Better than YOUR best

Watching Schumacher’s documentary yesterday I realized how athletes at the top of their sports generally have the mindset of competing with one’s self more than competing with others. Schumacher talks about how he becomes one with the car and how important it is to know how much you can push your car. If you push it above its limits the car is not happy and if you are running considerably lower than the car’s limit you are not happy. Its important for both of you to be happy.

I feel this is as important for a race driver as for anyone passionate about their chosen medium. Although it might seem important to do better than someone else racing alongside you its more important that you are in tune with what you have at hand and are pushing it to the best in its abilities. You have to completely block out others to the point that they are trivial and prioritize the highest focus from your mind’s resources for your medium and the task at hand. Constantly recognizing the potentials and limitations of your medium and making the most out of it.

Its easy to say that a better car wins the race and to constantly want a better car and hide behind the fact that you don’t have one It is much more important to come to terms with your own understanding of your limitations and max it out till you can’t do better with it. This is a learning that I wish to keep with me for long.

Maybe its important for you and me to ask. What is my medium of choice? What are its constraints at the moment? What am I trying to achieve with it? And how should I go about it knowing all of the above?

Ingredients of failure

Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will - Suzy Kassem

I was cooking a dish today and wanting to make an improvisation and started thinking if I should take that one step that I havn’t taken before to improve on the recipe at hand. And I started wondering what is it that am afraid of here? The answer was of ‘failure’. Of the dish going bad, of the ingredients going to waste, of my time going to waste. And I began to wonder how bad it was to fail to begin with having broken down the ingredients of the failure.

Ingredients of failure in a dish gone wrong:

Cooking ingredients

Time (about 1-2 hours)

Risk of being hungry or late for the meal

And that was all there was to lose in exchange for trying out something new that would give me a learning for life and added confidence to keep improving. Which is by all means priceless.

And this is a process that can be done with almost every task in our lives.

Sticking to our comfort zones is almost always the default state as our brains are wired to do so. But away from that default is the road less taken, its a place where our sensibilities are more heightened and put into use, its a place where we find our unique way of doing the task at hand.

Its a pity that the fear of failure is so deeply ingrained in our minds through years of conditioning. More the reason to spend all our living days to liberate ourselves from it.

Not Acknowledge the Status Quo

The challenge many a times is to not overturn the status quo or fight against it but to ignore it entirely. The moment we engage with a status quo and bend our will to do something for it or against it we give our power entirely to it. The status quo reduces our identity to binaries of ‘for’ and ‘against’ and we forget what it was we set out to do in the first place. The things that we like and we want to do will sometimes be limited by the artificial constraints around us but to engage in fighting the constraints and forgetting our dreams is not always a solution. At times its more important to side step the constraints than to fight them in order to keep alive our dreams. We need to prioritize what we want to do and acknowledge that we have a limited amount of energy to execute that which is precious to us. You might be able to win the battles you engage in but do you want to prioritize winning a particular battle? Thats the more important question to ask in our finite lives.