Failure

I could see that over the past year with the great depression happening in our globe from daily bombing, unfortunate events, to wars and recession - which represents different levels of failure. Many have tried to stop stigmatizing failure and started to openly discuss its attributes, and how important failure is to our growth; like ailments, to stimulate the body to develop its own immune system. Failure my friends is a medal of honor to be worn rather than hid.

Sunshine all the time makes a desert

Eastern philosophy has existed for thousands of years, throughout its simple anecdotes that strike the mind, it showed us how to see the fabrics of our universe and experience the depth of it by reflecting on its simplest forms from the flower to the dung. We all have come to agree that universe is as it is because of the yin and yang. These opposites are contrasts, but also complements and in this sense dependent upon one another.

Meaning that you would not know it is a day unless you have seen the night, you would not discern the color white without seeing it against others; you would not know happiness unless you have experienced unhappiness, so on and so forth. You would not know you are a success unless you have experienced failure, or as it is historically illustrated through Joseph vision about the 7 fat cows followed by the 7 lean cows. The art of life, so far as these opposites affect us, is to establish a proper equilibrium between them.

Failure is information, failure is feedback; failure is the tail of the coin. I wonder how we openly accept failure when we call it “training” that we happily go every single day to practice a new sport, expecting to fail because we call it training, yet when it comes to new ventures we become resentful and give up at the first failure?! Why so hard on yourself? Why are you not tolerating yourself the same way in life as in sports? Why are you stuck in language and absurd definitions?

Thoughts >> Emotions >> Actions

Every day some 50-60 thousand thoughts go through our head, where 95% are repeated thoughts. Thoughts create your emotions, and emotions influence your actions. Imagine recalling a horrific incident in your life and look at your body reacts the same way as if the incident is happening now. This is how powerful your thoughts are. Emotions are energy in motion when you repress it circles back in your blood stream and causes your body ailments. Short-term repressed emotions may cause coughing, cold, sinus. Long-term repressed emotions like resentment cause cancer. Your body, your ailments; own your thoughts or they will always take you on a ride. How? Meditation in its simplest forms works perfectly in observing your thoughts, and as long as 10 minutes every single day.

When the student is ready, the teacher appears

Perseverance is the art of letting go of expectations without letting go of actions. No wonder you are not making any progress and have a hard time adopting a new habit, no matter how many self-help books you have read and how many quotes you have tweeted, yet no noticeable change from the core. You’re thinking and talking a lot about it, the more you dwell on thinking, the more you expend energy and the more you are thinking about thinking, the more you grandiose the obstacles, the less likely you are to do anything. Just do it, leap and the net will appear. “Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination”

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving

Ancient mystics remind us that the journey is the destination, and yet we persist in trying to make the journey about the destination. Why do we do this? The other side of the problem is obsessing with goals. Goal setting, in fact, impedes you from achieving anything worthwhile rather than achieving. When you set a goal and usually bound it to a milestone and arrive to the milestone; either you will give up because you've achieved your goal, or you will give up because you couldn't. If you do things for results, you will be disappointed. And then you’ll probably give up. When you fixate your eyes on the goal, you miss the journey of continuous learning, you miss the opportunity to change your goal and expand it to something bigger as you go. Ditch goal setting and do things for their own sake. Have a purpose but not a goal. This way your work will never come to an end because the goal is constantly changing but the purpose is fixed. Japanese has a philosophy about never ending goals, Kaizen is a Japanese word for constant and never-ending improvement.

How I apply it to my work? I have a purpose to creating simple and nimble products, through connecting the dots of existing technologies, aiming to service the less fortunate hemisphere of our universe. This is always at the back of my head when I am developing my products, I don't have either the intention or the power to have a product that I will call it final. I will release the product when it's ready, but I will keep enhancing it as I go according to the market and customers' feedback.

Creative ideas show their value to unlock unintelligible connections of facts, allowing man to penetrate deeper into the mystery of life

Humans are known to be bad at reasoning, and good at associations. Meaning that we are always good at observing and realizing patterns rather than getting down to the reason behind why it is happening. We worship the goddess of reasoning, and with it, we create unintelligible connections of facts and call it the truth. Our building blocks become gridlocked with our confined thinking because we based it on associations rather than reasoning. Scientology has unconsciously influenced us that only the things that we can prove, put into language, or prove through equation exists. The sun does not care if you observe it or not, it will still shine, we have to remember that language is human-made and no matter how many words we create to describe what we are observing through our five senses, would always remain short of what true nature really is. Assuming you are still utilizing your five senses in nature, rather than being engrossed into its 4K UHD digital version of it!

Getting out of your own way requires understanding how you surf your life through your judgmental senses and blocks of labels that you have unconsciously built through the years, after many years of societal and religious conditioning that has greatly helped in forming your confined 50-60 thoughts that slowly progress – if ever - as a tortoise in a desert. How would you know which life decisions are yours and which are your society? Meditate.

You have to be on one of two camps; either you only have high IQ and highly influenced by your first impressions – most likely conditioned by your society – and it takes a very long time to alter your first impression. Your first impression is the initial judgment and it acts like the filter you see things through; it reframes all the situations to fit your first impression. On the other hand, you are high on EQ and your first impression initially formed to help see things through, yet your five senses are highly alerted in absorbing new information and realizing patterns of behavior and attitude that help you in updating/altering your initial judgment. It is clear that the latter has better chances thriving and flourishing among others than the former.

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so

Forming new habits is no easy task, it requires the paradigm shift in perspective to appreciate and understand that there are no shortcuts to a good life. In a world submerged with information, we think we are intelligent but we are not. We come to surf life through Google lenses, instant gratification or I am not doing. We have forgotten that in order for one thing to happen, millions of factors are working in the background. With our leaps in science technology, we only have come to know at best is 4% of our universe, yet we act like we know it inside out, assuming that trees should bend for us and conform to our expectations.

Cells that fire together, wire together

The 21 days of forming new habits is a result of observing, that the average time the brain takes to wire a new habit, this also includes unwiring old habits. We form habits when we are not at peace with our thoughts, to escape and avoid our restless mind, and repress the turmoil of our emotions. When we activate one of our senses, we easily turn our focus outwardly to the activated sense at hand. The more senses you activate, the more you evade your elusive mind. Some go to smoking – activates touch, smelling, and hearing. Some use eating – activates smelling, hearing, and tasting. Some use music – activates hearing. Some use sex – engages the five senses.

Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habit. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

Student: “Master, you can't pour anything into my cup until I empty it to make room for what you are trying to give me."

Master: "Yes I know, and I can't give you any new thoughts or ideas or perspectives on life's lessons until you clear out some thoughts that are already teeming in your mind to make room for what I have to teach you. If you truly seek understanding, then first, empty your cup!"

Your mind can’t do its job if it’s filled with inflexible ideologies and judgments. Forming new habits means also decluttering your life from unnecessary wants by detaching from things that pull you down, be it emotions, unused gadgets, wares, clothing, and habits. You have to first empty your cup before you can pour new things into it, or it will simply spillover other parts of your life.

Forming a new habit reminds me of organ transplant, at the beginning, you do the basic analysis to check the environment "Personality and current habits" before you transplant the organ "new habit" to minimize the possibility of rejection by the environment. Throughout the early 21 days, you use Immunosuppressive to reduce the possibility of rejecting the new habit – the mind. Seen as the fine-tuning of the organ in the new environment, a little bit to the left or right in space-time to ensure the least resistance with maximum benefit. The more you reduce the pain points and eliminate resistance by not getting in your own way, the more likely you are to succeed.

“You are what you do, not what you say you'll do”

Another factor you should consider completely before forming new habits is they fit in in relation to others. Sometimes two opposing habits co-exist - and cause dichotomy - and some other times they initially co-exist until one gets stronger and expels the other outside of the environment inviting more habits alike the newly adapted ones. All of us harbor at least nine other employable selves – currently languishing outside of the paid job market. What other selves have you compromised on your way to fit it?

#Empathy #Leadership #Failure #EQ #Consciousness #LifeTrauma #Training #Resilience #Perseverance #Stuck