Watch your thoughts, they become words. Watch your words, they become actions. Watch your actions, they become habits. Watch your habits, they become your character. Watch your character, it becomes your destiny. – Lao Tzu
1. If you are really serious and committed about bringing clarity in your life, do one favor, please use this quote as your phone screen saver.
Why? Because it will keep reminding you that you are nothing but an accumulation of all your thoughts and all other things in your life just happen to flow indirectly from it.
‘You cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight’: Jim Rohn
You just need to remind that you are blessed with THE MOST sophisticated software: Your MIND.
However, the unfortunate part is that you are never given the manual to operate this software. You are just plain lucky to be born with it. As a result, you are hardly bothered about its optimum performance.
You are no different than a kid who gets the most sophisticated supercomputer as a birthday gift and is extremely happy to just play all kinds of games on it.
I am sure you wouldn’t like to be that kid.
Once you understand that what you possess is an extraordinary piece of evolutionary marvel, you will be on your way to witness exponential growth within yourself.
This evolutionary biological masterpiece is blessed with a critical component called the Reticular Activating System (RAS). This is primarily a bundle of nerves at your brainstem that filters out unnecessary information so that you could focus more on the important stuff.
The RAS is the reason you tend to see more of the red cars on the road once you decide to buy one.
When you define your goals, you give your brain something new to look for and focus on.
Your mind proceeds to match up on the outside what you want most on the inside – your GOAL.
Once you become more aware of RAS and its ancillary benefits, you can be better equipped to identify the best of opportunities with minimal effort.
Besides, it helps you in finding your ‘zone of effortless focus’. Once located you can literally milk it for your endless creative pursuit.
2. You get in life what you tolerate. If you tolerate your body being overweight, tired, and perpetually sick, it will be.
No two ways about it.
If you keep feeding your body with tastiest of food devoid of any significant nutrition, expecting it to last the distance is nothing but an illusion.
But despite knowing this sad truth we all are culprits of abusing our body till it reaches to the point of breakdown.
As a result, your own body becomes a major obstacle in your path.
Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don’t fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgment, repeated every day: Jim Rohn
Even though we might have succeeded in increasing the longevity of our species but that’s never a guarantee that you wouldn’t be a victim of some random lifestyle disease.
Therefore, taking care of the nutritional requirement of your body should always be one of your topmost priority.
To keep the body in good health is a duty… otherwise, we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear: Buddha
Optimization of this gifted evolutionary marvel is possible only when the body and the mind are in complete sync.
In fact, once you know how to get this body mechanics to work efficiently it can help you immensely in realizing the true potential of your mind.
3. Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow: Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” Cal Newport drives home this point through this interesting example:
If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, he would probably have been one of the Los Altos Zen Center’s most popular teachers. But he didn’t follow this simple advice. Apple Computer was decidedly not born out of passion, but instead was the result of a lucky break – a “small-time” scheme that unexpectedly took off.
In fact, going beyond mastering your chosen craft will help you in aligning with your own purpose.
Here again, what will help you immensely, in the long run, is your craftsman mindset.
The craftsman mindset is something that is deceptively pragmatic but requires commitment and hard work of many years.
It’s what works in the entertainment business. As Mark Casstevens put it, “the tape doesn’t lie”: If you’re a performer, singer or a stand-up comedian, what you produce is basically all that matters.
If you can have an instant feedback loop, that gives you the leverage of improving your skill in the least amount of time. Then rest assured that you are on the correct path to go beyond the mastery of your chosen craft.
4. You are not the center of this universe
Extremely sorry to disappoint you but the truth is most people just don’t care about you. You simply don’t figure in their universe.
Of course, if you happen to be a celebrity of any sort then this may not apply to you, but for most mere mortals, there is absolutely no point in worrying about what other people think about them.
But at the same time, all the constructive feedback coming from people who are emotionally invested in you and really do care about you should get your rapt attention.
Allowing your never-ending responsibilities to cloud your mental space is the worst thing you could do to yourself. Just because most of your responsibilities happen to be of urgent nature doesn’t mean that it should keep hogging the spotlight of your life.
People need to know that they have all the tools within themselves. Self-awareness, which means awareness of their body, awareness of their mental space, awareness of their relationships — not only with each other but with life and the ecosystem: Deepak Chopra
You are capable of achieving extraordinary feats when you work in a happy ecosystem.
5. I will not allow yesterday’s success to lull me into today’s complacency, for this is the great foundation of failure: Og Mandino
Don’t let your success fail you.
Wait a minute, you don’t think you have achieved success yet?
Think again. You are not only literate but an educated person capable of earning a dignified livelihood for yourself. And you have worked reasonably hard to reach where you are today. This fact alone puts you into a minority of successful few.
Now it depends entirely upon you how you choose to move forward from here.
If you are not moving forward it simply means that you stopped doing what made you successful, to begin with. Your success clouded your own perspective and as a result, you just slacked off.
Have you ever been bitten by a shark?
How about a mosquito?
It’s the little things in life that will bite you. The decisions you think don’t make any difference at all end up making a large impact. It’s the little things that inevitably and predictably derail your success.
So be extremely protective of your established and proven system.
Don’t forget that Everyone is affected by three kinds of influences:
Inputs: What you feed your mind with
Association: the people with whom you spend your time
Environment: Your immediate surroundings and events
Similarly, people, in general, can be categorized into three kinds:
Three-minute people: your neighbor, your corner shopkeeper
Three-hour people: your school friends, your colleagues
Three-day people: your best friend, your mentor
Make sure you’re not spending three hours with a three-minute person.
Beware of the influence that people and the environment around you can have on you.
And last but not the least never forget that 95 percent of everything we feel, think, do, and achieve is a result of a learned habit!
So keep learning the new ones along with the flexibility to unlearn old and inefficient ones.
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