Success? Never felt so easy
- BirdieChao
- Mar 31, 2017
- 4 min read
This is Birdie's 3rd personal article
1
Bet all of you have study traits of successful people around the world. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Richard Brandson, Gary Vaynerchuk to whoever you admire. All of the successful people possess this common trait.
While you are brainstorming all the traits that you have came upon, I want you to just choose one of the traits and go deeper into the trait. Ask yourself why can they practice that trait.
If you ended up being discipline and work ethic, congratulations. You got the same answer as me! But let me invite you to think deeper. What caused them to be so discipline and have such strong work ethic?
Let me give you a hint, it's not about drop out, setbacks and bankruptcy.
If you haven't got it, it's that all the successful people are "mind over body". They simply does not surrender to their body desires.
Actually, most of us had already practiced being mind over body before. Sacrificing sleep for exam? Staying up all night for party? hitting the gym till the you cant even pull off just one more rep?
I'm sure you experienced something similar before isn't it? Looking at a chocolaty cake that you are drooling all over but ended up not eating it also counts!
If you do, great! That's the first "wind" of willpower, and there's second, third and forth and so on. And those "winds" meant an energy boost in yourself. You might hit second "wind" before too!
Ever felt so sleepy while revising that you want to just give up and go to sleep,but when you made up your mind to finish the last chapter, suddenly you are energised again?
Ever felt so dead in the night while going without sleep but when everybody decides to start partying again and the fatigue just suddenly dissapeared by itself?
Have you ever felt that your muscles pumped and tired that even raising your hand seems impossible, but you tell yourself "F*** it" and just magically did a few more reps which you don't even expect by yourself?
That's basically it, mind over body. Successful people are just so good at practicing mind over body that they can always force that extra boost of energy out until they achieved what they want.
2
Now you know that “Mind over Body” is the secret, but you have no clue how can you start working on your willpower. Not as if you will study till 3am-4am every day, also not that you will workout till you can't even raise your hand every time. So how can you work on your mind?
It’s not so easy as you think that when you say “Alright! I will start to train my willpower now!” and “Tadaa~” you are successful . It doesn’t work like that.
Ironically, it is also not hard to practice. All you need is just a medium for you to measure. For example through business, sports or just some activity you that's visible. For me personally, I choose to pratice morning ritual. I had achieved some success during the schooldays where I wake up early to prepare breakfast for myself and do a 10-15min yoga. It worked out for the schooldays but for now, it stopped. (I promise I will practice this again!)
As for the approach, you should start by taking small baby steps and every time you step out one step, then you step out the another step. Do not be impatient and use the “fake it till you make it” method. It will be too much of a change suddenly and the chance of giving up is very high. Because I did.
For some cases, you might need to change your negative habits. Our habits form our reality, you are who you are because of your habits. Just like my writing habit, it’s horrible. In my previous post, I wrote a lot of “You guys”, “Out there”, and awkward punctuations. This kind of habits can be toxic and not serving us in certain occasions. All we have to do is just be aware of these habits and have a deliberate action to change them.
3
Changes, always come with pain.
A quote from the article I read yesterday which inspired me to write all this. “First comes the very extremity of distress, then follows unexpected reliefs.”
I hope that all of you will acknowledge that in order to improve yourself, you need to sacrifice something. It might be fun, sleep or maybe freedom. And this wouldn’t be easy to go through because of we are habitual livings. Hence, you need to prepare for resistance in yourself and set the right mind to overcome it.
Persevere through the pain till you are comfortable being uncomfortable, then you will see the rewards of your change slowly popping out.
Success do not need a perfect condition, and many had succeeded despite being no background, wealth or degree. It’s all about the choices you made for yourself.
Quote from Gary Vaynerchuck : “It’s like poker, many had won despite not having the best hand”
Its your choice
To be live in your dreams or to be living your dreams
-BirdieChao
* I might be giving a talk at NLB, 7.30pm on 5th May, Friday. About the reasons why I started blogging and importance of personal branding. However, the speaker of the night is not me, it's Marie Ang, the founder and managing director of Solomon's Guild and the Asia Pacific President of Academic Management Group, LLC. She's the highlight and I'm just there to learn from her and if time permits, then give my own talk.
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