Fortune Favors the Bold
Stay true to yourself and remember, in paradise, there is no lying. Ask yourself in every step you make, will you future-self thank you for it?
New beginnings, what a delight. The landing into a new city to explore, the first class in your new post-graduate degree, and the joy of starting over with a new experience. I wonder though, how often did we fall in the traps that we built for ourselves? The times that we spent envisaging the all-bright new start. Till it feels so realistic that we begin to release dopamine by just fantasizing it. Oh, how glorious my wins the next year will be. But will it?
Frankly, I barely cared about the new years’ eve, I didn’t even watch the fireworks for this one. It’s not that I don’t enjoy them, my bowl of indifference may just be larger than the ones others have. Well, maybe I am too realistic for this world, or maybe the concoction that I am made up of didn’t include the ‘gatherings’ and the ‘parties’ guy in it. Anyway, the purpose here isn’t about me unravelling my characteristics, it’s about sharing with you that I never really cared for specific timings to set resolutions. In my view, setting goals and being productive are two separate things. After all, it is the smart worker that gets the best of the yield. To elaborate further, the vast majority of us will set new year resolutions and fail to abide by them even before January ends. I think the meme spread regarding this matter is sufficient to prove it. And for that sake, I think that confining oneself to dates or awaiting a group of friends to appreciate a specific act enough for me to begin doing it, is an awful way to hinder my level of productivity. Why would I act as my own menace? Just focus and stay as true-to-self as possible and continuously enquire that based on all the current given factors, how most-productive could you currently be that will make your future life a delicacy to taste not a ball of spikes to swallow?
I am my own critic. The loathing, the nightly reflections that keep you off-sleep, you name it. However, I usually do my best to maintain the objective lens, and not just delve into pinpointing each and every shortage and mishap that happened, irrelevant if it happened because of myself or others. Moving further, here are rules and ideas that I have come up with as of now, the result of hours of reads and trials and errors:
1- Spend time with yourself and try to understand who you are. And by that, I mean read yourself from a third-party view, and look at your strengths and weaknesses.
2- Recognize the gifts you have. Your gifts or dreams can fall in hindsight. Missing them may have you work much harder in industries and areas that you aren’t creative in, do not excel in, and worst of all, cause you to undermine your own skills and self-worth.
3- Embed your areas of creativity with external factors that allow you to intertwine with them in a synchronous flow.
4- Exercise with things that you love. This can be in your research, studies, work life, and is also applicable for hobbies.
5- Set yourself a tough schedule, something a bit more than you can bear. Always push yourself, so that you even if you underachieve you still accomplish a considerable, proper number of goals. But ensure that it’s scalable and attainable. Not too adventurous.
6- Reward and punish yourself according to the plan to set for yourself this year. This could be by pampering yourself or buying yourself gifts. As for punishing yourself, hold yourself accountable for all your mishaps. Look at yourself from a customer’s point of view to a service provider. Administer relative punishments accordingly.
7- Understand what’s the sole and final aim of the journey you’re planning for. The goals that you set for each year should pour into the same bucket.
8- Starve your distractions.
9- Invest in yourself and in your time more than you do in anything else. Those two are the only entities that will have your back along each and every step you take.
10- Enjoy the journey. Exercise with yourself again and again until you evidence that the dopaminergic releases are connected to the micro tasks and the journey itself, not the final goal. Above all, you still want to push through life happily.
11-Stay realistic to yourself and be yourselves best friend.
12-Examine your environment attentively, a flower will never bloom in the Sahara Desert. Find your own garden and bloom.
I read a quote once, ‘One should understand that living life is drawing a painting, not solving a mathematical equation.’ And as I have learned from Dr. Jordan Peterson, shredding sentences into pieces has always proved to be best. The several trials of extracting the purest form and final output of its meaning, will allow you to have a holistic mountain-view, which will subsequently enable you to comprehend the same things from several perspectives. To each person, life means something, and no one should ask anyone else about the meaning of life. To you, life is simply what you make of it. No one has or will ever exist that will exactly resemble your unique identity unless you forego that for the sake of blending-in in the cattle.
