Sunday, January 30, 2011

The reason behind inaction

Do note that the following sharing is a standard I expect of myself, and does not represent the standard I expect of others.

I had an interesting conversation with Alex and Fred form NTU-Ventures today, they posed a couple of questions that led me to believe that I have not entirely been as self-driven as I could be.

When asked about how many times I have had achieved first-place in various aspects of my life (That is to be "number one" whether is it in my studies, CCAs or work performance), I surprisingly wasn't able to provide many instances and observed that I was pretty much second place most of the time in terms of CCAs or academic achievements (If I ever were a leading individual in those aspects).

When provoked to think deeper unto why was that so, I came up with a whole lot of reasons to provide self-justification to reinforce my self-concept, not realizing that self-justification will only lead to the attitudes that supports complacency. Therefore, I realized that in order for us to truly hunger for achievements or success, tolerance for what is mediocre is truly unacceptable.

In order for us to move away from inaction, it is crucial that we:
1. Not be afraid of success or failure

- We have commonly heard people telling us not to fear failures, and that it is often through failure itself that we discover the areas we should work on. However, it is a refreshing thought that since we tend to fail more often than we succeed (In order for us to eventually succeed), we have grown to be comfortable with failure. Thus, we often play down our original goals and objectives, whenever we fall short of them, so that we can remain comfortable with what is mediocre or be contented with what we have invested.

We should therefore, not be afraid to succeed. This being said, refers to identifying and countering our personal resistance to "hope", "dream", and "strive" for the best. It is understood deep inside us that to achieve successes beyond which we are capable of, requires that much greater efforts than what we are capable of giving. Therefore, we often lose the courage to take on "impossible"challenges. However, this "impossible challenges" may not be truly impossible, but was deemed so due to preconceived assumptions. Therefore it is critical that we be able to identify these presumptions, test them and eventually discover that we will always have the potential for greater things.

2. Just do it

This being said, resistance do still come very naturally whenever you attempt to step out of your personal comfort zones (change), all the way till you have gotten comfortable with that change.

Therefore, at times, one great advise would be to simply "Just do it". Take action and have the faith that along the way, there will always be rewards which are worth the risk.

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