Of Success and Failure

It is better to play to win than to lose; it is better to wear out than to rust out. It is better to aim for excellence and not get lost in success. When one puts oneself on the track of excellence, it brings out inherent talents to light. It is said those who have never angered anyone is a failure in life. Similarly, a person who has never lost has never found the joy of winning. No doubt there is a joy in winning and pain in losing and if one does not accept both then it is like expecting the river to have one bank, the river is contained by two sides of the bank, is it not? Winning involves four important dimensions: Self-confidence, mental toughness, winning-oriented thinking and the ability to innovate. Self-confidence stands on three important pillars: feeling good, taking responsibility and developing skills. One has to learn the art of feeling good even in moments of pressure. The quality of life is the quality of one's consistent emotion. One has to master the art of keeping emotion in a state of well-being; search for such a state of consciousness. At moments of pressure, the mind tends to validate itself unconsciously on incidents where one is in pressure. In cricket, when wickets are falling, new players are under great pressure. Past failures will influence present situations. So we are not living in the present but we are living in our past. In my interactions with cricket players i tell them that when they are under pressure, they should consciously recreate their future and not their past. How can one do that? That is the responsibility and discipline one should have. Create your future from the commitment to win and with the wisdom gained out of your past failure. Recollect in your mind incidents for example, in cricket when a particular player was under tremendous pressure and faced with failure and yet how the player has bounced back. You should have these references ready and alive in you even before the match. One has to train one's body to be in the peak state, one's emotions to be in peak state and one's spirit also to be in a peak state. In such a peak state, a different quality of energy emerges and will influence one's action. Mind has to be tough for doing so. One has to teach and value a mind so as not to be disturbed. Once when you value it, action emerges from such an action. Your actions are an extension of your values. At the end, one also has to understand that failures are fertilisers to success. In fact, failures are postponed success. Don't fear failure but learn from failure. In failure there are recipes for success. By worrying and fearing, you miss learning. But observe and be unaffected by failure. With such a self-esteem one's winning and losing will only enhance one's talent and value. Cultivate interest in innovation for that is what will encourage and inspire you. Innovation will happen through focus, practice and inspiration. All that one can do is to put in consistent best efforts consciously. Success and failure are two sides of the same coin; irrespective of the best effort one puts in, you will have to face both success and failure at different times. There is no need to get discouraged by failure or unduly elated by success, for the time will come when the successful face failure and those who have failed will taste success. Swami Sukhabodhananda

Hope and Faith

The car you drive has a large windshield, but only a relatively small rear view mirror. The implication is obvious: What happened in your past is not nearly as important as what is in your future. Where you are going is much more important than where you've been. If you stay focused on the past, you're liable to miss numerous excellent opportunities ahead. Don't let disappointment become the central theme of your life. Quit mourning over something you can't change. God wants to give you a new beginning, but you have to let go of the old before you'll ever see the new. Let that door close behind you and step through the door in front of you. Maybe you've allowed other people to convince you that you're never going to rise higher, that you will never see your dreams come to pass. Don't believe them. When Caleb was a young man, he and Joshua were part of an exploratory spy mission to determine the strength of the enemy before God's people moved into the land that God had promised them. Out of the twelve spies, only Caleb and Joshua presented a positive report to Moses. They were all too willing to settle for the second best, to dwell for the rest of their lives right where they were. Unfortunately, that group of negative thinkers never did make it into the Promised Land. They spent the next forty years spinning their wheels and wandering around aimlessly in a desert. By then Caleb was 85 years old, but he hadn't given up on the dream God had placed in his heart. He told Joshua that he was still as strong as he was when the promise first came to him. Caleb went back to the same place and asked god for that mountain to live on. The mountain he claimed had five giants living on it. Surely, he could have found a place less fortified, more accessible, or more easily occupied. Although it is forty years later, he believed until he has seen that promise being fulfilled. That's the kind of attitude we need to have. We give up too easily. No, keep pressing forward, and keep believing. Keep yourself stirred up. You've got the gifts, the talents and the dreams. Don't allow complacency to keep you from seeing god's promises fulfilled in your life.

Wings of Fire....A P J Abdul Kalam

Each individual creature on this beautiful planet is created by God to fulfill a particular role. Whatever I achieved in life is through His help and an expression of His will. He showered His grace on me through some outstanding teachers and colleagues and when I pay my tributes to these fine persons, I'm merely praising His glory. All these rockets and missiles are His work through a small person Kalam, in order to tell several million mass of India, to never feel small or helpless. We all are born with a divine fire in us. Our efforts should be to give wings to this fire and fill the world with the glow of its goodness.
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I have always been a religious person in the sense that I maintain a working partnership with God. I was aware that the best work required more ability than I possessed and therefore I NEEDED HELP THAT ONLY GOD COULD GIVE ME. I made a true estimate of my own ability, then raised it 50 per cent and put myself in God's hands. In this partnership, I've always received all the power I needed and in fact have actually felt it flowing through me. Today, I can affirm that the kingdom of God is within you in the form of this power, to help you achieve your goals and realise your dreams.
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All reasonable men adapt themselves to the world. Only a few unreasonable ones "persist" in trying to adapt the world to themselves. All the progress in the world depends on these unreasonable men and their innovation and non-conformist actions.
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It is essential for a project manager to learn to live with uncertainty and ambiguity.
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I believed they drew sustenance from within. They relied more on the inner signals and less on the external cues.
Are you aware of your inner signals?
Do you trust them?
Do you have the focus of control over your life in your own hands?
Take this from me, the more decisions you can make avoiding external pressures, which will constantly try to manipulate and immobilise you, the better your life will be, the better your society will become. The entire nation will benefit by having strong, inner-directed people as their leaders.
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Your willingness to use your own inner resources to invest your life, especially your imagination, will bring you success. When you undertake a task from your own uniquely individual standpoint, you will become a person.
You, me, everyone on this planet is sent free by Him to cultivate all the creative potential within us and live at peace with our own conscience. We differ in the way we make our choices and evolve our destiny. Life is a difficult game. You can win it only by retaining your birthright to be a person. And to retain this right, you will have to willing to take the social and external risks involved in ignoring pressures to do things the way others say they should be done.
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Above all things, reverence yourself.

Thought of the day

To know how to say what other people only think is what makes men poets and sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think, makes men martyrs or reformers, or both.

Elizabeth Rundle Charles, writer (1828-1896)

today's ideas

Today is my sister's birthday and i decided to start writing again. I'll start with the following:
1.) By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong.
2.) Thank God for What You Have,Trust God For What you Need

what is the meaning of growing numbers.....

It is not how old you are, but how you are old. -Jules Renard, writer (1864-1910)

When I don't write.................

Whatever philosophies people offer you or you offer to yourself for your life path, nothing changes the fact that it is all about your decisions. It is as simple as that. Nothing is free and nothing is permanent. Every moment we are deciding what will happen next. just cause and effect relationship and it is our way of thinking, our approach which makes us what we are. Therefore it is very important that you take your decisions yourself, about everything which is related to you.............time to have dinner :)