Wake UP call - 12 best lessons from my mentor - Part 4

Lesson 10: Excite your work

 

No matter how many leaves we take from our college or office, ultimately we need to accept the truth of life that we need to work to earn our bread and butter. We need to work to earn our livelihood, we need to work to accomplish our dreams. Ultimately majority of our life is spent only on working because life is just the other name or work and vice versa. As we are aware that we need to work throughout our life, it's mandatory for us to make our work exciting. No one can come and make your work exciting. You've to innovate different ways of exciting your work all by yourself to enjoy doing it day and night.

Lesson 11: Every new skill matters

 

There is no other option but accepting the fact that there are a billion talents and skills existing in this world today. Every skill has its advantages. So no skill is small, no skill is big as long as you know as to when to use it and where to use it. No opportunity comes to us with a pre-invitation. We must be prepared to meet any opportunity whenever it strikes to achieve success. Developing new skills goes into the category of preparation. A new skill which you're interested in may or may not be useful currently in your work but there's no harm in developing it today because it might be of help tomorrow or sometime later. Hence I claim that every new skill matters.

Lesson 12: Surprise the world with something new frequently

 

The world around us and the people in it always like and love surprises. Monotony is ruling the lives of many in current times. People are trying to find solutions to breakthrough the doors of daily work schedule. Unfortunately some are bound by honesty while some others by salary. As a result, they work in spite of all the hard feelings at heart. What brings a fresh feeling in them is that of seeing someone who has broken the shackles of the world, broken some rules, taken some risks to boast of some achievements. When the audience is awaiting, the superstar has to arrive and he cannot repeat monotony. He has to bring something new for every show to entertain the audience . Likewise, each one of us will have to get something new often to surprise the world around us which is waiting for it.

Wake UP call - 12 best lessons from my mentor - Part 3

Lesson 7: Capture the collection on the way

 

How many photos have you taken of the street that you travel through everyday? How many photos have you taken separately with each of your friends? Probably the answers for both these questions is very less in number. We go through a lot of things but don't capture them as memories. Sometime, during the course of our journey when we need a collection of all such things we have no clue as to how to build it. Hence it's always advisable to take a photo at a new place where you are the first time on the way to your work. Like this you can have a huge collection of memories stored with you to refer back at any wanted time.

Lesson 8: Categorize your To-Do list

 

Writing down a to-do list is very important for our work to get distributed into a format such that not even one activity escapes our notice. However, putting all the work to be done under just one list gives no priority or consideration exclusivity for any single task. Each item on the to-do list is equivalent to the ten other tasks that exist there. It's just like training a lion and a chicken in the same training room with the same hunter which is totally irrational. Hence we must categorize the tasks on our to-do list so that we can prioritize accordingly and work.

Lesson 9: Targets are the most essential

 

No run can be scored if the crease is not marked at all in cricket; not even a single goal can be scored if the goal post is absent in the football field. Likewise in life nothing can be achieved if we don't have targets to achieve something. Target need not be only what we need to achieve, target should also be the time limit within which we need to achieve what we desire to achieve. Unless our target is time-bound, we will not be able to drive our energy at the highest peaks possible in order to exploit our complete efficiency. Associate your work with a target and enjoy the benefits.

Wake UP call - 12 best lessons from my mentor - Part 2

Lesson 4: Wake up, Take up, Dress up, Make up

 

If you've to go up in life, then you have to follow the 4 UPs of life. This was taught to my mentor by his mentor. Here are those 4 powerful UPs which can make us go up and grow up in life. Firstly, it's essential to wake up from our sleep early. Secondly, we must be ready to take up every responsibility that comes our way by seeing it as an opportunity. Thirdly, dressing up to be ready for work is the next UP. The world recognizes you by your dress first than your words. To err is human. So, it's very natural to find mistakes happening and we will have to respect the Murphy's law as well. Finally, we must be ready to make up for all the wrong decisions taken and unanticipated events that take away our intended results from us.

Lesson 5: Be time conscious

 

Time is eternal and immortal but humans are not the same. Hence, everything that's associated with us has a limited quantity. Likewise even time is a limited resource that God has gifted us of which we must make a wise choice of while using. A penny spent can be earned back but a minute lost can never be regained. That's why it's important for us to keep a check on where our time is being invested in and be totally time conscious.

Lesson 6: Feel the superstar in YOU

 

No matter how much ever one tries, one cannot be exactly like someone else is. Each human being on this planet is unique in himself/herself. Being so, everyone has unique capabilities and the skill levels to excel at them. It's completely up to us to decide how far we want to reach in life. Everyone dreams of being a superstar by mastering certain skillsets. While you dream of becoming a superstar you should feel the superstar in you. You will have to behave as if you've become the best in what you do and that influence itself shall make you a real superstar someday in the eyes of the people around.

Wake UP call - 12 best lessons from my mentor - Part 1

27th July was yet another remarkable day when I went to my mentor, Sujit Lalwani sir with a problem seeking for a solution only to learn that the problem was not the problem at all but there was something beyond that. The discussion started with just a request of one minute to discuss about the plan on work timings but it took an entirely different course as the real reasons for the confusion started unfolding. A one minute intended clarification went on for more than two hours of discussion and some of the best lessons were shared by my mentor. There is no point keeping these 12 powerful lessons with me alone. They've helped me a lot and I wish to share them with my dear readers so that whoever wants to uplift their lives can use them.

 

Lesson 1: Feel your dream

 
All of us have dreams but not all people feel their dreams. The reason you will find people with dreams but no destinations is because they don't cherish the feeling of accomplishment of their dreams even before dreams come true. Only when you can feel the thriving effect while imagining the dream coming true only then will you be able to accomplish the dream with the drive it gives you. Hence it's very important to feel your dreams while working to achieve them.
 

Lesson 2: Reignite your dreams

 
I am sure that you can go back to your past and recollect a lot of dreams that you had in your childhood. As we grow up we tend to forget the dreams and start building new ones. The same process repeats and old dreams are forgotten while new ones are built. There is no point in forgetting a dream once dreamt. Hence it's very essential to reignite our dreams time and again only to not allow them from dying away. There is no point in allowing your dreams to die away because we are alive to realize our dreams in reality.
 

Lesson 3: Even you're a human

 
While working towards multiple accomplishments in life, we tend to get pressurized by the number of tasks on our to-do list/s. Too much of competition from all directions bog us down. At one point, the frustration reaches its peaks and we might even decide to just get away with all the work at hand and not do anything just to attain some bliss in solitude. At such times, it doesn't mean that you're one of those who run away fearing work; it's just a temporary feeling which is very much natural for a human to feel.

Respect commitments to the self

Commitments are the most important promises that we make to ourselves and to others. Commitments are also used in certain other different scenarios such as personal commitments or family commitments or business commitments where in sometimes they are not just promises but are contracts or dire necessities without fulfilling which the life cannot proceed in a sound manner. If we expect someone else to believe in our commitments, we must first believe in us that we will live upto the commitments that we make to ourselves.

New year resolutions are some of the common commitments that people make to themselves and hardly few percentage of them are ever fulfilled throughout entire lifetime. It all depends upon how much of respect that we give to our own words. I still remember an example wherein Mahatma Gandhiji had stopped eating jaggery for some days just to advise a son of His disciple not to eat jaggery, because Bapu felt that if he couldn't stop eating jaggery, he couldn't advise someone else on the same lines. So he took a commitment to Himself that he wouldn't eat jaggery. The prime motive of His was to lead by example and hence he respected even this small commitment to himself though the situation would have got resolved by He just adivsing the little boy. Just because of his commitment to lead by example he could forfeit his desire for jaggery. Such should be the respect that we give to our commitments. Sometimes we make commitments out of motivation during a small period of time and after that motivation subsides we start disregarding our own commitments and break them. The reason for this is that we forget the reasons for our motivation that we had sometime back. So how do we make sure that we don't break these commitments?

If you can live upto the commitments that you make to oneself then you can easily fulfil the commitments made to others. Hence I will talk or rather write about just three simple steps to make sure that we respect and fulfil the commitments made to the self. First, write down the reasons for you taking up any commitment and preserve this to read and re-read everytime you are working towards this commitment irrespective of whether you have or have lost the motivation. If you have lost the motivaion, reading will trigger it back, if you still have the motivation it will just multiply by re-reading the reasons for the same. Second, there will be certain instances when you will be dragged away by negative forces such as laziness or ill health or disinterestedness or disturbed feelings due to which even reading doesn't bring back the motivation. At these circumstances, just remember that by breaking the commitment you are going to further worsen the situation and just by doing the small work required will definitely make the situation better. Its a simple human psychology which always becomes happy when you do something that you think you cannot do. Third, the belief inside us in ourselves grows everytime we stand for what we speak. We don't have to make big commitments to change the country or the society or the world. Small simple commitments that we make to change ourselves positively can be more than sufficient to cast an impact towards global betterment because you are bound to definitely influence this character of yours into others around you.

Everyday blogging is one of the small commitments that I make to myself and fulfil but sometimes when I fail to do so, I come back with double the efforts to cover up the past failure. Hope to know your stories on self-commitments on is.mohanbn@gmail.com
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Everyone's making noise

You step outside your house and you start hearing the honking horns, shouting vegetable vendors, running mill, chatter boxes on the pedestal and loads of other sources of noise. The tap-tap sound of plastic balls, never ending barking of the street dogs, sound waves travelling from different vocal chords and loud speakers just jam our hearing system every moment. There's so much of noise around due to more of unwanted reasons than wanted ones. All these noise enter our brain and misdirect the nerve impulses' direction of travel. The blood rushes through the veins and probably gets jammed without knowing where further to travel because of this sound pollution. Noticing all these I can't stop myself from saying 'Everyone's making noise'.

Amidst the clutter of distorted sounds do we have enough control to concentrate on the things that we are supposed to. When we plan we plan the plan so well in silence without any disturbance that we give the necessary importance to every detail of the plan but the moment we get out into the chaotic world all our planned stuff gets filtered. I sometimes keep wondering why is there no filter for our senses. Just if we could filter what content we would like to hear, what we would like to see, what we would like to smell, what we would like to feel and further. May be talking and tasting are the only aspects over which we can have some sort of control, not the complete control because our eyes and nose taste the food through the appearance and smell before our tongue can taste it. There is just too much of distortion and disorganization in things around us that we get distracted from the path we would have set for ourselves. We forget our life affairs in between the current affairs, we misunderstand our goals living amidst so many fools, we neglect the essentials watching others' pontentials, we ignore our own dreams among the worldly sreams. Its time for us to wake up from the sleep we are living everyday counting on others more than on us.

FOCUS and REINFORCEMENTS are the two keys which will unlock the unperturbed path to our success. You might have heard a zillion times that 'Where Focus goes, energy flows'. There can't be a simpler statement than this. You need to focus on what you want to do and accomplish. We have to accept that we are human beings and have limited memory and concentration. Everytime we lose our focus from our goals we need to reinforce back what we had decided to do and reorient ourselves in doing them again with full zeal. Write down your dreams and goals and focus your complete energy on achieving them. Reinforce in yourself everyday the pleasures associated with achieving those dreams of yours because the moment you let lose of yourself you are sure to be submerged under the ocean of confusions and commotions because 'Remember! everyone's making noise'.

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