Striving towards Excellence

-Karthik Gurumurthy

Perspective is more a question of how you view the world than how the world actually is. Just as it doesn't matter what has happened to you in life as much as it  matters how you deal with it, the art of getting what you want is the art of managing your own mind. So before going any further, I would like to talk about worrying and feeling overwhelmed, because they are..bad management!

"Worry is a form of fear, and all forms of fear produces fatigue"- Bertrand Russell

It is common to worry or feel a little overwhelmed  after college.Your life lies ahead of you and you're not exactly sure what form it's going to take. You may listen to other people's advice, and that advice may be helpful-but the value of such advice is relative, since even you may feel indifferently about yourself in a year or so.

Whatever the specifics of your situation, you have two primary assets to create a new life for yourself: your energy and your clarity of vision. And when you worry or feel overwhelmed, they are the first to go.

Think of pilots. They're trained, when flying in a dense fog or storm, to override their visual perception and trust the guidance of their electronic instruments-rather than staring down and insisting that the bad weather clear on demand.

In this kind of situation, pilots are taught to allow for their own cluelessness and shift to an alternate mode of perception..and ideally they all remain calm.

I used to watch cricket game more often before. I have noticed that when the captains of the teams are interviewed before a semi final or final, they often make the same remark: "We would like to go out there, relax and have fun."

I used to find that odd. These are the most important games in their lives. These performances would play a big part in determining the future course of their careers. Yet they spoke as it referring to some casual street pick-up games.

Then it dawned on me. The statement " I want to relax and have fun" carries a hidden meaning. When athletes are calm rather than nervous, they have more of their natural talents and instincts at their disposal. The same thing applies to all of us.

I speak from great experience. I used to worry all the time. In fact, I was very good at it.

Frankly, I thought it was a noble activity.

Why?

When I worried, I seemed to be industrious. After all, I was thinking about whatever it was over and over, so I couldn't be accused of slacking off- least of all by myself. Not only that, but my worrying implied that I was intelligent enough to know that there was a good reason to worry in the first place!

But I had it all wrong, as I came to realize. There was never a reason to sacrifice my energy. To say it differently, when you are in a situation that is causing you stress and anxiety, there is always another way to understand it.

To begin. If the way you understand a dilemma determines how easily you will work out, then if  you are having the problem, the important question is not only "What is the problem itself?" but also "How am I seeing it? What are the boundaries  it has in my mind? Am I framing this so that there's no possible solution, and so that effective action will be impossible? or can I find a way to understand this so that my perspective helps rather than hurts, and inspires rather than defeats?"

That is the goal.

Creating your own perspective suggests that you accept responsibility for the way your life is. That's a tall order and some people may not want to go there. After all, if they are responsible for the condition of their lives, it also implies that they have attracted the bad things that have happened.