Do I need to?

It has been over 3 months since my last post. I have not been lazy to write – As a matter of fact, I am hardly lazy when it comes to writing. I love writing. But, then, there was a thought – Why write what I write? I don’t write to preach; I am hardly qualified in that department. I write because I love. I don’t write when my mind is full. I write when my mind is empty.

These three months, I have been emptying my mind of the thought that it was getting full. I was letting go of my philosophical ego that was starting to take me over. I was emptying my mind of all the things that I thought I could do and I could not do. I was emptying my compulsive desires to conquer, communicate, establish, achieve, dream, …

It took me three months to understand the difference between compulsive and complimentary. Compulsive goals or desires are what we create because our world becomes blank without them – recognition, money, status and so forth. The problem with compulsive goals are that they neither do any justice to us nor lets us do any justice to them. When I chase a dream that was born out a compulsive desire for recognition, when it eludes me, I am unhappy and when I achieve it, it is unhappy and transforms into something else.

Then there are complimentary goals – the goals that compliment our existence. They are actually not goals that one sets. They evolve out of us ceremoniously dancing to beat of our own heart. There is never a need to prove one’s self. There is never a need to achieve. Achievements and results are byproducts of the spiritual union between what needs to be done and what one is born to do. There are no metrics to judge.

I am back to writing. When I write, my heart pumps and I go in a trance. This needs to be done and maybe this is what I was born to do.

Evaluate your progress after 10,000 hrs

I was listening to Malcom Gladwell on CNN couple of days back. Amazing guy, I love his take on simple things in life. Anyway, he was talking to Fareed Zakaria about his recent book “The Outliers“. If you don’t know what that book is about, here is a simple one-line jist until you read it sometime – “Behind every great person’s success there are two things – the time they are born and 10,000 hrs of sheer hard work”. The first factor of when you are born is pre-determined, I guess. You cannot do much about it other than make the best out of it. The second factor is interesting – 10,000 hrs of hard work. So, Gladwell in his interview said that he believed talent to be the desire to put 10,000 hrs of effort into something you want to do.

This is my take on this humdinger. Evaluate yourself after 10,000 hours. You might reach success before that or after that. In general, success is relative and cannot be accurtely quantified. However, after 10,000 hrs of work, you can start evaluating your progress. It will give you a _very_good_ overview of where you stand. Until the 10,000th hour, keep chugging. If our goal is to keep adding on quality hours to our project, when we hit 10,000, we would have accomplished lot of things. An easy way to remember this figure is – If we work 10 hrs a day on something, to reach 10,000 hrs, we need to work for little over 3 years.

Say for instance, you are writing a book. Your goal is to first finish the book and assume you finish the book in one year. The next two years you spend time marketing, publishing, doing book tours, etc. Everything is part of this grand scheme of getting your book published. At the end of the year three, if self-evaluation comes, it will give you a true insight.

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Achieving

It is easy to be an achiever. On the other hand, it is very hard to be ordinary. Every person is born to do great things. However, we constrain ourselves within false boundaries and settle for something less. We try to get a job at Google when it is easier to start a company like Google. We strive hard to keep our jobs intact by curbing our natural creativity and flair, while we are born to do otherwise. Achieving is easy. It is actually much easier than convincing ourselves that we should walk by the rules of this world.

The problem is that every one of us has been told in some point of our lives about what is “safe” to do to gain society’s respect. We take these lessons to heart rather than the lessons that come from within us. We “learn” to believe that these fake rules created by people who were scared to explore their inner selves are the rules to live by. Look at every child – he/she is an achiever. They play by their rules and they are not scared by what you think of their perception of the world.

Being an achiever is the easiest and best thing one can do for themselves. All they have to do is be themselves and do things that really make them happy. They have to let their inner child take control of the outer world. If only everybody could do that, we will have this world overflowing with happiness and tale of accomplishments.

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