we can pull off 5 push-ups that day when the motivation is quite low. Sickness might not push you to write a lengthy essay, however, try to aim for 50 words. The point is not to make you proud but sustain the work so that you can pick it up tomorrow.
Thy Vox 