Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Work on your past!

Life is not even and there are Ups and Downs for all of us. When you look back at life and the path you travelled, do you see struggles and pain? Though we cannot undo the path we walked into the present, we could have done better to reach the same ‘today’ and yet feel ‘achievements’ instead of struggles. 

So, here is the question! How to feel happy about the past? How to feel that you had a great past? 

The answer is very simple. Today is the past for tomorrow. Making today as rich as you can, creates a better past. No matter how you have been so far, what lies in your hands now is to give 100% to your ‘Today’.

Look at earnings and not income! To a common man with common thought, income and earnings might sound the same. But, if you carefully think about it, what you save from the income is your earning. Earn also means ‘to gain’ and gain is after you meet your living costs from your income. Life is the same. All that happens today is like your income; what must stay with you for future is like earnings. Choose what you want to spend and forget about today and what you want to carry with you to the future!

Turn setbacks into positive experiences! Struggles that you face today can’t stay with you as pain forever. When you make your struggles into experiences, what stays with you is how it changed you for good. Convert every failure into a lesson and a good habit to stay. There was a time, when I had a very big problem and an astrologer asked me to pray Sun God at the time of sunrise for 48 days. Instead of just praying, I made it a habit to memorize few religious hymns/slokas. I also started walk in the morning and made it a habit. Today, when I think of that problem, I don’t have the pain of the past paint the picture in front of me, rather what made me a better person!

Know yourself! This helps to avoid a bitter present. It is all about today, when you want to create a rich past. Introspect the person in you. See what makes you tensed, angry, react and makes the day stressful to make mistakes. Take for example, a day when you start to work 15 minutes early. You tend to observe lot of people in a hurry while you are not. You stop at the signals properly, give way for people who rush and enter with a smile to work. Compare this to a day when you start 10 minutes late than usual for work. You will experience being in the opposite side of the crowd who are in a hurry, shout at people on the road, try to jump at signals. This can be applied to any event in a day, like a meditation in the morning to start your day, a good exercise, not staying up hungry for long, sleeping early et al. Listen to the person in you and see what keeps your day at peace! 

Reactive tendencies and Creative competencies! When I read this somewhere, I was extrapolating it to how we all have these dimensions inside us. Many a times, I have seen creativity and leadership accompanies people who are early risers. Their first winning for the day is beating the sun by waking up before the sun wakes up. It creates fresh ideas and clarity of thought. I have seen implementers or reactors/adapters to be late sleepers. They find their nights calm and peaceful to implement what they want to. We all are formed by the creative, enterprising and implementation as ingredients but, not in the same proportion. So, the rule can’t be ‘one size fits all’ and it is not just about waking early or sleeping late. Look where you stand and what is the ask of you, seek inside and carve yourself through practices that meets the asks! I am sure this will make a brand out of you!

I don’t want to make this article complete. Rather, even if I try to, I will fail. Life is different for each one of us. Each life is unique. Each of us will have to apply our own techniques to be successful. While the tips I quoted above largely applies for anyone, post your tip to me. Waiting eagerly for it … ! 

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