Weekly Thoughts, Meditations and Ramblings

I have heard many people say to me that we should now work smart not work hard. Working hard is what our parents did. Now with modern technology we can work smart and we do not have to work hard.

I do not find this true, however, I am not going to dismiss working smart either. Working smart has its place. Its just not at the beginning when you are getting started at something.

When you are beginning or you are a newcomer you cannot work smart, because you are not smart yet to begin with. What is smart? Smart would be to know the ins and outs in your particular field. To know the tricks to be more efficient. To know how to yield the most results in the most efficient way. All these things you will learn only if you work hard, make mistakes and learn from experience what works and what does not. There is just no way around it. There are no shortcuts to this.

After years of working hard and knowing the tricks of the trade like it is the back of your own hand, you can now perform well almost effortlessly and now you can work smart. So it should not be work hard vs work smart. It should be work hard first and then work smart later.

Well, I am Indian and my ancestors were invaded by the British at one point in history and one thing my ancestors observed that the British were very good at is to divide and conquer. Most of your probably know what it means. To those that don't, it simply means to divide a group of people based on their differences and segregate them. That was they can be managed aka conquered easily.

This tactic is also useful for helping you in your life if you want to be more objective. Simply divide an object and start to see it for what it really is.

For example: Say you are attracted to a woman. You find her very beautiful. You want to come up to her but you are nervous. You cannot be rational and objective when you are overcome with..."nervousness". One thing you can do is to divide and conquer.

Divide her features. Say she has attractive eyes. Then picture in your mind her eye ball. On its own is it attractive? Or how about her beautiful luscious hair? Picture a strand of that hair in your soup. Is it attractive? The more we learn to see things for what they are the more level headed and objective we become. (Yes, I realize this paragraph makes me sound like a psychopath)

Her eyes and hair and nose complement each other. But on their own they really aren't great. This will help you to take control of yourself and most importantly-be yourself. Divide and conquer.

You are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of your work then simply divide it into small managable volume, and do not look at the whole. Sometimes the sheer size of it, so to speak, overwhelmes us. Making it into small manageable sizes makes it easier to conquer. Just ask the British.

There are a lot of information to be had. And there are a lot of things we can know and find out. This is good but it can also lead us to loose our focus.

Its very important to know what you want otherwise we will allow ourselves to be bombarded by useless information upon useless information

It seems we have developed this impulse to want to find out something which we do not know.

It is important to remind ourself that it is ok to not know it. It is not important to know what Lindsay Lohan birthday or her early life for example. It is not important to know what is Bread is in african language.

You may have noticed many times when you are sitting alone and idle your mind is wandering and it goes "I wonder if..." Well, instead of picking up your smartphone and finding out the answer, you should fight the impulse and keep wondering or better yet, shut of your mind and tell yourself to not think useless things and be in the present moment.

Contary to popular beliefs, its good to not know everything. Its ok. Knowledge is power but there is also something known as power abuse.

Learn how to not know and use your imagination. More importantly, learn how to be in the present moment. Stop this cycle of madness and impulse. You know enough. Now know nothing.

After reading countless numbers of self help and self motivational books I have come to the conclusion that very few books are realistic. I guess it is because reality is not very...motivational?

Reality tells you that life is not happy all the time no matter how many times you want to practice The Secret. You are going to fail....a lot. People will not always like you no matter how many times you read Dale Carnegie's book.

Often times we blame people for being a bubble buster for being realistic. But being realistic is helpful...mainly because that is where we happen to live. In the real world. Irrespective of what we want to tell ourselves there is no such thing as a 4 hour work week (even Tim Ferris works more than that) there no short cuts. Please live the dream...in your dream.

There is something that many motivational speakers or books will tell you that is probably the cause of your misery which is "pursue your dreams" but are all your dreams worth pursuing? Because in our dreams we are rocking the stage with our guitar solo, we are on the cover of the Time magazine, we are on the list of Forbes.

We dream only of the results. No one dreams of having swollen fingertips that comes with practicing the guitar for years, no one dreams of working non stop and tortureless hours. And unfortunately, that is what reality is. The reality is, to achieve your so call high falutin' dreams you need to work hours upon hours. Practicing the skills needed. And not every one can give that kind of dedication and commitment.

If it was so easy Eric Clapton would not be what he is today.

We need to think more about the process than the results. Most of the people are very result oriented, we need to be more process-oriented. Because majority of the time its about the process than the result. Its a long path with no end in sight. Eric Clapton still to this day practices his guitar skills and perfecting it.

You would think he is resting his laurels but no. Are you willing to do that?

We can dream all we want but let it be a dream. Its not harmful to dream because there are no repercussion in dreams. But there are repercussions in reality. In your dreams you can be a successful best selling author or artist in an instant.

In reality you have work countless hours and experience countless failures and rejections before getting some semblence of success for a few short minutes before you go back to working and failing.