I am a high achiever. Since early age, I have been ambitious and over the years I have developed a mindset that feeds my big appetite. Some people think that I am just a rat in a rat race. But, believe me, I know too well that life is not about ambition. To me, goals and achievements are like a video game levels which I pass and move on to the next ones.
That being said here are 7 THINGS THAT I LIVE BY TO REACH MY GOALS (when and if I have any):
N1) PUT WORK
No secret here. No bullshit. If you want to succeed you have to put work. Anyone who says otherwise is either a liar or won the lottery.
So unless you are one lucky fella, you have to put sweats and tears into your goals. That’s the only way you can truly succeed.
N2) I NEED PLANS
If I don’t know what I am going to do after 30 minutes, then my day is a waste. I need a strict plan which I have to follow. It makes things so much easier and I do not waste time on “imagining” how my day will turn out.
Instead, each night I put on a schedule for the following day. That way, I know what I am going to do and I do not waste time throughout the day.
N3) GOODBYE SOCIAL LIFE
People ask me how did I manage to achieve success while also being social. The sad truth is I didn’t. Social interactions absorb my mental energy.
When I am having an argument with my friend, and after an hour I sit down to work, I can’t be productive. All I do is analyze what my friend said, why he said it or how I should have reacted. I can’t do that if I want to concentrate on building skills.
Yes, sometimes I invest time in friends and people from whom I can learn. Sometimes I hang out with old friends whom I missed or with my family. But my time is usually limited and I generally don’t hang out frequently.
N4) SACRIFICE SHORT-TERM DELIGHT
In 10th grade, I had the opportunity to study astronomy and possibly participate in International Olympiads. However, I did not study for them as I believed that it was better to concentrate on some theoretical components before rushing into problem-solving.
People thought I was making a mistake, including my mum, teachers and friends. I did not participate in any International Olympiad in 10th grade.
The next year? 4 International Science Olympiad medals in a single year.
This brings me to my next point.
N5) OTHERS DON’T KNOW YOU
Hello others, I am Ara Mambreyan and you have no idea what goes inside my head.
In 9th grade, I heard how one of my teachers said that I wouldn’t succeed in science; 6 International Science Olympiad medals since then. “The dumbest person in that basketball team”; 5 National Basketball Championship gold medals while being a starter. “I don’t think writing is yours”… decent writing skills now (or so I would like to believe).
People don’t know you. Yes, it’s important to hear every advice and weigh each opinion. But it all comes down what works for YOU!
N6) FORGET PRIDE
My teacher says that I am dumb. Who cares?
If he thinks so, it’s because I left such an impression. It’s not personal. It’s either my idiosyncrasy or his. Either way, you do not have to lose the opportunities someone provides — be it partnership, knowledge or advice — just because they don’t like you.
Pride is not a good nothing. Yes, it’s important to know your worth. But people are… well, people and you have to understand everyone.
There is nothing personal…
N7) OH, BUT TAKE IT PERSONALLY
The only way you can succeed is if you really, really, want something. Motivation is like the fuel that you have to drive the road of success. If you don’t have it, you better settle.
But to have motivation, you have to take things personally. You have to want to prove the world your worth, prove that people were wrong about you, prove that you are great…
Who want sympathy and assurance that you still got time left.
People who genuinely believe they have wasted their time and want to make a genuine effort to achieve something.
If you are the 1st person then I’m sorry, this answer is not for you.
If you belong to the 2nd group then this answer might help you.
Lets go by facts and logic rather than blindly saying “ohh, you have a lot of time still left”.
No matter if you are in your 20s, 30s or 40s. If you feel like you have wasted past X years of your life means it’s a fact and cannot be changed.
The good thing though is that you have a realisation of the time you have wasted, unlike other people who are still delusional.
The very first thing you would need to do is to accept the fact and later analyse the cause of why exactly have you wasted X precious years of your life.
Analyse what went wrong:
Were you lazy? or were you engaged in some activities which consumed your time?
What exactly was the thing which made you waste your time.
Were you spending all your time on social media or were you in a relationship which took all the time away from you.
Once you are done finding the culprit, half your job is done.
2. Find a way to fix it:
Once you know what’s holding you back, you need a way to fix it.
If you feel you waste time because you are glued to phone all day, you cannot simply change that by saying “ohh, from tomorrow I will spend less time on my phone”.
We all know that never works, there needs to be some serious action taken against the thing which is wasting your time.
Like switching off your phone or using a dumb phone instead of a smartphone.
Extreme times call for extreme measures.
If there is something which has wasted years of your life then you won’t get rid of it unless you take extreme measures.
3. Keep track of your time:
Get a wrist watch and a journal, track your activity by every hour.
Note everything you have done in your journal by every hour.
I know it sounds silly but you won't be able to tell if you have improved unless you have some metrics to measure your performance.
Review your time journal at the end of the day to see how you did.
Once you do it for about a week you will realise how well you did and it will give you a sense of satisfaction and you will feel in control of your time.
4. Achievement comes from efforts:
People tell me, I’ve invested X months on gaining a skill or X years working on my business yet I am not successful.
The reality of the situation is they are tracking the wrong metric, what really counts are the efforts.
You can achieve more than other people in the same about or even less time by putting in more effort.
To sum it up:
Realise, analyse, fix, track and put in the effort and you should be good.
I had joined Kreatryx coaching(June-December 2017) and got AIR 24 in gate 2018.
My strategy was to practice more and more rather than studying notes again and again. Numerical practice helps to remember concepts.
From june to sep:- Day schedule:-
6 hr classes (8am to 2pm)
after class i used to sleep for 2hr so that i could feel fresh before start studying
Read notes for 1 hr and used to solve problems on that topic from koncept booklet and gate previous year(2-3hrs)
Daily i used to study 3:30-4hrs, in that almost 2:30-3 hrs were for practice only because most of the theory was covered in class in much effective way.
From oct to dec:- I started revision of some subjects along with classes.
Read notes 1 hr and used to solve problems on that topic from koncept booklet, and gate previous year
1:30-2hr for revision subject(Revised from notes in short way(formulas and some of concepts) and did practice from krash material and some of previous year questions.)
From 28 dec to 31 jan:- I used to study 7-9 hrs.
Revised notes
Solved gate previous year and krash material
Attempted mock test in alternate 3 days and subject test on alternate day(Because i had left many subject test so now after revising one subject i attempted one subject test.)
From 1 feb to 8 feb:-
Read notes of all subjects
Attempted 4 mock tests
9Feb:-
Read all Knotes(Short Notes)
I mentioned approx time because there was no fix time for particular task. My aim was to complete that task even it takes more/less time.
Every student has different strategy and schedule. I suggest you that make your own strategy and try to solve problems as much as you can. Quality of material is more important than quantity because you will learn more concepts and approach.
Narcissists are addictive! You want him so badly because you have been trained to want him.
When Narcissists want a woman, they go all out to get her attention. They are not at all shy because they are totally focused on their goal: Getting you to want them. And they usually have had a lot of experience with women and have a pretty good repertoire of techniques that work for them.
They stand out in this way from the average guy who can be shy, awkward, or simply less determined and confident by comparison.
Then later, when your Narcissistic guy “has” you, suddenly you are no longer the most important thing in the world to him. The thrill of the chase is over and he starts to find fault with you, or gets bored. His attention wanders.
As he pulls away, most women respond by thinking that if only they try harder, they will get the really amazing and incredibly attentive guy they fell in love with back. When this does not work, the fights start and the relationship turns ugly. Suddenly everything you do is wrong and he lets you know this continuously.
Cut to the chase: The relationship ended, you stayed strong for a while, but now he is back courting you again.
Wanting him back is like being tempted by the idea of ice cream when you are on a diet:
Logic tells you that you are better off without the ice cream, but your sense memories of the smell, taste, and texture of ice cream on your tongue tempt you to have it anyway.
As with a diet, it is easy to lose sight of your main goal—whether it is dropping 20 pounds so you like the way you look in a bathing suit again—or remembering with your “hoovering” ex that after he gets you back, he will treat you badly again so you need to stay away.
His “in and out” Behavior: Part of his allure is due to his use of what psychologists call “intermittent reinforcement:” you never know when he is going to call you or pull back.
This is equivalent to the rat in a cage in a psychology experiment who is being trained to keep pressing a bar that occasionally drops a food pellet into its cage. If the bar is taken away entirely, the rat can recover and eventually finds out that there are other ways to get food. However, if the food bar is sometimes there delivering pellets and sometimes not there; every time it reappears the rat goes back to pressing it again.
Punchline: Of course you want the ice cream! Of course you want love! That is why you are hoping your Narcissist food bar will go back to delivering love pellets again.
Solution: The basic solution requires you to:
Step 1: Distraction: Get busy to get your mind on other things. Start some new projects. Date other people. Plan outings with your friends.
Step 2: Remember the Bad: Make a mental film of him being mean to you and play it in your mind every time you weaken and want him back. Make a list of all the bad things he did to you and all the reasons that he is a bad choice as a mate.
Step 3: Re-commit to your Goal: As with a diet, or giving up smoking, or foods to which you are allergic, you have to recommit to your goal periodically. We all slip up, we all get tempted. Go back to reminding yourself of what you do want that is good for you. In your heart, you know it is not him.
Elinor Greenberg, PhD, CGP
In private practice in NYC and the author of the book: Borderline, Narcissistic, and Schizoid Adaptations: The Pursuit of Love, Admiration, and Safety.
It begins innocuously as a saviour and at the end, it can turn us into sugarcane bagasse!
Fear is one of the basic life-saving instincts provided. As I have written repeatedly that there is no function in the body which is superfluous. However, when the balance is lost, even protective mechanisms can kill us.
Fear is an essential built-in quality in us which helps us ‘fight, flight, fright, and freeze’. All these are necessary to save ourselves when our life is threatened. The fear stimulus is withdrawn immediately when we experience, ‘tend and befriend’.
There is a special structure in our brain which is the head of the department of ‘fear’. It is called amygdala (because it is like an almond). We have two amygdalae, the right and left. Negatives thoughts of fear are generated in the right amygdala while fear associated with positive excitement is handled by the left amygdala.
Daniel Goleman named the condition of the overreaction of the amygdala to any given emotion as ‘emotional hijack.
Amygdala is a checkpoint of our input!
Thalamus is like a sorter which distributes all our sensory input to all parts of the cortex. Before it does this, it makes these senses go through the security screening of the amygdala. If amygdala has any previous record of a particular input being harmful or threatening; it sounds the bugle and declares an emergency even before the rational prefrontal cortex steps in. The sensory input or inadvertent thought is never logically and rationally attended to by the brain and before any action is taken by the cortex, the amygdala or security guard takes preventive action and that action is fear. The amygdala generates fear so that we do not expose ourselves to the toxic effects of the dangerous signal.
Pavlov’s experiment of classical conditioning
Pavlov performed historical experiments on human conditioning. Take, for example, this simple experiment. He paired two stimuli. 1) An electric shock 2) The sound of a bell. He gave an electric shock to a dog and recorded electrical changes in the dog and he always associated the sound of a bell parallelly along with the electric shock. To his surprise, he found after repeated exposure to this dual stimuli, that exposure to one stimulus like the sound of a bell without an electric shock would bring about the same reaction of electric shock in the dog.
Unfortunately, our fear is always paired with something else. I would like to tell youngsters my story of fear and anxiety and how I got rid of it! (maybe a little late in life)
I learned it a little late, nevertheless, I mastered the way to overcome fear. However, fear at a younger age had left some indelible scars in me. I have dedicated the rest of my life to educating those who have become victims of this avoidable Frankenstein Monster!
It was in the year 1960 when I was preparing to go to High School, my father for some reason thought that I should learn typewriting and shorthand. During summer holidays before school opened, I was sent to a nearby town where this facility was available. I was supposed to stay in a cheap accommodation of an open hall exposed to all guests walking in and out of the room. That isolated and circumscribed stay in a huge hall itself was a psychological shame.
An astrologer was staying in one of the rooms in that hotel. He somehow wanted to attract me towards him (maybe he was a homosexual, I am not sure because he never treated me badly in that sense). He just materialized a popular sweet from a nearby famous restaurant in an instant under a pillow (I still don’t know how he did that magic) and displayed his supernatural power to a youngster. I believed in him completely. He started foretelling my future. I became curious. He said that my father is going to die shortly. This news shocked me. Suddenly the picture of the whole family who were all dependent on my father was projected in front of me. I shuddered. I believed him. My heart started racing and sweating. The next day I ran back to my village and obsessively started observing my father and other members of my family, always thinking about how and when this tragedy would unfold. It became stressful for me. I lived through that stress throughout my younger days and by my 18th year, I was diagnosed as ‘anxiety neurotic’. That incident was the trigger point to contract severe anxiety.
Do you know how I was affected by those astrologer’s words?
Whenever I saw my father, I thought of his death because the astrologer had told me that he would die. Perhaps, the news of the death of my father was coupled with his presence. Whenever I saw him, I was reminded of the prophecy of that astrologer. That was unfortunate in my case. By repeated stimulation of the same thought, the very presence of my father led me to a state of phobia and that was converted into ‘anxiety neurosis’ because of continued long term potentiation.
What is this long term potentiation (LTP)?
Imagine that there is an event where we are supposed to keep clapping as long as the lead-clapper is clapping and we are supposed to stop immediately after he stops. Surprisingly, we cannot immediately stop along with the lead-clapper. We invariably clap one or two times more. This process of adaptation to a task is called long term potentiation (LTP). The mechanism of memory is based on LTP. New receptors of the glutamate neurotransmitter are recruited in this process. Normally there are GABA inhibitory receptors in the amygdala which reduce the intensity of fear through the constant input of rational prefrontal cortex. However, because of genetic makeup or other predispositions, GABA receptors may become weakened, thereby ‘fear’ is augmented in the amygdala. To put it briefly, fear comes as a saviour and is recorded in the amygdala. However, normally its effectiveness is reduced by the GABA neurotransmitter. If we couple it with other thoughts, then the other thoughts present in another part of the brain or in the hippocampus stimulate the fear expression constantly. This habit gets memorized by the process of LTP and the effectiveness of GABA is steadily reduced. It is at this stage that, what has been fear thus far, may become a phobia. People with phobias work hard to avoid their phobias, but they become powerless to avoid them because of the LTP in the amygdala. This is due to the structural plasticity that has occurred in the amygdala.
Social transmission of fear
By observing those who are conditioned to fear, others who are normal also may develop a condition called observational conditioning. We do not have to be directly involved in negative emotion. Even the company of negative minded people may bring about changes in our amygdala leading to chronic fear. Therefore, the saying, “Tell me your friends, and I will tell you what you are!” is a very appropriate statement.
Unfortunately, many youngsters fall prey to some abnormal relationships with other boys (though girls are not excluded from this, it is more prevalent in boys). They suffer from ‘anxiety neurosis’ because of ‘amygdala hijack’. ‘Amygdala hijack’ is the metaplasticity (change in the structure) in the amygdala that facilitates the fear and nullifies the inhibitory effect.
Modern youth are exposed to all kind of literature on the internet and they read it and apply that half-cooked knowledge on their clandestine behaviour. It is a disaster. It becomes a constant fearful inner state in the brain which is always working in the background. This reduces the threshold of the inhibitory mechanism and creates a new LTP memory. They even start dreaming of the ill-effects of their activity and steadily it is converted into a type of phobia. All those who have this inner persistent guilt appear normal outside and they refrain from discussing these issues with their mentors because of guilt.
How do we get rid of this fear?
It is possible to rewire our brain
Please take this as a mantra. It is possible to change the brain’s connections. There are always two mechanisms in the brain 1) Excitation 2) Inhibition. Whenever there is fear, we should understand that the balance of excitation and inhibition is lost and we have to encourage the opposite of what we are suffering. If we are suffering from fear of loss of health, then we should try to learn all about our body. We should imagine the front of the brain giving instructions to the amygdala to stop its erratic activities. Replace the memory of fear in the hippocampus with the memories of those who have been cured of fear (like me), or replace it with the realisation of the irrationality behind our thoughts. 1) We have to steadily replace our existing negative thoughts in the hippocampus with positive thoughts 2) Rational explanation of the existing situation has to be kickstarted in the prefrontal cortex. By overcoming these two inhibitions, the amygdala can be released from its hijacked situation.
It is the thought of disease that is more detrimental than the disease
The very thought of the ill-effects and life-shortening nature of a disease plays havoc on our health rather than the actual disease. A person dies of fear before actual death comes. Let it be any future condition, it can come to us only if our mind permits it to come. If our decision is strong, it can change our genetic expression and can cure even cancer (refer to my previous post).
Fear is just a signal
Fear cannot make space to sleep in us if we do not give it a place to even sit. It is the improper teaching in schools, at home and in society that has made certain conditions secretive and bad. If a person has hypertension and diabetes, they can openly talk about this (sometimes they themselves boast of having these conditions). This has social acceptance. However, if a person is mentally ill (It is the same body), the condition is kept secret even by the parents. If a boy has developed neurosis because of some bad habit, our society does not permit him to openly declare it. The problem will be solved in no time if he/she opens up. The secretive nature of some conditions makes them incurable.
Meditation
Start meditating in the following unique way.
As usual take a comfortble position. Breath normally. After settling, imagine yourself to be present inside your mother’s womb and start enacting the whole drama of your life till today. Wipe this out completely. Go back to your foetal state. Start as a new person. Begin a new storyline. Forget all that you have experienced until today as a bad dream. Wake up from your previous dream and start with a new dream. In this life, be sure and pure, go to the original settings of your body. You can easily change the connections of the brain. You become happy. You will discover that you are ‘bliss-personified’.
You will enjoy life like never before!
Remember you are born to enjoy!
P.S: This is how I was able overcome my fear and illness. I am sure you can too.
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