The Otherwise Wasted Reserves....On Motivation

Whenever I go on a jog it is always easier at the very beginning but after about 15 minutes it becomes difficult as the lactic acid begins to build up in the muscles that are active. And then its downhill from there; every single step, every breath, even the cadence of tapping feet on the ground and swinging arms demand more and more effort. Each strained breath and drenched attire attest to the effort being employed to move the body closer and closer to the finish line, the final lap – the end of the road. Sometimes I have to run against a hindering breeze that feels like invisible strands slowing me down or sometimes I have the wind behind me pushing, urging me forward like a yacht with a gale filling up its sails. But through all this one fact remains, an hour into the jog I have used up all my energy and consequently I am tired, smelly, aching, my throat feels parched and sometimes I am even blinded by the sweat constantly dripping into my eyes because my arms are too tired to even mop them up quick enough. This is when I feel like quitting; stopping for a breath, or a sip of water – my heart is racing furiously and my ankles may be reluctantly obedient but my knees are on the verge of mutiny. Almost without fail this happens approximately an hour my jogging session (my target is 2 hours at 2 or 3 miles per hour) – and I am always faced with the same quandary, should I go on, should I rest a while or should I just stop? This is when I have to dig deep into my Reserves, that 95% of my mind that is just being not utilized and wasting away until such a moment when it becomes critical to the achievement of the goal at hand.

Any experienced athlete, especially long distance runners will tell you that once you begin to run you must never stop until you reach the end of the race, or you achieve your target. They will also tell you not to either run too fast or to slow but to maintain an even pace from the beginning to the end, whether going up a hill, down a ravine, against the wind or riding in front of a breeze. They will also tell you to regulate your breathing and to endeavor to take long deep breaths instead of short shallow breaths that are tempting and almost unavoidable but with training can be overcome. When I begun to jog a few months ago I couldn’t do any of these things and it has been an incredible [and ongoing] struggle to become disciplined enough to jog constantly and correctly. In the very beginning I could not even jog for 10 minutes straight without stopping 4 times; I used to take water breaks constantly, I used to wheeze, run out of breath, cough and generally do more walking than jogging. But I dug deep into my normally wasted reserves – that part of the mind that is just kept tucked away until a mother’s baby is trapped underneath a car and she is suddenly strong enough to lift the heavy car to save her child, or a fellow soldier is shot and wounded and needs a brave soul to run into danger to the rescue. Human beings are constantly outstripping their perceived limits to achieve impossibilities especially in the face of insurmountable odds. For me its every time I defy 5 years of heavy smoking and jog for 2 hours non-stop; its every time I take 10 – 15 hours of my week to write and correct this blog (YES! It sometimes takes that long to craft these 3 paragraphs or so); its every time I wake up and stare depression and unhappiness in the face and smile regardless; its every time a business deal goes awry, I am cheated, circumvented, unpaid, disappointed or things just don’t work out and I still press on with essential lessons and more experience; its every time I work out when I wake up, and every time I refuse to regress and smoke another cigarette.

For though my victories may be small, my realization is that digging into my Reserves for these minor things on a constant basis has begun to transform me into a more motivated and disciplined individual than I have ever been. I can still remember clearly the first day I jogged for a full 2 hours and almost 5 miles; that night I couldn’t sleep because my knees and ankles felt like lead weights and my whole body was undergoing fierce agony. To top it off, my morning was even worse! But I dug into my reserves, even deeper than before and got some Deep Heat medication liberally soothing all the ‘trouble spots’, bandaged my knees and wore double socks and went running again. I did this for a week by the end of which all the pain was gone, and I could push myself for 2 and a half hours, sometimes three hours even and I didn’t have to do so with trepidation because it was becoming easier and easier to reach deep into and utilize my innate Reserves. I spent my whole summer jogging, pushing up, crunching, lifting weights and there were times that I slacked, I injured myself a few times and even now I just don’t have enough time to work out as much and also take care of all my responsibilities. But I can say one thing for myself – I have learnt one of the most important lessons in my short life so far: I can do anything if I put my mind to it. If does not matter how impossible it seems, how difficult it will be, how much effort, time, energy and sacrifice that will be required but so long as I can dig deep within myself, within those reserves that God put in each and every one of us, I CAN AND WILL ACHIEVE ANY GOAL! If you don’t use your reserves, then they will just waste away and you will just not fully achieve your true potential. Dig deep into your reserves and Success will be inevitable.

Cheers and God richly bless you all!

            

The Lucky Percent’s 10,000 Hours...The Truth About Talent!

THE BIZMIC himself is back! It has been a while since I laid bare some of my roaming thoughts and opinions because I have been battling against a great many business priorities as well as personal and emotional issues. Yes, even the motivational and inspiring Bizmic is sometimes unmotivated, uninspired or simply has little time to write. But then BMIC must live on; and I must be disciplined and focused to educate, motivate and inspire others with my gift; my writing; My Talent! My question for you today is are you also one of the so called ‘lucky ones’ who are talented in something like art, sports, music, dancing, cooking, inventing, or in a particular area such as mathematics or comedy. Are you one amongst the fortunate few, the extremely blessed, the exceptions to the rule – The Lucky Percent? Is your gift as simple as being ‘beautiful’ or ‘handsome’, being remarkably intelligent, or easily learning languages? Have you identified your innate talent or are you a one of the vast majority I call the Other Percent: unremarkable and seemingly normal in every way. During my ‘intermission’ from writing I have dedicated a lot of thought to why I write and always seem to be musing over philosophical subjects, reading, writing and pursuing profit-making business ventures. I was beginning to think that I am simply one of those lucky people who are naturally talented at writing, and also one of the lucky few with an uncanny ability to monetize my time and energy. It appears that I am just plain lucky, that I was simply born this way, right? I begun to harbor a rather elitist view that I was an esteemed member of The Fortunate Few and thus I was better off than most other people and would naturally succeed no matter what. Thanks to a YouTube Video a friend posted on my Facebook page I have done some further research and come to the conclusion that Talent is not necessarily equal to Success.

Being talented at something is not a guarantee that one will excel in that area. According to bestselling author, Malcolm Gladwell in an interview promoting his recent book, “The Outliers”, talent is not simply about being naturally good at doing something but rather gaining proficiency at that task over constant and ‘deliberate practice’. He stresses the “10,000 Hour Rule” which he uses to illustrate the point that to be truly great at doing something you need 10,000 hours of practice, which is also equal to about 4 hours of practice everyday for 10 years. Gladwell asserts that achieving greatness requires enormous amounts of time spent practicing; he used the musical talents of the greatest and most successful rock band in history, The Beatles, as well as the programming talent of the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, as examples. The Beatles performed live in a strip club in Hamburg, Germany over 1,200 times, doing 8 hour daily sessions from 1960 to 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time and Gladwell deduces that this incredible amount of time performing was critical to shaping their talent, “so by the time they returned to England from Hamburg, Germany, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.” Bill Gates gained access to a computer in his high school in 1968 at the tender age of 13 – he then spent way more than 10,000 hours programming it and any other computer he could lay his hands on. Gladwell interviews Gates, who says that unique access to a computer at a time when they were not commonplace helped him to succeed. Without that access and subsequent constant practice, Gladwell states that Gates would still be “a highly intelligent, driven, charming person and a successful professional”, but that he might not be worth US$50 billion or so he is worth today.

These and many other examples reveal the real truth about talent: Talent consists of a profound Love for something that is transformed into a Desire to succeed in turn inducing Constant and Deliberate Practice. I mean what if Bill Gates had not spent copious amounts of time programming, or The Beatles gave up playing long 8-hour stints at the German strip club, or I didn’t spend thousands upon thousands of hours reading everything I got my hands on. Would Gates be the wealthy computer genius he is today; would The Beatles be the greatest rock band; would my vocabulary be as polished and erudite as it is? People always ask me why I read so much and my response is always that love reading and I desire to improve my vocabulary and sentence construction and I am not quite at 10,000 hours of writing yet but I’m getting there, day by day, blog by blog. I have been involved in one kind of formal business or another for more than 3 years now and I gain more proficiency and experience in my various businesses as I spend more time deliberately practicing proposal writing, drafting of contracts, deal negotiations, understanding financial information and implementing ideas to create value so in another 7 years of continuing on this path I can guarantee that I will be a Business Guru who is wealthy and quite successful. It appears that the whole point of going to school from Kindergarten through to University, Internships, Apprenticeships and the like is just to equip a young inexperienced individual with their 10,000 hours of practice. It is important to note that it is only something that you love and are willing to work hard at, patiently and with resilience that you will become extremely skilled at doing – in other words your talent is equal to what you desire to constantly and deliberately practice. Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney said in reference to his job that, “You can’t get to places like this without working really hard, loving what you do...and having enormous amounts of energy, patience and resilience”. Note that he was with Disney for almost 30 years before becoming CEO. To reiterate, you may be lucky to have your talent but you will succeed only if you hone that talent with constant and deliberate practice because it takes a long time and massive amounts of effort and toil to succeed at anything so get to work amassing your 10,000 hours at the end of which you are warmly welcome to the much vaunted ranks of The Lucky Percent.

Cheers and may God bless you all!