Resolve to plan your year

The end of 2010 is near and with the rush of the holidays January will be here all too soon. Many of us will make a few New Year’s resolutions, and many of us will forget the resolutions not long after, illustrating that we’re all wonderfully human.  I think sometimes our poor luck with resolutions leads us to abandon planning and goal setting altogether – a mistake I’ve made too made times. I do better with a plan. It doesn’t always work out quite according to plan, and I don’t always hit my goals, but just having a plan seems to make a difference.

Sometime between now and the end of the year find a quiet corner and spend 2 hours thinking about what you want to accomplish next year. Reflect on what you’ve accomplished this year, how work is going, whether you’re spending enough time with family, and where you would like to be a year later. Dream a little, and write it all down. Think of it as a ‘State of You’ letter. Write down what you’d like to do and why and how and when. It’s not a contract, it’s not something you’ll read a year from now and cringe at - it’s about making you think about where you want to go.

So make your list, and yes, check it twice. Give yourself the gift of two hours to think about what you’d like to do next year, and I think you’ll find it to be more valuable than you might expect.

Happy Holidays,

Andy Warren from http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/71789

Art attack

 

I'm really bored tonight and this is what I came up with. An elderly Indian woman at a terminal traveling overseas for the first time leaving her husband behind.

Its easy to hate, but hard to love

Now I might run the risk of sounding like a guru, but this is what I got to experience recently and this was nothing less than a spiritual experience. It all started when my dear brother handed me this treasure which was lying at his home underutilized. It was a Stephen Covey quietly sitting on a shelf at his home. It was like this charismatic speaker who taught the world the right way to live was never allowed to speak there. Yes, I was handed the book "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People". I will soon coax him into reading this book himself too, but that's another day.

So, this book opposes the cosmetic way of personality development that many books talk about. Covey professes that you cannot "influence people and make friends" without genuinely liking them. You will need to a drastic change internally in order to be able to change your personality externally. Its sort of a soul cleaning exercise that is necessary in order to achieve any kind of success. Otherwise, you may still achieve success but at the cost of others' happiness.

Getting back to the subject of this blog, now that I am reading some doctrines prescribed in the book and getting to practice them as suggested by Covey, I am increasingly able to love everyone around me. Its a pristine, unadulterated, unconditional love that doesn't expect anything in return. And the more I love, the more I realize how hard it is to love someone.

Hating is easy. Its easy to say "this guy is a bad manager. All he cares about is his own success." But it's hard to put yourself into his shoes and understand what pressure he undergoes and why he passes on some of it to his underlings. Its easy to say "my spouse doesn't love me anymore." Its hard to unconditionally give your best to her and make yourself likable to him or her. Its easy to put your ego first and get offended by a seemingly innocent remark. But its hard to take it sportively and understand the point. Its easy to blame the government for apathy. But its hard to be a good citizen and make a difference.

As humans, we take the path of least resistance and tend to hate. But whenever I feel the urge to do that, I direct myself to take the hard path instead. And once I take the path of love, only then I realize the blissful after-effects that come as a bonus. Mind will be filled with positive energy, which makes you tireless even after a hard day. Negative energy brings nothing but stress and exhaustion.

To end the blog post, let me quote from Star Wars - "May the (positive) force be with you..."