Willpower - Overrated as ‘the key to success’

What is Willpower? How do we define it?

Willpower can be described as a strong determination that allows you to achieve something, and stay stick to the desire, no matter how difficult the path is. A strong willpower also helps us calmly deal with delays in achievements. Let’s put a good example here to explain willpower better; we, as employees or workers in an organization always get up early in the morning, regardless of how tiring the previous day was. Why? Because our willpower constantly encourages us to avoid getting late or taking a leave at office as it might have negative impact to our productivity.

In today’s era, willpower has become an essential component for success, but has it always been this way?

No. If we go back to the history, people didn’t require willpower,   they used to follow their general instincts to survive and succeed. But with the evolving time, we humans have set lot of rules and boundaries for self and for others to get things in order. Each one of us is rushing to leave behind every other person in the race of competition. And we are hardwired with the belief system that we only will achieve success if we will follow these set rules and regulations.

As per the recent study and an experiment, where students were asked to have the marshmallow right away or wait for 20 minutes and then eat to get extra reward. The study showed that the students who waited for 20 minutes to get the double reward are fared better in later life, than those who ate the marshmallow instantly.

So, it proves that yes, Willpower is important to succeed and people are emphasizing more on strengthening the willpower in today’s era.

Even most of the organizations organize special trainings for their employees to help them strengthen their willpower.

But there are few things which sometimes overpower the willpower and should not be overlooked while traversing the terrain towards your goal. Those few things are; our previous failures which often leave us in discouraged state of mind, our physical health which keeps us drained every day and does not allow us to begin the day with right motivation and courage, and our emotions; low emotions often reduce our motivation level.

Courtesy: AK Mishra Library

Something just popped up in your mind and said that yes, it happens and you have experienced it many times, right? We know it, it happens; and these reasons get overlooked until and unless we face them in our lives. Even if you have unlimited will power, it has its limits, when you face the above mentioned reasons which often holds you back to get up and continue the race. Besides will power, your mental, emotional and physical power play major role. For eg. When you resist getting into an argument which makes no sense to you, it is the emotional and mental power that helps you resist more than the will power.  When you go to the meeting and use various tactics to crack it, it is your mental power. For petty most tasks like the craving for our favourite food or a dress we wish to purchase, we have all the will but our emotional and mental power stops us for varied reasons like health or finance issues respectively. Hence, Willpower is a limited resource, and the other components of success should be at work at times when your willpower starts depleting.

Get success with limited Willpower

Now, when you are aware that willpower is a limited resource, and there are other key components to achieve success, like a plan, a systematic approach; put the plan and systematic approach first and then compliment it with Willpower. Here, with systematic approach, I am also trying to encourage you to create the right environment, right conditions, right set of mind along with right guidance and planning that assure your success. If you will successfully develop a plan, a right environment, right resources; then willpower will act as an added advantage to help you get success.

1. Get in the company of like-minded people who have are experience and who can guide you towards the path of your goal
2. Stay happy and get out of all the emotional dilemmas which may become an hindrance to your success
3. Set right resources for you, the right strategy, systematic plan to achieve your goal
4. Replace your old beliefs and old conditioning of mind – if you have failed earlier, it doesn’t mean you will fail again. Failures are just a stepping stone to success. So, let go of the regrets, rather, use the past mistakes as learning and go for it again. Success will be yours!

Remember, you are reading this article because you have an aim, you have the dream, you have the patience, you are getting right guidance, and you have the will to achieve success. All you need is to work on the above mentioned aeas now to get success in each sphere of life. Good Luck!

How to Properly Complain without Offending Everyone?

If we look the internal structure of a complaint—you wouldn’t be surprised that it’s of the same pattern as a debate. It should go without saying that a debate must be attempted with an appropriate preparation—especially If you’d want to win it—so should a complaint.

Living in a capitalist society that constitutes people of varying mindsets and people who are driven by different motives—it’s inevitable that someone in our vicinity will hurt us in some way or the other. Markedly, it could be anyone; a colleague, a child, a friend or out of all, most likely—your partner.

People around us are often neglectful of something that matters excessively to us. With our definition, people surrounding us are mostly; thoughtless, brusk, offensive or unkind. We don’t often recognize our reactions to the maltreatment people throw at us. We might not agree but our reactions go right from our hearts and clearly depicts who we are. Our reactions can make a substantial difference between a life of a persistent bitterness, constant frustrations and our tolerable peaceful coexistence with so-called our ruthless society.  

An important section that contributes immensely to the art of living is sanely handling those who do us wrong and complain constructively. There are largely 3 main paths which one might opt to complain others;

1.       Shouting Panda

Here we shout, insult, belittle, explode to our extremes to crush our opponents. However, the thing that we often neglect is what lies behind these responses. It’s agitation and broadly a catastrophic feeling of betrayal and hurt. This unsettles us so much and hurts our dignity to such an extent that we find ourselves roaring our way to humiliation. But, at the same time—we also must acknowledge that Shouting Panda guarantees to prevent our complaint from ever being heard, let alone be resolved.

In our way to complain with all our rantings, we often end up offending who have offended us, which entirely dooms our original complaint against them. Here, we achieve nothing!

2.       Holding Panda

Here the victim says very little but hates very quietly and deeply. Here, one doesn’t complain directly from their disparity of ever being understood. This panda is often fueled with self-loathing and feels like he doesn’t deserve to be heard. It gets trapped in primitive self-hatred—resulting in an intense cynicism and melancholy and withdraws himself from the scene itself.

We often learn this technique of complaining in our childhood when we learn to swallow our pain and push it inside us. It often leaked with veiled aggression against those who have done us wrong.

Here too, we achieve nothing!

3.       Adult Panda

Here Panda is mature and knows what he wants to communicate. In order to master such a behavior, we should fundamentally work with a background sense that we don’t deserve meanness and also, that meanness won’t on its own ever be able to disturb us.

We mustn’t put ourselves in a complete chaos, just because someone has said something mean to us—by an insult.

Here are few things Adult Panda can teach us;

·         We should take the meanness from the world in a calm and strategic manner.

·         We must be careful to not belittle our opponents or insult.

·         We must concentrate on how we feel rather than pointing fingers at our opponents.

·         Replace – ‘You’re selfish and evil for doing this to me’ by saying – ‘I feel hurt’.

Even after all the precautions and advice from Adult Panda, we shouldn’t extend our faith to everyone that they would always understand our complaint and accept what we’re trying to convey. But, we voice our complaints anyway, because we know it’s not good to swallow our complaints. And, no one gets benefited from our silence in a long run.

By sketching an appropriate style of complaining, we can fill in our words with reasons and reflections and we can take our hesitant self on the path of Mature complaining—one step at a time.

Happy Complaining!

If you think there is a better way to express a complaint, do let us know in our comment section. We might include it in our article and help several people to improve their complaining.

Also, Check our courses by Success Guru AK Mishra and explore infinite possibilities to improve your lifestyle; Click Here  

How not to care what anyone thinks of you?

Courtesy: AK Mishra Library

One of our most prominent fears which haunt us when we socialize in this world and mingle with others—is that we may in our hearts be not interesting, rather boring. But the good news and fundamental truth too is that no one is ever truly boring. They are only in danger of coming across as such when they either fail to understand their deeper selves or don’t dare or know how to communicate with others.

There is simply no such thing as an inherently boring person or thing—is one of the great lessons of art. Many of the most satisfying artworks don’t feature rare elements, they are evidently about the ordinary, looked from a special perspective, with unusual sincerity and openness to varnished experience.

For example—look at the painting of Whistler’s Mother by James McNeill. It’s a simple depiction of artist’s mother sitting on a wooden chair against a gray wall. Outwardly the scene in the painting is utterly simple and could initially appear to be deeply unpromising material for a painting. Yet, like any great artist, McNeill knew how to interrogate his own perceptions—in a fresh, clear, underivative manner and translated them accurately into his medium—knitting a small masterpiece out of the thread of everyday life. And just as there’s no such thing as a boring everyday life, so too there could be no such thing as an innately boring person.

Humans witnessed in its essence with honesty and without artifice is always interesting.

When we call a person boring—we’re just pointing to someone who doesn’t have the courage for concentration to tell us what it’s like to be them. By contrast, we invariably prove compelling when we succeed in saying how and what we truly desire, envy, regret mourn or dream. In a simpler form if anyone recuperates the real data on what it’s like to exist is guaranteed to have material with which one can captivate others.

An interesting person isn’t always someone with whom obviously and outwardly interesting things have happened: like someone who travelled the world or met importance dignitaries, nor someone who talks about the weighty themes of culture, history or science. On the contrast, an interesting person is someone who can give us faithful accounts, drama, and strangeness of being alive.

Then, what are some of the elements that get in the way of is being as interesting as we in fact are;

Our Loss of Faith

We feel boring and exhibit the same feeling when there is a lack of faith. We often believe that it really could be feelings that would stand the best chance of interesting others. When we tell an anecdote, we majorly concentrate on giving the outward details—like about the weather, people who were involved, what time was it—rather than maintaining courage to report the layer of feelings, beneath the surface—the intricate facts which flashes the moment of guilt, the sudden sexual attraction, the humiliating sulk, that strange euphoria at the middle of the night, every small detail. We should acknowledge that our neglect is not just an oversight, but it could be a deliberate strategy to mold our ideas of dignity and normality. We lack the nerve to look more closely within.

For say, most five-years-old are far less boring than most 45-years old. What’s interesting is that kids don’t necessarily have exciting feelings, far from it, but their sheer frankness and uncensored version of their feelings are what makes their insights interesting.

Our inner-struggle to appear normal

We all feel boring not by our nature—so much as by a fateful will that begins its effect in teenage years to appear normal, even when we’re honest about our feelings. We may still prove boring because we don’t know them as well as we should, so we get stuck at the level of insisting on an emotion rather than explaining it. Any situation is extremely exciting, awful or beautiful, but not to be able to provide those around us with any of the sorts of related details and examples that would help them understand why. We can end up boring not so much because we don’t want to share our lives, as because we don’t yet know them well enough to do so.

Luckily, the gift of being interesting is not an exceptional talent. It requires only direction, honesty and focus. The person we call fascinating is someone alive to what we all deeply want from social intercourses, which is an uncensored glimpse of what the brief waking dream called life feels like.  Through the eyes of another person and reassurance, we are not entirely alone with all that feels most puzzling, strange and strong within us.